Google Touts Chrome 89 Memory Savings That 'Keep Your Mac Cooler' While Browsing

Google's Chrome browser has been criticized for years for being a system resource hog, but Chromium developers are making some loud claims about how much smarter the latest version is at using and freeing up memory on macOS.

According to a new post on Google's Chromium blog, Chrome developers recently managed to shrink the memory footprint of background tabs on Mac by up to 8%, or just over 1GB on some systems in version 89 of the browser.

Tab Throttling, which acts on pages that are not currently active, is also said to have led to significant improvements by reducing JavaScript Timer wake-ups. Background tabs no longer wake up the CPU as often and preserve battery life, and as a result, Chrome uses up to 5x less CPU, while battery life is up to 1.25 hours better, says Google.

According to the developers, since its introduction in Chrome 87 and wider rollout in Chrome 88, the feature has been responsible for a 65% improvement on Chrome's Apple Energy Impact score for pages in the background.

The highlighted improvements are in stark contrast to recently reported independent measurements which claimed to demonstrate that Google Chrome uses 10x more RAM than Safari on macOS Big Sur.

The interpretation of those measurements has since been contested, but separately Apple still claims that Safari on ‌macOS Big Sur‌ is "50% faster on average at loading frequently visited websites than Chrome." Apple also says Safari can stream video for up to one and a half hours longer, and can keep users browsing normally on a single charge for up to one hour longer, compared to Chrome and Firefox.

Google Chrome for Mac is a free download available directly from Google's servers. Google Chrome for iOS is a free download for iPhone and iPad available on the App Store. [Direct Link]