Just a few hours ago, the search giant Google launched the latest version of one of its flagship products, Chrome 85 . This is the most widely used web browser in the world, and by far, it hopes to remain so for a long time.
How could it be otherwise, this new version of the Google program is full of new features, both functional and, as we will show you. To all this we must add that this new version aims to accelerate the loading of pages on the computer and make better use of the RAM memory in its version for Android. It is also important to add that the new Chrome comes with numerous patches for vulnerabilities related to the security of the program.
To check that you can now update to the most recent version of the program, you just have to open the Chrome menu. Next you will have to go to Google Chrome Help / Information.
Performance improvements coming to the new Chrome 85
To begin with, as we mentioned, one of the main novelties that you are going to find here is a page load up to 10% faster. This is something that Google itself claims, which is why it is promoting a loading system whereby the most common tasks are prioritized and performed faster. Say that this is a feature that is rolling out on Windows and Mac computers . With all this, what is wanted is that we obtain notable improvements in the performance of the browser.
Based on tests carried out by the firm itself, pages load up to 10% faster on average. In addition, these improvements are even greater when the CPU is responsible for executing many tabs. Keep in mind that opening a large number of tabs does not help the device’s performance much, despite its usefulness. That is why Chrome 85 now opens tabs, accelerating its load in the background, so it consumes less CPU on the computer.
Say that background tabs consume a maximum of 1% of CPU time after being idle for five minutes or more. Of course, this is not the first time that Chrome has introduced improvements to limit the CPU usage of the tabs .
Support with AVIF images
To all this we have to add the AVIF image support with the launch of Chrome 85. In this way, users now have support to handle the AVIF image format. For those of you who do not know, the AVIF image file format compresses images using the AV1 codec , also dramatically reduces image sizes without significant loss of quality. This, of course, brings many benefits on the Internet, since bandwidth consumption is reduced to load pages faster.
At the same time, overall data consumption is reduced, as AVIF offers a significant reduction in file size for images. This comparison is made with other formats as common as JPEG or WebP , hence the support that has just been implemented.
Chrome 85 blocks more downloads with mixed content
Also keep in mind that in 2019 Google started with a plan to block mixed content downloads in Chrome. This refers to mixed content downloads are files that are delivered over an insecure HTTP connection when launched from HTTPS websites. In this way, Chrome began to show warnings to warn developers that these downloads would be blocked in future versions. Well, now the browser will show a visual warning when audio, video, or image files of mixed content are downloaded.
Other news that we find in Chrome 85
These are the main novelties that come to this new version of the program that is being deployed at the moment, but they are not the only ones. Others that could be considered as minors are also reaching the stable version of the program, and are the following:
- The full URLs in the address bar will soon be hidden by default.
- Legacy Browser Support or LBS support is added.
- Chrome 85 also adds quick keyboard shortcuts for opening PWA or progressive web apps.
- This new version now comes with a QR code generator to help us share websites.
