Chrome is using less memory, crashing less, and loading search results faster, according to Google

Google highlights a few improvements that it made in recent times to its Chrome web browser on the official Chromium website. These improvements reduce the number of crashes of the browser and the browser's memory usage, improve its responsiveness and the loading of Google Search results.

Google Chrome, with Google Search as the default search engine, will load search results faster now in many cases according to Google. Chrome displays suggestions when users start to type and users of the browser may select one of the results to open the search results page.

Chrome is now prefetching suggestions based on the likelihood of selection. The algorithm analyses all suggestions based on the likelihood of selection and will prefetch search results if a "suggested query is very likely to be selected".

The new feature works only if Google Search is set as the default search engine in Chrome, which it is by default, and if the "autocomplete searches and URLs" feature is enabled as well.

Chrome users find the option on the chrome://settings/syncSetup page in Chrome.

Google claims that "search results are now 4x more likely to be shown within 500 ms". Other search providers may use the feature by "adding information to the query suggestions sent from their servers to Chrome", according to Google.

Chrome won't prefetch results if speculative prefetching is disabled in the browser or if the user has disabled JavaScript. Google lists several other reasons on the linked site above.

The second improvement comes in the form of Chrome's new memory allocator, PartitionAlloc. Its rollout started on Android and Windows in Chrome 89, on Linux in Chrome 92, and on Chrome OS in Chrome 93.

ChromeOS data reveals a reduction of 15% of the total memory footprint, and a 20% browser process memory reduction.

The third and final improvement reduces the number of hangs of the browser. Google removed a local cache from the browser that was added years ago to it, as it added complexity, increased memory usage, and was a top contributor "to shutdown hangs in the browser".

Now You: did you notice any improvements recently while using Chrome?

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