Google Chrome Blog: Chrome improvements for a faster and more efficient web

Chrome Blog

The latest news from the Google Chrome team

Chrome improvements for a faster and more efficient web

Thursday, September 3, 2015

Speed is one of the founding principles of Chrome. As the web evolves and sites take advantage of increasing capabilities, Chrome’s performance—how fast pages load, how smooth scrolling is, how much memory is consumed, and how long your battery lasts—becomes even more important. So in the latest release of Chrome we’ve included a ton of improvements to make your browsing use less memory and power.
Chrome has long had the option to “continue where you left off” by restoring tabs when you relaunch Chrome. Now, Chrome is smarter about restoring your tabs more efficiently. Tabs are restored from most to least recently viewed, so you get to see the most important tabs faster. And Chrome will now detect if your computer is running low on resources and stop restoring the rest of your tabs to save you precious memory. You can always click to restore them if you'd like to access them later.
We’ve also introduced another memory-saving technique. Chrome can now detect when a webpage isn't busy with some other task, and use the free time to aggressively clean up old, unused memory. In practice we found that this reduced website memory usage by 10% on average, but the effect is even more dramatic on complex web apps. With Gmail, for example, we can free up nearly a quarter of the memory used by the tab.

After being idle for a short time, Chrome 45 (right) frees up nearly a quarter of the memory it was using for Gmail, a significant improvement compared to Chrome 43 (left). Video is sped up 8x.
We’ve also made changes to Chrome to improve power usage. A new setting introduced in June will auto-pause Flash content that's not central to a website. Our testing has shown that turning on this setting makes your battery last up to 15% longer depending on your operating system, so over the next few weeks we'll begin turning on this feature by default for all users.
This latest version of Chrome includes the most recent wave of performance updates, but there's much more in the works for upcoming versions of Chrome. So get ready for faster, even more powerful browsing!
Posted by Ryan Schoen, Product Manager and Performance Promoter