Google Touts Chrome 89 memory saver that keeps your Mac cooler while browsing

Google’s Chrome browser has been criticized for years for being a system resource pig, but Chromium developers are making loud claims about how much smarter the latest version is to use and free up memory on MacOS.

According to a new post on Google’s Chromium blog, Chrome developers recently managed to reduce the memory footprint of background tabs on Mac by 8%, or just over 1 GB on some systems in version 89 of the browser.

Tab Throttling, which works on pages that are not currently active, is said to have led to significant improvements by reducing JavaScript timer wake-up. Background tabs no longer wake up the CPU as often and maintain battery life, resulting in Chrome using up to 5 times less CPU, while battery life is up to 1.25 hours better, Google says.

According to the developers, the feature has been responsible for a 65% improvement on Chrome’s Apple Energy Impact score for background pages since its launch in Chrome 87 and a wider implementation in Chrome 88.

The highlighted improvements are in stark contrast to recently reported independent measurements claiming that Google Chrome uses 10x more RAM than Safari on MacOS Big Sur.

The interpretation of the measurements has since been disputed, but separately Apple still claims that Safari on ‘MacOS Big Sur’ is on average 50% faster when it loads regular visits to websites than Chrome. Apple also says that Safari can stream video for up to one and a half hours longer, and that users can typically browse up to one hour longer on a single charge, compared to Chrome and Firefox.

Google Chrome for Mac is a free download available directly from Google’s servers. Google Chrome for iOS is a free download for iPhone and iPad available in the App Store. [Direct Link]