Google speeds up Chrome, but its RAM appetite stays about the same

Editor's take: In my experience, Chrome has been a decent browser. However, I have long complained about its abuse of my RAM supply. So I'm always optimistic when Google says it has patched it to work faster or more efficiently, but I'm usually left disappointed. So, I always take such news with a grain of salt.

Google recently announced that Chrome is now "faster than ever," achieving its highest score yet on the Speedometer 3.0 benchmark. The search giant claims that the browser's speed has improved by about 10 percent since August 2024. Google estimates this could save users millions of hours annually waiting for web applications to load or respond. The gains come from a series of optimizations, including improved memory layouts, more efficient string processing with new hashing algorithms, and refinements to Chrome's Blink rendering engine that enhance CSS styling and font ...