Chrome optimizes memory usage again, adding a memory release switch

Produced | OSC Open Source Community (ID: oschina2013)

Chrome still occupies the first position in the browser market with an overwhelming advantage. Although the market share is very high, many users think that Chrome is not easy to use; many of them have high memory usage, high power consumption, privacy Poor protection, and problems that plague domestic users that cannot be synchronized. Among them, the problem of memory usage is a common problem. Every time Chrome is updated, someone will ask “Has the memory usage been reduced?” Such a question.

Google is naturally aware of this problem, and has launched several updates for the memory usage problem. We have also reported that Google has researched a project called “Native Window Occlusion”, which can obtain the location of the local non-Chrome window on the user’s screen, and then combine the location of each Chrome window itself to calculate whether the tab is blocked or not. In the case of occlusion, treat these occluded windows as background tags, and reduce the priority of the tags in the occluded windows, and the Chrome browser will have a more obvious performance improvement.

Recently, Google has made some new progress on the problem of memory usage, and is developing new tools for hibernating inactive tabs and freeing system resources for other applications.

In the settings menu of the latest Canary version of Chrome (chrome://settings/performance), a new performance page has recently appeared, which includes switches for Memory Saver (saving memory) and Energy Saver (saving power).

Among them, the introduction of Memory Saver writes:

When turned on, Chrome frees memory from inactive tabs. This gives more computer resources to active tabs and other applications, and keeps the Chrome browser fast. Inactive tabs are automatically restored when you return to a tab.

And when Memory Saver is active, an icon similar to a car’s speedometer will appear on the right side of the address bar.

In Memory Saver’s settings, you can set a whitelist for sites that are very important or frequently used to prevent them from being accidentally released, and when you click the little icon that looks like a car speedometer in the address bar of one of the tabs , you’ll see a popup showing how much memory is freed up for other tasks.

As for the Energy Saver mode mentioned above, it is easy to understand. The introduction reads:

When on, Chrome saves battery power by limiting background activity and visual effects such as smooth scrolling and video frame rate.

At present, these changes only appear on the latest Chrome Canary. Google’s continuous improvements to the browser to reduce system resource usage are worthy of praise, and we hope that these functions can enter the stable version soon.

The text and pictures in this article are from the OSC open source community