This tab upgrade should give Google Chrome a major speed boost
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Charging times on Google Chrome will soon be much faster with the release of a new feature known as “Freeze Dried Tabs”, which saves tabs as “interactive snapshots”.
In a message on the Chromium blog (opens in new tab)Google claims the new feature will bring “20% noticeable acceleration” in cold startups from the browser on Android devices.
The new feature improves on the previous method of displaying unloaded pages (via screenshots) by allowing users to click links and scroll the length of pages before they are fully loaded.
Google Chrome Speed Boost
So-called “freeze-drying” works by saving a page’s images as vector images, rasterizing them, and “displaying them dynamically as the user scrolls” next to captured hyperlinks.
Large images are omitted from these new tabs and unused letters in font files, which can be several megabytes in size, are removed to reduce page load times.
During testing, Google found that freeze-dried tabs “can speed up the median time it takes to draw all of the page’s content to just 2.8 seconds from launch”.
Google believes that the new technique used to load tabs will be especially useful for “transition views” and for pages with particularly large chunks of content that would otherwise take a long time to load.
It claims that Freeze Dried Tabs layout and fully loaded pages mean the same thing that Google Chrome will seem even faster from now on, as the transition from snapshot to full page is a barely noticeable change.
While freeze-dried tabs currently only appear in Google Chrome for Android, the company is exploring “additional places to use this technology.”