Back when it originally launched in 2008, Google Chrome was one of the lightest Internet browsers out there. Eight years later, this Internet browsing solution is still considered to be one of the best of its kind on the market but it also became infamous for its tendency to mercilessly hog memory. Now, the reason Chrome changed the way it did has a lot to do with the fact that the Internet changed the way it did. In comparison to 2008, modern websites do a lot more stuff and users’ habits have migrated from local programs to browser apps. These days, activities like document editing, chatting, and file sharing are almost exclusively done within browsers which consequently means that browsers are expected to handle much more stuff than they did back in the day. In an effort to improve stability, the Chromium team decided to split every Chrome tab, extension, and plug-in into an individual process. What this does is prevents the browser from crashing when a single website, extension, or plug-in does. However, what this also does is consume a lot more RAM given how certain tasks need to be duplicated for each tab. It’s a compromise that the Chromium team decided to make in order to offer a stable Internet browsing experience.
There are more reasons why Chrome devours memory the way it does but this is the main one. Luckily, the Chromium team has now seemingly managed to come up with a way to continue with this practice but use less RAM in the process. Namely, the developers have just announced that Chrome 54 will utilize a brand new JavaScript engine which will cut JavaScript-related memory usage in half. Practically speaking, this is going to be a huge deal given how most modern websites use this programming language rather heavily.
In addition to that, Chromium developers have revealed that they’re planning to release a lot of other Chrome performance improvements in the upcoming months, asserting that they’re specifically targeting low-end computers, smartphones, and tablets with 1GB of RAM or less. As for this JavaScript update, it’s officially launching on December 6th while it’s bound to hit the Chrome Beta channel by mid-November.