Chrome Will Soon Stop Eating All Your Memory

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Chrome is famous (or perhaps, infamous) for hogging your computer's RAM. It's an unfortunate trade-off tons of users make for one of the best, most flexible browsers around. This December, in build 55 of Chrome, we'll see a new version of the Javascript V8 Engine which should seriously free up your memory.

The V8 Engine Blog has some in-depth statistics and charts, but the important thing to note is that on tested sites like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Hacker News, Flipboard and imgur, there were some dramatic improvements in RAM consumption. 

"Overall, we observed a 50 [percent] reduction of average V8 heap size on this set of benchmarks," the team wrote.

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Chrome 55 is currently scheduled for release in early December. That build, as previously reported, will also be a major stepping stone in Google's timeline to kill Adobe Flash. HTML5 will become the default player for gaming and videos in that build, and users will have to go into settings to enable Flash if they encounter sites that don't support the new standard.

Until December, you'll just have to disable a few extensions or close a few more tabs, but hopefully, finally, Chrome won't hog your memory anymore. 

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Andrew E. Freedman