In the not too distant past, Microsoft claimed that it had found a way to fix Chrome’s notorious RAM usage in Windows 10, but if you expected that this would make the web browser less resourceful, we have some bad news as Google has just to disable the solution.
Chrome is the world’s most popular web browser, but it has been annoying and frustrating for users for years due to the amount of RAM it uses. If you have a lot of tabs open at once, you may notice that your machine starts to slow down, and this problem is so serious that Microsoft took care to fix the issue in Windows 10 May 2020 update using Segment Heap feature.
This, Microsoft claimed, would result in a 27% reduction in memory usage for its Chromium-based Edge web browser, which uses the same engine as Chrome. This saving was big enough for Google to notice and adopt it for Chrome as well.
However, it now appears that the RAM saving solution Microsoft came up with will be disabled by default in future versions of Chrome.
Why?
So why did Google remove such a popular solution? It appears that while Segment Heap usage reduced Chrome’s RAM usage, an Intel engineer found that it ended up causing “performance regression” in other areas, particularly the processor.
And, according to a Chrome developer, “the cost of the CPU (10% slowdown on the 2.0 speedometer, 13% increase in CPU / power consumption) is too big for us too,” and the feature will be disabled from By default in Chrome 85, which will be released in August.
But does this mean that we have to live with Chrome eating all our RAM? I hope not. First of all, Google has stopped using the feature for now while running more tests and could “reconsider in the future,” if there is a way to implement it without overly affecting the CPU.
Google also claims that it is working on other optimizations for Chrome 85, so we can see Chrome’s RAM usage anyway.
Hopefully Google will find a way to reduce Chrome’s RAM usage, as it could be said to be the biggest flaw in the web browser, and many people are getting fed up with it.
Via TechDows
