Chrome 45 makes Google’s popular browser faster and more power efficient

4 Sep 2015

Chrome 45 browser faster and easier on your battery

Google’s Chrome browser has been given an update that promises to be faster and more efficient in terms of RAM usage and power management.

Google has always intended Chrome to set the benchmark for other browsers to follow in the wider interests of the web community.

Chrome 45, its latest version, comes with new improvements that tidy up areas where Chrome had perhaps gotten a little bloated.

For one thing, the new Chrome is smarter about restoring tabs where you left off more efficiently. Tabs are restored from most to least recently viewed to get you to the most important tabs faster.

Chrome 45 will also detect if your computer is running low on resources and will stop restoring the rest of your tabs to save memory.

New Flash auto-pause in Chrome 45 could make laptop batteries last 15pc longer

Google has also introduced another memory saving technique, through which Chrome will detect if a web page isn’t busy and will use this time to aggressively clean up old, unused memory.

“In practice, we found that this reduced website memory usage by 10pc on average, but the effect is even more dramatic on complex web apps,” explained Ryan Schoen, product manager and performance promoter at Google.

“With Gmail, for example, we can free up nearly a quarter of the memory used by the tab.”

Google has also introduced a new setting that will auto-pause Flash content that is not central to a website.

It claims turning on this setting will make your battery last up to 15pc longer, depending on your operating system.

Schoen said that Google will begin switching this feature on by default for all users in the coming weeks.

Chrome image via Shutterstock

John Kennedy is a journalist who served as editor of Silicon Republic for 17 years

editorial@siliconrepublic.com