Google Chrome uses more RAM to protect Meltdown and Specter

Image: raymond wong / mashable

Good news! Google has added new backups to its Chrome web browser to protect you from crucial vulnerabilities of the Meltdown and Spectrum processor discovered in January.

The bad news: Chrome is now a bigger memory (RAM) cat than before. So, if your computer is already feeling the pinch of performance because it does not have a plentiful amount of RAM, it's only going to get worse.

In a security blog, Google details how the latest version of its browser, Chrome 67, implements a feature called "site isolation" to protect against mergers and ghosts.

Originally available in experimental Chrome, Site Isolation is now enabled by default for 99% of Chrome 67 users on Windows, Mac, Linux and Chrome OS. Additional security will arrive on Android in Chrome 68.

So, how exactly does Site Isolation protect your data from theft? Although Google talks about weeds on his blog, it's really very simple.

Rather than using a single rendering process to load a website and all its included data, Chrome 67 breaks the rendering of a website into multiple processes.

By dividing the data of a website into different rendering processes, Chrome essentially isolates your private site information or scripts from an attacker.

Still a little confused? Google has created a handy chart:

These additional rendering processes have a cost: Chrome needs to use more RAM to create them. Google says "there is about 10-13% of total overheating of memory in actual workloads because of the larger number of processes."

This may not sound like much, but if you have a computer with little RAM, it could be the difference between being able to open a few extra tabs in Chrome, or running multiple applications or runnin processes

Users with computers with, say, 4GB of RAM will definitely feel the pressure when they try to open many tabs or multi-tasking.

Our tip: If you can upgrade your computer's RAM, do it, especially if you have a laptop. Many laptops (like MacBooks) can not be updated by users nowadays, but do your homework and see if that's the case. RAM upgrades are pretty cheap and are not hard to make even for non-tech heads.