Google is trying to speed up Chrome with new Freeze-dried Tabs feature

One of the original major selling points of Google Chrome was its rapid response times as it loaded up the elements on the sites you were visiting. As its dominance grew, however, and our web using habits evolved, the Google browser began to creak as we put more and more pressure on it in the form of multiple open tabs. A new Chrome update is seeking to give the browser a considerable boost in speed by tackling that tab problem. Let’s take a look at what is going on.

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Google has recently announced a new Chrome feature called Freeze-Dried tabs, which should offer boosts of speed of up to 20% for Chrome users running cold startups on Android devices. Google had previously attempted to address the tab issue by saving screenshots of them and then serving them up rather than the fully functional webpage. This update builds on that by storing what Google calls interactive snapshots.

There is quite a bit of technical stuff going on under the hood with these snapshots being saved as vector graphics, which are then loaded to display only as the user scrolls down through them. Large graphics and any unused letters in the font files being used on the page are left out on the tabs, which can result in speed savings of up to 2.8ms according to the search giant.

“Testing has shown that by using a Freeze Dried Tab we can speed up the median time taken to draw all the content of the page to just 2.8s from launch (~20% faster compared to starting to draw normally). Since all the content is there and there’s often no layout shift, it feels even faster!”

On top of this, the new feature also adds the interactive element to the snapshots by embedding clickable links into the vectored image meaning users can click on the interactive links as soon as they see them rather than having to wait for the full page to load and replace the saved screenshot.

This means the feature offers a 20% speed boost as well as added functionality on the current solution, which marks an excellent update for Google Chrome.

In other recent Chrome News, some ad blockers will soon be redundant.