Browser wars: Google Chrome just received a major performance boost

Searching the web on Google Chrome is now faster than ever thanks to a new update to the omnibox in Google's browser.

In a new post in the search giant's The Fast and the Curious series by Chrome product manager Yana Yushkina, the company explained that searching in Chrome is now even faster since search results are prefeteched if a suggest query is very likely to be selected.

For those unfamiliar, Chrome's omnibox suggests potential queries when the “Autocomplete searches and URLs" feature is turned on in the browser's settings. This makes searching for information faster and easier as users don't have to type in an entire search query to find what they're looking for.

According to Google, search results are now four times more likely to be shown within 500 milliseconds of a user typing a query into Chrome's omnibox. It's worth noting that this only happens if Google Search is your default search engine though other search providers can trigger this feature as well by adding information to the query suggestions sent from their servers to Chrome (more information can be found here).

Memory improvements and shutdown hangs

With the release of version M89 of its browser back in March, Google rolled out its new memory allocator PartitionAlloc to Android smartphones and Windows devices bringing improved memory usage (up to 22 percent savings) and performance (up to nine percent faster responsiveness).

Since that time though, the company has also implemented PartitionAlloc on Linux in m92 and in Chrome OS in M93. Now with field data from version M93 on Chrome OS, Chrome shows a total memory footprint reduction of 15 percent in addition to a 20 percent browser process memory reduction which improves web browsing on Chromebooks for both single and multi-tabs.

Google also provided new details on a local cache that was added to Chrome's history system years ago with the goal of making startup faster. Instead of speeding up startup though, the cache added code complexity and memory usage while also being the company's top contributor to shutdown hangs in its browser. The cache has now been removed and Chrome will likely shut down faster going forward.

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