14 DAY TRIAL // It’s not a secret Google Chrome is one of the biggest memory hogs on Windows, and despite the several attempts of the search company to address it, the browser is still eating tons of resources when running on a device powered by Microsoft’s operating system.
And now Google is trying to embrace a different approach, turning to a piece of tech bundled with Windows 10 to do the whole thing.
Google Chrome would use the Windows 10 TerminateProcess API to shut down browser processes, essentially being able to suspend the tasks that would otherwise continue to eat up resources in the browser.
“Exiting a process cleanly is difficult and expensive. Avoiding race conditions becomes almost impossible with complex software and a clean exit can be quite slow. Waiting on all threads, paging in code and data, and race conditions make it not worthwhile,” Google says in a commit discovered by Tom’s Guide.
“We have been gradually moving towards using TerminateProcess for more process types. Although the majority of the shutdown processes tracked by this bug are in utility processes this change uses TerminateProcess for all process types. We should not need to let destructors run so it should be safe to never use exit() (or to make it opt-in).”
Still a work in progress for the time being
When this new feature is projected to reach the production channel is something that remains to be seen, but for now, the good news is Google is still working on ways to optimize the resource usage of its browser.
In the long term, this is an improvement that comes in handy not only to Google Chrome users alone, but to everybody else running a Chromium browser, and these include those committed to the new Microsoft Edge too.