Google is constantly working on ways to speed up its Chrome browser, and most of those improvements carry over to other Chromium browsers like Vidaldi and Microsoft Edge. The latest performance boost is coming from an unlikely place: loading browser cookies.
Google explained in a new blog post that it has introduced “Share Memory Versioning” in Chromium (the open-source core for Chrome, Edge, and other web browsers), which aims to address performance issues with pages that use browser cookies. The company’s testing revealed that some sites use inefficient code that requests the same cookies and other resources over and over again, and because each of those checks has to wait for a response from the browser’s memory, some pages were slower than they should have been.
Google said 87% of cookie accesses in its test results were redundant, and the company even found examples of cookies being requested hundreds of times per second. However, there wasn’t an easy way to address the issue without breaking existing web pages. Google’s solution was to create a new architecture for reading and writing cookies, called Shared Memory Versioning, which reduces cookie data requests between different components of the browser.
The result is that the slowest web pages, especially pages with forms and other elements that use cookies for storage, are now up to 5% faster on all platforms. That’s not a drastic change, but combined with all the other performance improvements rolled out in the Chromium project, it’s helping Chrome and other browsers become more responsive.
Google said in a blog post, “As billions of people turn to the web to get things done every day, the browser becomes more responsible for hosting a multitude of apps at once, resource contention becomes a challenge. The multi-process Chrome browser contends for multiple resources: CPU and memory of course, but also its own queues of work between its internal services (in this article, the network service). This is why we’ve been focused on identifying and fixing slow interactions from Chrome users’ field data, which is the authoritative source when it comes to real user experiences.”
Source: Chromium Blog