Chrome is about to start eating more RAM, and we have Specter to thank

While Chrome is a pretty solid browser, it is known for its tendency to be a bit of a resource pot. His well-known appetite for all the RAM you have is about to get worse, and we all have thanks for Spectrum. The good news, however, is that this increase in RAM usage is accompanied by a new feature that should help protect Chrome users from the rather scary threats of Specter when it comes to the use of RAM. they are browsing the web.

A new feature called Site Isolation will be deployed in Chrome 67. Site Isolation has been tested on a small scale since Chrome 63, but now Google is confident enough to deploy it to 99% of Windows users , Mac, Linux, and ChromeOS. Google says that it retains the latter 1% so that it can continue to monitor performance.

So, what is the site isolation? In simple terms, it's a change in the architecture of Chrome that limits each rendering process to a single site. This, in turn, can potentially prevent a malicious website from performing a Spectrum attack and stealing data loaded from other sites because they will now be separated into different processes.

Google claims that although it's a significant change in the way Chrome operates under the hood, there should be no major changes for developers and users final out of some known problems. The tradeoff, of course, comes in the overall consumption of RAM.

"Site isolation forces Chrome to create more rendering processes that come with compromises in performance: On the plus side, each rendering process is smaller, faster, and less cluttered. internally, but there is about 10-13% of total memory overhead in actual workloads because of the larger number of processes, "writes Charlie Reis of Google." Our team continues to work hard to optimize this behavior to to keep Chrome both fast and secure. "

So, it seems like Google will work to reduce the impact of RAM on Chrome, but there are some things you can do to make sure that the impact is not so great.You can, of course, increase the amount of RAM in your PC, but unless that is a good way to make sure that the RAM usage remains low is to keep a limited number of tabs open.This is a good advice for the use of Chrome in general, but it is also easier said than done when you have everything on the Internet at your fingertips.