14 DAY TRIAL // Mozilla has recently released a new Firefox version, but if you’re into the Chromium browser, here’s some great news.
Google Chrome 85 is now available for download on all supported platforms, and one of the biggest improvements in this release concerns the speed of the app.
More specifically, starting with Chrome 85, the browser uses Profile Guided Optimization, or PGO, a new feature that is supposed to generate a page load time decrease by as much as 10 percent.
Long-time Chrome users might remember that this feature was originally introduced in Chrome 53 on Windows-based on Microsoft Visual C++, but thanks to the latest improvements, Google says the browser can make websites load some 10 percent faster than before.
“Simplified, Profile Guided Optimization (PGO) is a compiler optimization technique where the most performance-critical parts of the code can run faster. Because PGO uses real usage scenarios that match the workflows of Chrome users around the world, the most common tasks get prioritized and made faster. It is rolling out with Chrome M85 on Mac and Windows,” Max Christoff, Engineering Director, Chrome, explains.
New beta feature
At the same time, Google is also announcing a new feature called tab throttling that’s making its debut in the beta channel.
How this feature works is pretty simple: tab throttling suspends the resources that are directed to tabs that you haven’t accessed recently and uses them for active tabs, thus prioritizing the pages that you actually interact it. Google again says that massive improvements have been noticed thanks to this feature.
“We know you need a lot of tabs to do your work, and with tab throttling - now rolling out on Beta channel - Chrome will give more resources to the tabs you’re using by taking them back from tabs that have been in the background for a long time. We see improvements not only in loading speed but also battery and memory savings,” Christoff says.
The new version of Chrome is available today on Windows, Linux, and Mac.