Chrome has a bit of a bad habit of consuming RAM. And when I mean consume, I mean at the rate of a 5 discovering the dessert section of a Pizza Hut buffet for the first time.
It was so bad that out of pure frustration, I pulled the plug and tried Microsoft Edge for a week. But fortunately, Chrome’s latest update is set to help.
Version 55, which went live over the weekend and you should probably download right now, is more of a security update first and foremost. As Spandas noted over at Lifehacker, the patch makes 36 separate security fixes. 12 of those were part of Google’s bug bounty offering, which will now result in $US70,000 being paid out to infosec researchers.
One the big thing – and something that Google has been moving towards for a while – is Flash. It’s automatically disabled in version 55, with users prompted to enable Adobe’s buggy, completely insecure player whenever they visit a site that still uses the technology. (Which they absolutely shouldn’t, but it does mean the major ones that do like Amazon will function fine under version 55.)
And the second big thing? It’s a new JavaScript engine, which Google a couple of months ago promised could save up to 50% of RAM used. Lower-end machines and mobile devices will get more of a benefit than your gaming rig sporting of 32GB DDR4 RAM though; they have less RAM to play around with in the first place. But in general, the new engine reduces the heap size (that’s the amount of memory allocated to objects).
It’s the last stable update for Chrome this year, although if you want to see where the browser is headed here’s a changelog for the updates scheduled to make their way into the stable build for version 56, due out in January. The changelog for the latest build is here, although there’s a good chance most gamers won’t understand the vast majority of it.
Comments
8 responses to “Chrome’s Latest Update Disables Flash, Uses Less RAM”
The last few versions have done wonders for its power management on the Mac, so I don’t have to switch over to Safari when I’m using my laptop’s battery.
Good, Flash needs to die. It was a necessary evil in the early to mid 2000s, but it’s now time to kill it.
But! But! But! Without Flash (and Shockwave before it), we never would have had Stitck Death!
What madness are you speaking of?!
I use a plugin called “The Great Suspender”, that keeps Chrome’s memory to a minimum nicely.
Think you accidentally forgot a there
Bravo
I thought it was a missing “year old”.
Hmm, might switch to Chrome now.
This is why women have body image issues…..
Or did you mean a 5 year old?
I hope that’s what you meant.