The developers behind Google Chrome have recently been able
to reduce Chrome’s memory footprint of background tabs by up to 8% on Mac, or
just over 1GB on some systems in version 89, hence making Chrome’s latest version
smarter at using and freeing up memory on MacOS.
Tab throttling has been improved in the latest version of Chrome as a result of reduced JavaScript Timer wake-ups. Chrome now uses up to 5x less CPU, as background tabs don’t wake up the CPU as much, leading to longer battery life, which is up to 1.25 hours better.
The feature of tab throttling, which is part of Chrome 87
and 88 versions, has accounted for a 65% improvement on Chrome's Apple Energy
Impact score for pages in the background.
What is interesting about this claim by Chrome developers is
that independent tests on Chrome prove otherwise, reporting a 10 times greater
RAM usage of Chrome as compared to Safari. Even Apple claims that Safari on macOS
Big Sur is "50% faster on average at loading frequently visited websites
than Chrome."
