Google released Chrome 87 a few hours ago. As the latest update of the 2020 plan, Google not only brings us some practical function improvements of this version, but also the performance improvement and energy consumption optimization that have been tested before are also published this time.
Therefore, Chrome 87 is also considered to be the biggest improvement in Chrome’s performance in recent years. Let’s take a look.
Faster and more power-saving, tab resource scheduling is smarter
Key points:
- The power consumption of the background tab page is greatly reduced.
- The browser’s overall resource scheduling is smarter when multitasking.
- Android version page navigation loads faster.
The biggest update brought by this official version update is the performance consumption limit for the background tab.
In the process of using browsers, most web pages almost use something called a JavaScript timer to execute code tasks regularly to achieve various web page functions. Google’s biggest problem earlier was power consumption. After investigation, it was found that the JavaScript timers of the tab pages placed in the background by the user still took up a lot of system resources to keep working. So the solution was born.
Before the official version of Chrome 87, this technology called Throttle Javascript timers in the background (chrome://flags/#intensive-wake-up-throttling) has been tested in Canary, Dev and Beta versions of Chrome for some time. By reducing the wake-up frequency of the JaveScript timer of the background tab page to once every 1 minute, the system resources required by the background tab page are reduced, but at the same time, it can ensure that some tasks that need to run in the background (such as media playback) work normally.
According to a test conducted by Google, this improvement can reduce CPU usage by up to 5 times, bringing nearly 1.25 hours of additional usage time, which is absolutely positive for portable devices such as laptops.
This idea of optimizing the background page to ensure front-end work is also applied to the browser itself: for the Windows version, Chrome 87 also officially introduces the Occlusion Tracking technology, which can help Chrome determine whether the current webpage tab and browser window are the user’s focus. Further optimize the overall resource scheduling of the browser. According to Google, this improvement can increase the browser startup speed by 25% and the tab loading speed by 7% while using less memory.
Finally, the performance adjustments for the Android version are mainly for web navigation operations (forward and backward). Google said that one-fifth of the operations when browsing the web are focused on forward and backward. The back/forward cache function added this time can increase the loading speed of web content after related operations by nearly 20%. In the future, this improvement will be increased to 50%, achieving almost instantaneous page loading.
If you are interested in related performance improvements and technical details, please move to this article on the Chromium Blog to learn more.
The tab function has improved, and now you can search
Key points:
- Chrome OS first, follow-up push on desktop
- Multi-tab browsing is more efficient
In previous versions, Chrome has added the functions of fixed tabs and grouped tabs. You can pin frequently opened webpages to the far left of Chrome’s tab bar. For multiple tabs, you can also group and group tabs. They are classified by color marking.
After breaking some of the tab management extensions, Chrome 87 continued to make efforts this time and announced the addition of a new feature: tab search. In short, when you open multiple tabs and want to quickly locate a certain tab, you can directly click the arrow button at the far right of the title bar at the top of the browser to bring up the tab search panel. For users who need to keep multiple tab pages open in their daily work, this function should be able to be efficient and power-saving in conjunction with the resource limitations of the background tabs mentioned above.
Unfortunately, this feature has not yet been officially launched on the desktop. Google said that it will log in to Chrome OS first and will push it to the desktop version soon.
More functions in the address bar
Key points:
- Directly jump to the common browser settings through the address bar (for example, “Clear History”)
At present, Google has also given some commands that can be executed, and said that the commands that can be executed in this function will continue to increase in the future.
The content of the new tab page is richer
Key points:
- Need personal browsing data accumulation
- Review history directly from the new tab page
After a period of time, if you suddenly want to review or continue researching the information you have searched on the Internet. What other new ways besides searching through the historical records? Chrome 87 uses the new tab page to help you find it through the card module at the bottom of the new tab page.
According to Google’s introduction, these cards will display historical pages and related pages on different topics based on our browsing history. The main application scenarios include gift selection, shopping, recipes, and so on.
PDF reader function is more complete
Key points:
- Support for viewing annotations, but not for editing annotations
We have always thought that Chrome’s PDF reader is too rudimentary compared to Edge, but Chrome 87 has finally caught up and brought many improvements to PDF readers.
The most intuitive change of the PDF reader in Chrome 87 is the addition of the navigation bar: the new navigation bar on the left side of the browse page can display thumbnail previews of all pages, and if the PDF file itself has a directory, you can switch to the directory view to jump View, convenience and practicality have been improved a lot. .
In addition, a zoom control and a new view control have been added to the toolbar. If your screen is big enough, you can set to view two PDF pages side by side. The only regret is that although this version supports viewing of PDF annotations, it still does not support editing.
The new version of the PDF reader has been released. If you can’t see the new interface after the update, you can also go to the function tab page to search for PDF Viewer Update (chrome://flags/#pdf-viewer-updat) and start it manually.
Best Apple Developer & some technical details
Key update points:
- Adapt to macOS Big Sur and Apple M1
- More complete web camera control function, web version meeting tool will be used
- The new wallpapers for Chrome OS are so beautiful
Apple recently officially released the macOS Big Sur system, which brought new application icon adaptation problems, and the official launch of Chrome 87 also added icons for macOS Big Sur. The development team said that it is still further optimizing to make the visual look more unified.
In addition, for the just-released Mac hardware based on the ARM-based Apple M1 processor, the official version of Chrome 87 has launched a version based on two architectures: the Intel architecture version and the Apple M1 architecture version. The latter uses native compilation, which is more efficient. Higher is also more suitable for new hardware.
Finally, Chrome 87 also brings a series of technical details for web page functions. For example, now we can directly control the camera with zoom, tilt, pan and other functions on the Chrome web page; in addition, this update for Chrome OS also adds A new wallpaper.
The above is all the content of this stable version of the Chrome 87 update. How do Chrome’s performance and power consumption improvements perform on your device? Welcome to discuss in the comment section.
