Google announced last week a series of improvements to V8 JavaScript, which will directly benefit Chrome, and it is expected that its new version will have a 35 to 50% reduction in memory usage.
The team behind the V8 JavaScript engine explains its work in detail in a technical article on the V8 blog. The terms used in the article are quite technical and may be difficult to read, but the bottom line is that the improvements will reduce memory consumption in Chrome 55 by 50% compared to Chrome 53.
The measurements refer to tests performed on loading a limited set of websites, including Facebook, The New York Times, Hacker News, CNN, Reddit, Twitter, Imgur, and YouTube, but Google expects these results to be universal.
Chrome has gradually increased its memory consumption in recent years, and if its upward trend continues, it is certain that it will also lose a large share of the market. And we say “it too” when we consider Firefox, for example, which has particularly high memory consumption and constant crashes, resulting in its users abandoning it and now having a smaller market share than Safari.
Google released Chrome 54 earlier this week and is scheduled to release Chrome 55 in mid-November.
