According to Google’s Chrome blog, the update Chrome 45 promises to improve RAM usage, the overall performance of the browser, speed up the launch time, and reduce battery usage. Chrome has long had the option to “continue where you left off” by restoring tabs when you relaunch Chrome. Now, Chrome restore your tabs more efficiently and the browser opens those tabs first that you most recently looked at saving your time. The new Chrome also now detects if your computer is running low on resources, and automatically stops restoring tabs in an effort to save memory. Just click to refresh later, if necessary. Google has also taught Chrome how to identify when a webpage is idle, and use that free time to clean up memory that is old and not been used. “In practice we found that this reduced website memory usage by 10 percent on average, but the effect is even more dramatic on complex Web apps,” wrote Product Manager Ryan Schoen in a blog post. “On Gmail, Chrome 45 freed up nearly a quarter of the memory used by the tab—’a significant improvement compared to Chrome 43′,” Google said. The process of improving reloading seems to have been inspired from a Chrome extension introduced in May. The Great Suspender automatically suspends unused tabs after a certain user-specified time, until the user clicks on them again. Flash has always been an issue with resources. In June, Google had announced a new setting would be introduced to auto-pause Flash content that’s not central to a website. Chrome 45 has a default setting that pauses unwatched Flash-based content. Google found that implementing this feature can save up to 15 percent of a user’s battery life. Flash media on Web sites that was previously manually enabled under that setting is now frozen unless it is found that it is the main content being viewed. The Google team plans to make this feature on by default for all users over the next few weeks. Chrome 45 is available for desktop users of the browser now.
