Google Chrome is about to stop being selfish when it comes to RAM after the developers roll out the December update for the browser.
Particularly speaking, the upcoming version is Chrome 55, and it's going in loaded with an improved JavaScript engine that "significantly reduced the memory footprint."
Most websites nowadays use JavaScript behind the scenes, and to put two and two together, an upgrade to the element running the language known as V8 simply means a more efficient browser.
According to Stephen Shankland of CNET, the people behind Chrome used websites such as Reddit, Twitter and The New York Times to test out the update. Compared with Chrome 53, the results showed that Chrome 55 used 50 percent less RAM.
However, those who have plenty of memory under their computers' hoods won't really see a big jump in performance. In other words, only those that doesn't have that much horsepower will mostly benefit from the December update.
At any rate, users who usually have tons of tabs open on Chrome and leave it open along with numerous other apps will find that it's at least somewhat more efficient than before.
This is more or less just the beginning too, as the V8 Memory Sanitation Engineers have more plans in store moving forward.
"Over the next months we will continue our work on reducing the memory footprint of V8. We have more zone memory optimizations planned for the parser and we plan to focus on devices ranging from 512M-1G of memory," the team says.
The stable version of Chrome 55 is expected to start rolling out to desktops on Dec. 6.
Before wrapping things up, it's also worth pointing out that Chrome 53 brought to the table a speed boost of roughly 15 percent for both the desktop and Android versions of the browser. On top of that, Chrome also became 20 percent more efficient regarding battery usage.
That said, Google used two Microsoft Surface Books — one running Chrome 46, and the other running Chrome 53 — to showcase said improvements back in September.
As for other significant changes that Chrome 53 came with, the Mountain View company started to block Adobe Flash content in favor of HTML5 in that version.
With everything said and done, what do you think of the upcoming Chrome 55 update landing this December? Feel free to hit us up in the comments section below and let us know.
