Chrome browser has garnered a bad reputation for being a resource hog, and in my personal experience, it does lead to some serious throttling on machines with low-end hardware. Google has today announced that with v87 – which is now rolling out – the company is giving Chrome browser its biggest performance boost in years. And the numbers being touted by Google are pretty substantial.

25% faster, 5x lower CPU usage, and 1.25 hours of extra battery life

To start, Google claims to have reduced the CPU usage of Chrome by 5x, while simultaneously adding 1.25 hours of battery life as per internal benchmarks. This has been achieved by prioritizing active Chrome tabs in the foreground compared to other programs and functions, something Google calls Tab Throttling and Occlusion Tracking

These under-the-hood improvements to Chrome also ensure that the browser now opens up to 25% faster and page loading speed has also gone up by 7%, all the while using a lesser amount of RAM and cutting down on power consumption. And on the Android platform, Google claims that Chrome will now load pages almost instantaneously as users go back and forth

Universal tab search tool in Chrome browser

Google is also adding a few additional tools to the Chrome browser. The first one is a tab search feature. As the name makes it abundantly clear, users will be able to quickly find a tab from a universal list of tabs, irrespective of the windows or groups they are placed in. You can either scroll the whole tab list or just search its name from the search field. The tab search tool will first make its way to Chrome OS and will arrive on other platforms soon. 

Google is also making the universal search bar at the top in Chrome even more useful. Now, when users type a relevant query that resembles a settings option, they’ll see an action button that will take them directly to the requisite settings page. For example, when you type delete history in the search bar, you will also see an action button that will guide you to the appropriate page in Chrome’s settings section where you can delete your browser history.