Google is closing 2020 with a major update to its Google Chrome Browser. “This month’s update represents the largest gain in Chrome performance in years,” Matt Waddell, Chrome’s director of product, wrote in a blog post. Waddell says a slew of under-the-hood changes and optimizations have led to boosts to Chrome on several fronts.
Google says Chrome will prioritize active tabs, which will reduce CPU usage by up to five times. The company found in testing that these upgrades can improve system battery life by up to an hour and a quarter. Chrome will also require less power and memory than in the past. Google claims the browser will start up to 25 percent faster, while pages will load up to seven percent quicker.
The Android version of Chrome be upgraded also. Google says pages will load “near instantaneously” when you move backward and forward. The company will gradually roll out the back/forward cache as part of Chrome 87.
Have you ever lost track of dozens of open tabs? The newly updated Chrome browser will now display a list of open Chrome tabs and let you type in the name of the one you’re hunting down. That tab search feature will be available on Chromebooks first, and it’ll arrive on the desktop version of Chrome soon.
All these things together add up to a significant update for perhaps the world’s most popular web browser.