Google has unveiled Chrome 54 for Windows, Mac, and Linux and already looking ahead at v56 expected to be released in January 2017. With the focus mainly on developers, this release is coming mostly with under-the-hood improvements and bug fixes. But one of the noteworthy changes in version 54 of Chrome, HTML5 will be automatically used when a Flash embed for YouTube is detected.



As of September 2016, Google Chrome had a 54.41% desktop browser market share, according to Net Applications. This proves that Google Chrome is the most preferred desktop browser over Microsoft Inte
et Explorer, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari and Opera. However, Google Chrome’s weakness is that it consumes a substantial amount of memory. And as you open more tabs and install more extensions, the memory problem compounds.
Last year, The Verge performed a test to determine how long the battery would last on a MacBook Pro while using Apple Safari against Google Chrome. In the test, The Verge visited a series of websites until the battery stopped working. While using Apple Safari, the battery lasted 13 hours and 18 minutes. And while using Google Chrome, the battery lasted 9 hours and 45 minutes. Fortunately, Google is preparing to fix this problem.

Google engineers working on Chrome have found a way to cut the memory use of the browser in half. This will be made possible by integrating a new V8 JavaScript engine in Google Chrome version 55. Google tested the new V8 JavaScript engine on websites like YouTube, The New York Times, Imgur, Twitter, and Reddit and found that it used 50% less RAM on average compared to before.

Specifically, the Google Chrome team is working on reducing the JavaScript engine heap size in version 55. However, the Chromium team — which are the engineers working on Chrome — said that there is a trade-off between garbage collection throughput, latency and memory consumption.

Essentially, garbage collection latency can be reduced by using more memory. For devices that have under 512MB of RAM, it can be challenging to prioritize latency and throughput over memory consumption may result in “out-of-memory crashes.” The V8 JavaScript engine heap strategy would be able to determine when the next garbage collection will happen based on the number of live objects and provide some slack.

While the browser is in memory reduction mode, V8 will use less slack — which will require less memory since more frequent garbage collections will be performed. Tom’s Hardware also pointed out that the Chromium team also made improvements to the V8 JavaScript engine by removing parsed scripts when it is no longer being used from memory at a faster pace.

The Google Chrome update may not be that noticeable if your desktop computer already has a lot of memory like 8GB or 16GB of RAM. However, people with computers that have 4GB of RAM will likely notice a difference in speed and battery life. Google Chrome on mobile devices is also expected to become faster.

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