Things Just Got Better For Chrome Users
Seeing use on over 60% of devices capable of using an internet browser, Google Chrome has become an important feature of internet browsing. It’s popular for a reason, though it’s certainly not perfect. But with a new update, Google has made using their browsing experience a lot smoother.
The headline feature in this update is faster searching speeds. This only applies to the “omnibox” (the search bar up at the top of your screen), but since that’s where most initial searches tend to go anyway, it’s a speed increase you’re likely to feel. From an official blog post: “Searching in Chrome is now even faster, as search results are prefetched if a suggested query is very likely to be selected. This means that you see the search results more quickly, as they’ve been fetched from the web server before you even select the query. In fact, our experiments found that search results are now 4X more likely to be shown within 500 ms!”
This next update only applies to systems running on Chrome OS, though considering how important memory is for computing, this should come as a pleasant surprise: “Chrome OS shows a total memory footprint reduction of 15% in addition to a 20% browser process memory reduction, improving the Chromebook browsing experience for both single and multi-tabs.” This is thanks to a new memory allocator program named ParticianAlloc – which has been part of the Chrome package for a while now, but since launch they’ve been able to collect the data needed to formally catalogue the changes. So for those sitting here under a mountain of “I-swear-I’ll-get-back-to-these-at-some-point” tabs, you can be comfortable knowing that that’s putting a less of a strain on your system than normal.
Finally, the blog post leaves us with one last treat. A while back, a new cache system was added to Chrome. Originally intended to improve performance and startup speed, it contributed to a browser-crashing bug. They go into more technical detail about what caused the crashes in their blog post, but for most people, all you’ll need to know is that the new cache system is no longer included in any of Chrome’s processes.