Edge and Chrome use less memory with Windows 10 2004

It’s a surprise from the Windows 10 May 2020 Update: the latest version of Microsoft’s Chromium-based Edge browser is less memory intensive than expected and for sure. The browser takes up a little less memory, a benefit that Google Chrome should also benefit from. In the middle of the week, Kim Denny, product manager of Microsoft Edge, explained in a small blog post how the browser takes advantage of improvements in memory allocation (more precisely, improvements in the heap heap) for Win32 apps. “Early results from internal testing on machines running Windows 10 May 2020 Update show that the Microsoft Edge browser consumes less memory and memory consumption can drop by up to 27%,” it said. she writes.

Microsoft has yet to draw attention to these May 2020 Update improvements in heap heap memory allocation, and it’s not certain that all Win32 applications can take advantage of them. But a quick test of the browser on a machine running the November 2019 update – version 1909 – and on a machine running the latest May 2020 update – version 2004 – of Windows 10, shows a real improvement. For this test, our colleagues opened 10 media-rich tabs on both machines, assuming that the difference would be clearer with a large number of open tabs. For their test, our colleagues accessed live sites, but they activated an ad blocker to avoid variations related to the number and type of ads served.

Improvement expected for Chrome as well

On the machine running Windows 10 November 2019 Update, the amount of memory consumed was 1971 MB. On the latest Windows 10 May 2020 Update, the same ten tabs consumed 1204 MB of available memory . A drop of 38%, much larger than Microsoft had expected. According to Windows Latest, Google Chrome could also benefit from improvements to the heap heap, provided it upgrades to the Windows SDK. The memory consumption used by the respective Chrome browsers on the two systems tested by our colleagues was comparable, around 1650 MB (the two test machines were different, with different CPUs, so comparing the CPU usage would not have any meaning). It is not yet known whether this heap heap enhancement will benefit all browsers and Win32 applications. But it is certain that the browser tests will be all the more interesting.