Tired of Chrome eating up your RAM? Google finally plans to fix it

By Mark Coppock October 10, 2016

webvr chrome android desktop google

Google Chrome is the browser that everyone loves to hate. It’s now the dominant browser in the market, having taken over the number one spot from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. At the same time, Chrome has been known to drag down system performance, something that Google hopes to resolve in an update coming later this year.

Specifically, Chrome 55 will represent the culmination of Google’s concerted effort to reduce memory usage, as Techspot reports. The primary culprit impacting Google’s memory footprint is the Javascript V8 engine, which is used on a variety of sites to provide for a more dynamic user experience.

Recommended Videos

Updating Javascript V8 with reduced heap size and zone memory will enable the engine to use dramatically less RAM, particularly on more complex sites. In addition, Google is improving the performance of Chrome’s ‘garbage collector’ code, which cleans up RAM that’s no longer being used and releases it back to the system.

Google plans to reduce the amount of RAM that Chrome uses by up to a whopping 50 percent. To date, the company has compared Chrome 55’s RAM usage compared to current versions on a variety of web sites and measured the impact of the latest updates. Sites like Imgur, The New York Times, Reddit, Twitter, and YouTube were all analyzed to confirm the overall improvements.

Going forward, Google will be working toward supporting much less robust machines, including those with less than 1GB RAM. Hopefully, all of this work by the Chromium team will result in a browser that can perform well in systems with less memory as well as support more open tabs and extensions for heavier users with beefier devices.

Google hopes to release Chrome 55 on December 6. You can install the Chrome beta version to be the first to receive the update, albeit with some potential bugs. If you’re looking for an alternative browser, then you’ll want to check out our head-to-head comparison of Chrome, Edge, Safari, Firefox, Opera, and Vivaldi.

Topics

Computing Writer

Mark has been a geek since MS-DOS gave way to Windows and the PalmPilot was a thing. He’s translated his love for…

Computing

Why Google Chrome Incognito Mode isn’t what it claims to be

Google Chrome icon in mac dock.

A seemingly obscure little class-action lawsuit filed in 2021 has exploded into the mainstream news lately, alleging that Google continues to track users when they’re using incognito mode on Chrome.

Of course, any savvy web user knows there’s no such thing as complete privacy on the internet, at least not without running Tor through a VPN tunnel while wearing a Guy Fawkes mask. But it seems what we expect of Google Chrome’s incognito mode and what Google actually does are two different things.

Computing

Google Chrome tops this list of most vulnerable browsers

According to a recent report, Google Chrome is the most vulnerability-ridden browser of all the major players. Chrome also happens to be the most popular browser in the world, accounting for over 60% of usage according to most sources, which means that a larger number of people are at risk until the bugs are fixed.

Every browser suffers from these security weaknesses from time to time, including the increasingly popular Apple Safari, Microsoft Edge, and Mozilla Firefox, but Chrome has had a startlingly high number of weaknesses in 2022. The vulnerability report from Atlas VPN summarized data found in the VulDB vulnerability database. In this year alone, 303 vulnerabilities have been detected in Google Chrome. Firefox came in a distant second with 117, while 103 were found in Edge, and only 26 in Safari.

Computing

New phishing method looks just like the real thing, but it steals your passwords

A MacBook with Google Chrome loaded.

Thanks to a new phishing method, hackers could steal all sorts of personal information by simply mimicking real login forms in Application Mode. This is a feature that's available in all Chromium-based browsers, which includes Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Brave.

Using Application Mode allows threat actors to spread highly believable-looking local login forms that look like desktop applications. In reality, all inputs are sent to a malicious attacker.