Skip to main content

Tired of Chrome eating up your RAM? Google finally plans to fix it

Google Chrome is the browser that everyone loves to hate. It’s now the dominant browser in the market, having taken over the number one spot from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. At the same time, Chrome has been known to drag down system performance, something that Google hopes to resolve in an update coming later this year.

Specifically, Chrome 55 will represent the culmination of Google’s concerted effort to reduce memory usage, as Techspot reports. The primary culprit impacting Google’s memory footprint is the Javascript V8 engine, which is used on a variety of sites to provide for a more dynamic user experience.

Recommended Videos

Updating Javascript V8 with reduced heap size and zone memory will enable the engine to use dramatically less RAM, particularly on more complex sites. In addition, Google is improving the performance of Chrome’s ‘garbage collector’ code, which cleans up RAM that’s no longer being used and releases it back to the system.

Google plans to reduce the amount of RAM that Chrome uses by up to a whopping 50 percent. To date, the company has compared Chrome 55’s RAM usage compared to current versions on a variety of web sites and measured the impact of the latest updates. Sites like Imgur, The New York Times, Reddit, Twitter, and YouTube were all analyzed to confirm the overall improvements.

Going forward, Google will be working toward supporting much less robust machines, including those with less than 1GB RAM. Hopefully, all of this work by the Chromium team will result in a browser that can perform well in systems with less memory as well as support more open tabs and extensions for heavier users with beefier devices.

Google hopes to release Chrome 55 on December 6. You can install the Chrome beta version to be the first to receive the update, albeit with some potential bugs. If you’re looking for an alternative browser, then you’ll want to check out our head-to-head comparison of Chrome, Edge, Safari, Firefox, Opera, and Vivaldi.

Mark Coppock
Mark Coppock is a Freelance Writer at Digital Trends covering primarily laptop and other computing technologies. He has…
Google is testing a feature that will let AI hide away internet pop-ups
Google Chrome browser running on Android Automotive in a car.

Google is testing a new feature in Chrome Canary, the experimental version of the Chrome browser. As reported by TechRadar, the "PermissionsAI" feature is designed to deal with pop-ups from websites asking you to share your location or consent to notifications.

According to Chromium, the tool will use Google's "Permission Predictions Service" and Gemini Nano v2 to analyze users' previous responses to pop-ups and guess how they will respond to new ones. If you're likely to decline, the feature will block the annoying pop-up that appears in the middle of your screen and instead hide it away in a corner in case you need it later.

Read more
U.S. government to Google: sell Chrome
Google Chrome browser running on Android Automotive in a car.

Google might have to sell Chrome, despite its ranking as the best browser you can use. After ruling that Google has illegally monopolized the search market, the U.S. Department of Justice is pushing for Google to sell off Chrome to break up its search dominance. Chrome currently represents over 65% of the browser market, far ahead of any competitors.

According to Bloomberg's reporting, officials from the DOJ and several states who have joined the case will recommend to federal judge Amit Mehta that Google sell off Chrome in order to rebalance the scales. Google parent company Alphabet has been involved in the lawsuit since early 2020. In August, Mehta ruled that Google illegally obtained a search monopoly and called for sanctions against the tech giant.

Read more
ChatGPT monthly usage may now rival Google Chrome
A person sits in front of a laptop. On the laptop screen is the home page for OpenAI's ChatGPT artificial intelligence chatbot.

A number of popular generative AI platforms are seeing consistent growth as users are figuring out how they want to use the tools -- and ChatGPT is at the top of the list with the most visits, at 3.7 billion worldwide. So many people are visiting the AI chatbot, and its figures are rivaling browser market share. It can only be compared to Google Chrome figures in terms of monthly users, which is estimated to be around 3.45 billion.

Statistics from Similarweb indicate that ChatGPT saw a 17.2% month-over-month (MoM) growth and a 115.9% year-over-year (YoY) traffic growth. Some highlights that spurned the ChatGPT growth during 2024 include its parent company, OpenAI, updating its web address from a subdomain, chat.openai.com, to a main domain, chatgpt.com. The tool especially saw a surge of traffic in May 2024, when it hit a 2.2-billion-visit milestone, and has been growing ever since, according to Similarweb researcher David F. Carr.

Read more