Google has figured out how the Chrome browser uses less RAM chrome memory (Topic)

The Google team pondered the question of how to make the chrome browser more rational in terms of memory consumption and teach it to save device resources. Recently, the company's developers have come up with a way to moderate the appetites of the branded browser, and now an experimental version of the browser with a function that allows chrome to "eat" less memory resources is passing the necessary tests.

Freeze tabs

The solution was Tab Freeze technology, incorporated into the new Chrome as an experimental feature. The system monitors open tabs, and if some of them are not used for some time, Tab Freeze will unload them from RAM, or, in a simpler way, simply “freeze” them. The function is available in four versions, depending on the choice of the "freeze" mode. In normal mode, when Tab Freeze is active, the chrome browser will automatically remove open tabs from RAM that have not been used for the next five minutes.

Tab Freeze can be considered an updated version of the Tab Discard option that the chrome browser received in 2015. Its capabilities allowed the browser to monitor the activity of open tabs, and in case of problems with RAM, the resources of unused Internet pages were redirected where necessary. If it was necessary to open an inactive tab, chrome reloaded it again.

Modern users are often faced with a slowdown in the browser and the entire device due to a lack of RAM. The increasing complexity of web standards, along with "heavy" applications and web pages sometimes lead to the fact that only a few open tabs require gigabytes of memory. Thanks to a new feature built experimentally in chrome, the user's device memory can be used more economically.

In its "raw" form, Tab Freeze technology is available in test versions of the browser for Windows, Linux and macOS operating systems. Google has not yet announced when the tab freeze feature will appear in the stable version of Chrome.

Competitor Experience

Mozilla developers have tried a similar way to reduce browser appetite. In 2019, as part of an experiment, branded Firefox received a similar system for deactivating unused tabs. The developers have defined a strict order in which inactive tabs will be unloaded. Unpinned and silent webpages were the first to "freeze", followed by pinned, but not playing audio, and then pinned and with sound.

In theory, the mechanism was supposed to be user-friendly, but in practice, the function did not work as expected. Firefox on Windows devices began to deactivate tabs unnecessarily because it miscalculated available memory resources. Because of this, Mozilla has decided to drop the experimental feature for now.

The Topic of Article: Google has figured out how the Chrome browser uses less RAM chrome memory.
Author: Jake Pinkman