Chrome Becomes a Bit Less of a Memory Hog With Version 45
While the Chrome browser is extremely popular, it has gained something of a reputation. What hippos are to little plastic balls, Chrome is to memory: hungry, hungry.
Chrome 45, released earlier this week, should make Google’s browser a little lighter. The company described some improvements yesterday that should reduce the browser’s footprint.
Perhaps the most significant change for tab hoarders such as myself is new behavior when reloading all your tabs when you first launch the browser. Chrome 45 does a couple of things differently. First, it loads the tabs from most to least recently used. This should mean that the tabs you’re most interested in and want to use first will be the first to load. Second, if your system is low on memory, it will stop restoring tabs in the background. Clicking the tab to view it will, of course, load it, but otherwise it’ll remain dormant.
Idle tabs, too, should see reduced memory usage, especially when they’re used to run complex Web applications with lots of JavaScript. JavaScript is a garbage collected language; the JavaScript engine periodically scans its memory for unused objects and frees all those that it finds. The Chrome JavaScript engine, V8, in common with many other typical garbage collectors, also compacts memory; during garbage collection, objects are packed to be closer together to eliminate or reduce the number of gaps between objects. This in turn allows the garbage collector to free up larger blocks of memory and return those to the operating system.
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