With the recent release of Chrome 45 you may or may not have noticed some improvements made to the overall performance of the RAM and power hungry browser.

Google explains that the founding principle (way back when) was speed. As a user of Chrome for my browsing I can say that it does the trick but it sure could be better and smaller...and faster. Chrome 45 now uses 10% less RAM due in part to instead of loading all the previous tabs, it will now load them in a more efficient manner. Google goes on to explain further in a recent blog post, tabs are restored from most to least recently viewed, so you get to see the most important tabs faster. And Chrome will now detect if your computer is running low on resources and stop restoring the rest of your tabs to save you precious memory. You can always click to restore them if you'd like to access them later.

Along with that they've introduced another memory-saving technique. Chrome can now detect when a webpage isn't busy with some other task, and use the free time to aggressively clean up old, unused memory. In practice they found that this reduced website memory usage by 10% on average, but the effect is even more dramatic on complex web apps. With Gmail, for example, you can free up nearly a quarter of the memory used by the tab.



Back in June they made changes to improve laptop power usage by auto-pausing Flash content that's not central to a website. Testing has shown that turning on this setting makes your battery last up to 15% longer depending on your operating system, so over the next few weeks we'll begin turning on this feature by default for all users.