Chrome is nothing but a hindrance to your PC's performance. Google's browser is notorious for demanding large amounts of memory and CPU usage to run, and despite years of promises to fix it, little has changed.

But things may soon change. Google has promised a new update that will "improve Chrome's performance the most in years."

The main change is the way Chrome handles tabs. Previously, the browser treated each tab like a separate process, so a single tab crash did not ruin an entire browsing session, but it did put a lot of strain on the PC.

After this month's update, this will change, and Chrome will prioritize active tabs and keep the rest running in the background; according to Google, most (over 40%) of the work done on background tabs is done by a JavaScript timer and that throttling this to once a minute will greatly improve resource management.

According to Google's own internal benchmarks, this change will "reduce CPU utilization by up to 5x and extend battery life by up to 1.25 hours. Importantly, it does not affect the background functions you need, things like music playback and notifications should still go through as normal.

In addition, Google promises that Chrome will generally be faster than before. The browser itself will launch 25 percent faster and load pages 7 percent faster. Meanwhile, it will consume less power and RAM than the current version. Meanwhile, Android users will experience "nearly instantaneous" page loads.

Chrome is also set to get a bunch of new features that will make navigation easier, especially if you tend to have a lot of tabs open at the same time; the first is a dedicated tab search that will let you see a dedicated list of open tabs. This feature will be introduced on Chromebooks first, but will be coming to other versions of Chrome in the near future.

The address bar will also add something called "Chrome Actions," which will allow users to perform major actions without having to search through the settings menu. The first actions are all privacy- and security-focused, and typing commands such as "Edit Password," "Launch Secret Window," or "Delete History" will immediately execute those actions.

Google also plans to add cards "for some users" to the new tab page. The point here is to allow users to find things they previously viewed but forgot to bookmark and resume where they left off. It will start with cooking and shopping, but Google promises that entertainment cards are also planned for early next year.

The new version of Chrome 87.0.4280.66 also fixes 33 security flaws. Most notable is the "Slipstream" bug, discovered last month by renowned hacker Samy Kamkar, which also exists in Mozilla Firefox.

Unlike the three recent emergency updates to Chrome, the newly released update does not appear to patch any urgent "zero-day" vulnerabilities. However, most of these flaws are currently locked down in Chromium's bug reporting forum.