Chrome to be lighter on RAM

Heavy shoppers might be able to multi-task

Heavy users of Chrome might actually be able to do something else on their high powered PCs and not find that their browser had eaten all their RAM with a side order of other systems resources.

Chrome has always had a problem with RAM and those machines with lower specs tend to suffer, if the users runs more than half a dozen tabs. However, an upcoming update is touted to greatly lower its footprint.

Google claims its Chrome 55, which is expected to arrive in December, has made changes to the way it handles Javascript so that it used nearly half the resources.

This average reduction in RAM usage has been observed on a number of major websites, including Facebook, Reddit and YouTube as well as news outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post.

All this comes from the updated JavaScript V8 engine, which reduces the heap size and zone memory. It depends which sites you visit of course. But some of the heavy JavaScript shopping sites are RAM intensive.

Google has promised that more improvements will be made to address Google Chrome’s memory consumption, with a focus on low-power devices with between 512MB and 1GB of RAM. This work will be done “over the next few months”.