Google LLC has begun broadly rolling out the latest release of Chrome, which features two new features that will reduce the browser’s memory and energy use.
The news was first reported by 9to5Google on Friday. Today, The Verge reported that the new features will become available on Windows machines, Macs and Chromebooks. Google had previewed the features in December.
The first new capability, dubbed Memory Saver, aims to reduce the amount of RAM that Chrome requires to run. Chrome is considered a memory-intensive browser because it deploys each tab as a separate process, or program, which increases hardware requirements. The new Memory Saver feature can reduce browser’s RAM usage by up to 40% or 10 gigabytes when running demanding web applications.
Memory Saver lowers hardware utilization by disabling background tabs that aren’t actively used. The background tabs’ shortcuts still appear above the Chrome address bar, which means they can be quickly reopened if necessary. But their contents are deleted from the browser’s memory.
When a user clicks on a background tab, Chrome automatically reloads it. The browser also displays a pop-panel that shows how much RAM was saved by Memory Saver. Optionally, users can configure Chrome to avoid applying Memory Saver to certain websites, which helps ensure the data in a background tab is not deleted before it can be saved.
Previous versions of Chrome also suspended background tabs, but only partly. Webpages rely on code written in the JavaScript programming language to power many of their features. Previous versions of Chrome slowed down some of the JavaScript code in background tabs, which helped reduce hardware utilization.
The second new feature that is rolling out as part of the latest Chrome release is called Energy Saver. It reduces Chrome’s power usage when the browser runs on a laptop that is unplugged and has 20% or less of its battery capacity available.
Energy Saver lowers browser tabs’ power consumption by slowing the display refresh rate. When the refresh rate is slower, the visual fidelity of animations decreases and page scrolling consumes less processor capacity.
The new features are rolling out about a year after Google released a major update to its Chrome OS operating system, which uses Chrome as its primary user interface. That update also focused on browser tab management. Chrome OS received a feature that enables users to jump to a specific browser tab by searching for it with a natural language query.
