Viewing websites in Chrome should now use 10% less memory on average [Video]

Following the public release of Chrome 45 a couple of days ago, Google yesterday detailed an important new feature for mobile: Chrome Custom Tabs. Now, Google is showing off more of the performance improvements that the company has introduced in the latest version, allowing Chrome to use less memory and power on the desktop. In one example, it seems Google has managed to reduce the memory footprint of most sites you visit through the browser…

Although Chrome has long had a “continue where you left off” feature to restore tabs when relaunching the browser, Google says that this feature is now much smarter. In Chrome 45, tabs are restored in order from most to least recently viewed, giving you access to the most important tabs first. Also, if your computer is running low on resources, Chrome can stop restoring tabs in order to save memory.

The company also says that Chrome has a new memory-saving technique, which allows Chrome to “detect when a webpage isn’t busy with some other task.” The browser will then use this time “to aggressively clean up old, unused memory.” On average, this change has reduced website memory usage by about 10%. In the below example video, Google shows Gmail using 25% less memory than it did in Chrome 43:

Finally, Google says that it has made some changes to improve power consumption by the browser. As we told you last week, Google is now pausing flash content around the web as part of its bigger push to reduce the amount of flash content in its ad network and on the internet as whole. “Our testing has shown that turning on this setting makes your battery last up to 15% longer depending on your operating system,” the company says.