14 DAY TRIAL // Google has just announced that starting with Chrome 53, its browser is using Microsoft’s Profile Guided Optimization (PGO) technology that can help achieve a speed boost of up to 15 percent.
Specifically, PGO is a new system that Microsoft developed in order to make applications and processes adapt to users’ needs depending on how they use each feature.
With PGO implementation, Google Chrome can obtain a new tab page load time increase of up to 14.8 percent, while the page load time can be 5.9 percent faster. Furthermore, startup time can be faster by 16.8 percent, Chrome says.
How PGO works in Google Chrome
What PGO does in Chrome is to keep track of how you use the browser and optimize the application in order to speed up the features that you need the most. At the same time, functionality that you rarely access no longer receives a priority flag, so its footprint on system performance is substantially reduced.
This way, you get a more lightweight browser that puts the focus on the features you use the most and all the job is performed automatically based on information regarding the functions that are called more frequently.
“To gather this data, the nightly build process now produces a special version of Chrome that tracks how often functions are used. PGO then optimizes those high-use functions for speed, in some cases increasing the binary size of those functions. To balance out that increase, PGO also optimizes less-used functions with smaller, though slightly slower code. These trade-offs result in higher overall performance, and a smaller overall code footprint,” Google explains.
Users who want to experience this speed boost can give a try to Google Chrome 53 64-bit or Chrome 54 32-bit, with the search company promising a substantially improved experience thanks to PGO.
According to third-party data, Google Chrome is currently running on more than 50 percent of the world’s PCs, while Internet Explorer is rapidly losing ground as Microsoft is pushing everyone to Edge browser. The new Windows 10 app is far behind with approximately 5 percent share.