Google Chrome 55 Will Have Memory-Optimization Features for Faster Browsing

Google has announced that an update coming to its website browser, Chrome, will include an upgraded JavaScript engine to aid in reducing the memory usage on websites that were programmed using JavaScript (via CNET).

Planned for launch on December 6, Chrome 55 will see performance improvements predominantly if a device doesn't have much memory to start with (such as low-cost smartphones), and if a user runs Chrome with multiple tabs or other apps open at the same time.

Google's V8 JavaScript engine team said it has "significantly reduced the memory footprint of several websites," helping to improve performance on the browser. These websites include The New York Times, Reddit, YouTube, and others, and were all picked to gauge Chrome's specific enhanced performance features. The team discovered that Chrome used a total of 50 percent less of a device's RAM on average in comparison to Chrome 53, which updated in September to emphasize HTML5 content over Adobe Flash.

Most noticeably, the average V8 heap memory consumption of the mobile New York Times benchmark reduced by about 66%. Overall, we observed a 50% reduction of average V8 heap size on this set of benchmarks.

Another optimization introduced recently not only reduces memory on low-memory devices but beefier mobile and desktop machines. Reducing the V8 heap page size from 1M to 512KB results in a smaller memory footprint when not many live objects are present and lower overall memory fragmentation up to 2x. It also allows V8 to perform more compaction work since smaller work chunks allow more work to be done in parallel by the memory compaction threads.

As it moves forward with more updates to the web browsing software, the focus for the Chrome team appears to be on entry-level devices that have between 512MB and 1GB of RAM.

Still, users who are conscious about performance issues with multiple tabs and apps open -- or who own a system with a lot of memory -- are likely to see less of a difference with Chrome 55. Chrome is available to download for iOS, Mac, Windows, and Linux systems, and users should see the new performance-enhanced update on December 6.