Google Chrome’s recent updates have made the browser less of a resource hog than it was previously, thanks to Google’s extensive under-the-hood fine-tuning to reduce the browser’s appetite for CPU, memory, and battery resources. The latest improvements to Chrome take things a step further by making the browser 30% faster than ever, but only on high-end devices.
The search giant shared in a blog post some of the tweaks it made to give Chrome a speed boost. Chrome’s latest version includes some technical upgrades that will cut down on memory usage to bolster its speed and efficiency.A
Chrome on Android now prioritizes speed over binary size using compiler flags. Prior to this, the browser would sacrifice these flags in favor of binary size. Google points out that Chrome on Android “has always been optimized for a small footprint, but the Android ecosystem is diverse and contains devices with varying levels of capabilities.” As a result, the Chrome team cooked up a special version of the browser targeted at many of the top Android phones.
This change has led to a 30% increase in Chrome’s speed on the Speedometer 2.1 benchmark. Google says this speed boost has been achieved through some tweaks to the browser’s underlying code, including enhancements to the JavaScript “Object.prototype.toString” and “Array.prototype.join” functions, as well as specialized fast paths for parsing to “innerHTML.”
Additionally, the team found a way to save memory in both V8 and Oilpan with pointer compression. This means that Google has improved how pointers are compressed and decompressed, ensuring that high-traffic fields are not compressed. Consequently, Chrome Desktop saw a 10% increase in Apple’s Speedometer 2.1 browser benchmark over a period of three months.
Chrome is undeniably one of the best mobile browsers due to speed improvements, but it is far from perfect. One of the browser’s drawbacks is often a slowdown in performance, but these recent upgrades should significantly improve the browser’s speed. And if you spend a lot of your computing time browsing the web using Chrome, the latest changes should add a serious boost to your productivity as well.
Source: Androidpolice
