In the latest update, Google has accelerated page loading in Chrome by 10% and improved tab navigation across platforms, as well as adding many cool new features.
Today, Google is releasing several updates to its Chrome web browser to improve performance and speed up the browsing experience. In particular, Google is making Chrome tabs easier and faster to use. Under the hood, the company promises improvements that will provide up to 10% faster page loading and reduce the impact of having idle tabs in the background.
The new features take into account the wishes of experienced Chrome users, who tend to open many tabs at the same time and regularly work in the browser.
Google introduced tab groups in May of this year, initially in beta. The feature allows users to add their open tabs to a group, which they can then name and tag, to organize various projects, tasks, applications, and other online research. With this update, tab groups will be available to all users.
Based on feedback from beta users, Google is also tweaking how tab groups work.
Chrome now allows users to collapse and expand their tab groups so you can focus on the ones you need to access right now. Google says this was the most popular request from those who used tab groups during the tests. In addition, Google is introducing a new touch interface for tabs designed for laptops used in tablet mode, the first to come to Chromebooks. This will make it easier for users to scroll through tabs.
In the Android version of Chrome, if you start typing a page in the address bar, you’ll see a prompt to switch to that tab if it’s already open. Android users will also benefit from simplified URL sharing, making it easier to copy links and share them with other devices or send links through other apps.
In addition, they will be able to print the page or even generate a QR code to scan or download. The new QR code feature is also coming to the Chrome desktop and will be available from the new QR code icon in the Chrome address bar.
Google will also start rolling out what is likely to be a very popular new feature in this latest release – the ability to fill out and save PDF forms right from Chrome. You can even reopen those files and pick up where you left off. However, this feature will only be available for the next few weeks, Google says.
In the meantime, Chrome Browser Beta will have a feature that lets you hover over a tab to see a thumbnail preview of the page. This can be especially useful in times when you have many open tabs on the same domain, such as Google Docs.
To improve the overall experience of using many tabs in Chrome, two improvements will be implemented in this release (version M85). The first is Profile Guided Optimization, which is a compiler optimization technique that allows the most performance-critical parts of the code to run faster, Google explains. He says it will bring up to 10% faster page loads by prioritizing the most frequently encountered tasks. The improvement will roll out to Mac and Windows with Chrome M85. (The technique was first introduced on the M53 using Microsoft Visual C++ [MSVC], the previous Chrome build environment. It now uses Clang and will be distributed to both Mac and Windows.)
With Chrome Beta, Google is also introducing tab throttling, which gives more resources to the tabs you’re currently using by taking resources away from tabs that have been in the background for a long time. This change should bring improvements in download speed, battery and memory savings.
Chrome has often been criticized for being slow. Although user complaints can be related to various issues, users will ultimately blame the software and not the operating system it runs on. This means that Google must make an effort to fix problems in areas that it can fix by implementing such optimizations. To what extent the improvements deliver the results promised by Google, however, will need to be confirmed by third-party testing once they arrive.