Chrome hogging all your system memory? Google claims new update fixes issue

For a long time, one of the biggest issues Google has faced is regarding Chrome having heavy memory usage on different devices. Now, the company has addressed the issue and worked towards the launch of Chrome version M89. This is expected to reduce memory usage in Mac, Windows and Android devices, according to the company’s blog post. In the blog, Mark Chang, Chrome Product Manager said that the company will be using its own advanced memory allocator to fix the problem in the latest Chrome version, which is called PartitionAlloc.

“PartitionAlloc is optimized for low allocation latency, space efficiency, and security. For some time now, PartitionAlloc has been used extensively within Blink, our renderer codebase. Starting in M89, we’ve upgraded Chrome on Android and 64-bit Windows to use PartitionAlloc everywhere (by intercepting malloc),” said Chang.

According to Chang, PartitionAlloc- the Chrome M89 version will be able to save memory significantly on Windows which is up to 22 per cent in the browser process, 3 per cent in the GPU and 8 per cent in the renderer. Apart from this, the company has also improved browser responsiveness by up to 9 per cent. When it comes to using and discarding memory, Chrome will now be smarter with up to 100MiB per tab. This, the company claimed, is more than 20 per cent on some popular sites. Chrome will also be discarding memory that any foreground tab is not using actively like some big images that a user has scrolled off screen.

For Mac OS devices, the memory footprint of background tabs has been shrunk by up to 8 per cent by the company and this is over 1 GB on some systems having the browser version 87. Moreover, the company has also rolled out Tab Throttling that has the ability to wake up within the pages that are not in view at the moment. This feature is also responsible for as much as 65 per cent improvement on Apple Energy Impact score when it comes to pages running in the background. To put simply, end users will see a change in their Mac devices getting cooler whereas the fans will also be quieter while they are browsing.

Coming to Android devices, the company said that it is using Android App Bundles which will help optimize downloads. This will be done on a per device level. “Some new Play and Android capabilities allowed us to repackage Chrome on Android, and we’re seeing fewer crashes due to resource exhaustion, a 5 per cent improvement in memory usage, 7.5per cent faster startup times, and up to 2per cent faster page loads,” read a statement in the blog.