Google touts Chrome 89’s memory savings that ‘keep your Mac cooler’ while browsing

Google’s Chrome browser has been criticized for years for being a chore of system resources, but the developers at Chromium are making strong claims that the latest version is smarter at using and freeing 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 Macs by up to 8%, or just over 1GB on some systems in the past. browser version 89.

The tab limitation, which acts on pages that are not currently active, would also have led to significant improvements by reducing JavaScript timer wakes. Background tabs no longer wake up the processor as often and conserve battery life, therefore Chrome uses up to 5 times less CPU while battery life is up to at 1.25 hours better, according to Google.

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

The highlighted improvements contrast sharply with recently reported independent metrics that claimed to show that Google Chrome uses 10 times more RAM than Safari on macOS Big Sur.

The interpretation of these metrics has since been disputed, but separately Apple still claims that Safari on “macOS Big Sur” is “50% faster on average at loading frequently visited websites than Chrome.” Apple also claims that Safari can stream video for an hour and a half longer and allow users to browse normally on a single charge for up to an hour longer, 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 on the App Store. [Direct Link]