Speed has always been one of the main struggles of web browser developers. With each update, be it Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, Apple or the responsible company, they look for a way to make their browser open faster, consume fewer resources or allow users to visit the webs faster. Now, Google Chrome is about to receive an improvement that will allow its users to navigate much faster than what they have seen so far. And this improvement also comes thanks to Microsoft.
It’s no news that Microsoft is doing Google Chrome a lot of good. Since the company ditched its own engine and adopted Chromium for Edge development, Google’s OpenSource engine has received a host of new features and improvements of all kinds. And one of the last, which we will be able to enjoy very soon, is Code Caching.
How Microsoft will speed up the loading of Google Chrome
Modern web browsers use considerably large scripts on their internal WebUI pages. These scripts are loaded and run through the browser’s V8 engine. Repeating this task over and over again is an unnecessary waste of time.
Thanks to this new function, what Google Chrome (and Edge too) will do is serialize the processed script so that the information generated by it is cached. In this way, when this script needs to be reloaded, Chrome will send the serialized byte code to Blink, who will decide whether to load the previously generated information, or re-process the script from scratch.
In this way, by being able to load this information from the Chrome cache instead of processing it from scratch, the loading time is significantly reduced when opening a new tab, or when users navigate through the internal pages of the browser (the that start with chrome: //).
According to Microsoft, thanks to this function both Edge and Chrome should notice a time reduction of between 11% and 20%.
How to test this new feature
At the moment, this new function is in an experimental phase, so it is disabled by default in all versions of the browser, even in the Canary branch. To activate it, what we must do is open the properties window of the direct access (recommended the latest Canary version of the browser), and in the “destination” section add the following parameter:
--enable-features=WebUICodeCache
If it gives problems, just close the browser, delete this parameter and reopen it so that it works normally again.
Google Chrome 92 also improves the cache for some users
But the above feature isn’t the only performance improvement coming to Google Chrome. The current version of Chrome, 92, is testing a new feature called ” back-forward cache ” on some random users.
This new function has been available on Android for a long time, and what allows us is to be able to go back or forward almost instantly thanks to the fact that, when changing web using the history or the forward or back buttons, the web does not load zero, instead the copy of the cache saved on the PC is loaded.
At the moment we do not know when this function will reach all users. Google is only testing it on a very select group of users. But, if we want, we can activate it through the following flag in Chrome 92 (Canary is not necessary):
chrome://flags/#back-forward-cache