Google says that the new Chrome version 89 comes with significant memory savings for Windows 10 users. The company also said that it has better memory handling for macOS as well and a faster experience on Android.
On Windows 10, Google says it is achieving up to 22% in memory savings in the browser process, 3% in the GPU, and 8% in the renderer.
The feat was achieved by using Chrome’s memory allocator, PartitionAlloc. Google optimized how Chrome uses and discards memory in foreground tabs.
What can it do now?
The optimization means it can reclaim up to 100 MiB per tab, by discarding memory from a foreground tab that is not being used. For instance, it could be large images that have been scrolled off the screen.
For macOS, Chrome uses less memory in the background tabs. Google says that it saw 8% memory savings on macOS, which can be as much as 1GiB.
Chrome is now able to help Macs stay cooler using a throttling feature or JavaScript timing throttling, which was in Chrome 87. Tab throttling frees us resources from tabs that have been in the background too long.
Big wins
Google says that it recorded a 65% improvement on the Apple Energy Impact score in the macOS Activity Monitor for background tabs.
The new version on Android is good too as it brings 5% improvement in memory usage, starts up 7.5% faster, and is up to 2% faster on loading pages. The results could depend on the type of Android device you have.
On the latest Android devices running at least Android Q and with at least 8GB of RAM, Chrome is now presented as a 64-bit binary. The results should be even faster.