Google Chrome’s final release of the year, Chrome 87, brings along massive performance gains and many under the hood improvements. According to the announcement, the main improvements include:
- Prioritizing user’s active tabs vs. everything that’s open—reducing CPU usage by up to 5x and extending battery life by up to 1.25 hours.
- Starting up to 25 percent faster, loads pages up to 7 percent faster, and does all of this using less power and RAM than before.
- Pages are now loaded instantaneously when you navigate backward and forward, making these everyday tasks super-fast.
The company uses tab throttling, occlusion tracking, and back/forward caching to help Chrome manage computer resources more efficiently. Occlusion tracking is not new to Chrome though. It was previously added to Chrome OS and Mac and is coming to Windows now. It allows the browser to optimize resources for the tabs used, which enables instantaneous page loading.
Talking about the updated Chrome, Mark Chang, Chrome Product Manager, explained,
This month’s update represents the largest gain in Chrome performance in years, thanks to many under-the-hood improvements. Even if you have a lot of tabs open, you likely only focus on a small set of them to get a task done. Starting in this release, Chrome is actively managing your computer’s resources to make the tabs you care about fast – while allowing you to keep hundreds of tabs open – so you can pick up where you left off.
Apart from the performance gains, the new update brings the following features.
- Users can now pin their tabs and then search for them using the search bar regardless of the window they’re in.
- Chrome’s Omnibox (the address bar) can now be used to take action as well. For example, you can type ‘clear my history,’ and it will take you to the required tab.
- The new Chrome shows its users a list of activities they left in the middle to help jump back to them easily.
