Google Chrome's new update makes it more memory and battery-friendly

As far as browsers go, Google Chrome is a huge draw, partly because it's faster, and partly because of the level of convenience it offers by syncing your web activities with your Android phone. But as far as Chrome's speed goes, the price you pay for that is in battery and memory.

It's a well known fact that Chrome is nowhere near easy on your RAM, not to mention it can drain your laptop or smartphone battery that much quicker than other browsers. But the guys at Google, in a blog post yesterday, talked about a whole bunch of new changes based around freeing up your resources. Chrome has had the option to restore tabs for a long time now, allowing you to pick up where you left off. The new update, however, makes it a little smarter about the process. Now, the most recently viewed tabs restore first. Chrome will also detect if your computer is running low on RAM and stop restoring the rest of your tabs to save your memory. Of course, you can still click to restore them later anyway. On top of that, Chrome can also now detect when a web page is static, and not busy with another task, and use that time frame to free up old, unused memory from that tab. Google says the new update can reduce website memory usage by 10 percent of average but, with more complex apps like Gmail, reduce memory usage by up to a whopping 25 percent. Don't take our word for it, check out the video (it's at 8x speed).


Another change is the addition of a setting that will auto pause flash content  that's not central to the website, meaning no more auto-playing flash ads for those of you without AdBlock. This could improve your battery life up to 15 percent, says Google. The changes will be activated as default over the next few weeks.