Chrome will finally eat less RAM from this December

If you’re one of the millions of people using Google Chrome on a daily basis, you know how much it can slow down your computer.

As websites and online tools ask more and more from computers, browsers have quickly become a big burden — especially when they don’t do a great job at memory management.

The Chromium team has worked hard on improving the browser and is soon ready to present an update that will cut its memory use in half. By including a new JavaScript engine in Chrome 54, memory usage on JavaScript-heavy sites will be lower than in previous version.

In Google’s testing, websites like Imgur, Reddit, Twitter, The New York Times and YouTube were using 50 percent less RAM on average, which is a significant improvement.

If your desktop computer already has a lot of memory or you systematically close tabs to save some memory, the impact of the update will be less noticeable. But if you’re on a mobile device with less RAM or have a severe case of ‘too many open tabs’, you’ll be happy to notice the reduced load.

While this is already a step in the right direction, the Chromium team is hoping to release more memory-saving updates in the future, specifically focusing on low-end devices with less than 1 GB of memory.

The stable build will go live on December 6th, but if you can’t wait there’s always the Chrome Beta channel that will almost certainly include the improvements a few weeks earlier. If you’re planning to switch to Beta, don’t forget that you’re running pre-release software that might include bugs.