[especially in the face of increasing competition from Microsoft's Edge and Mozilla's Firefox. For Chrome users who are thinking about switching, Chrome is going to be a little faster and use a lot less memory.

In a post on the Chromium blog, Chrome browser product manager Yana Yushkina announced improved search speed when searching in the Omnibox. The omnibox is the bar at the top of the Chrome browser where you enter a website address or search query. Chrome's memory usage has also been reduced and issues related to a common shutdown bug have been resolved.

"Searching in Chrome is now even faster. This is because if a candidate query is very likely to be selected, the search results are prefetched," says Yushkina. This means that the search results are fetched from the web server before the query is selected, so the search results appear faster."

According to Yushkina, search results appear in less than 500 milliseconds.

This only works if the user has set Google Search as the default search engine. However, it is possible for other search developers to integrate this faster feature, such as those who prefer Bing, Yahoo, or DuckDuckGo.

Apart from faster omnibox searches and new updates to aid online shopping, Chrome will also consume less memory.

"Chrome OS shows a 15% reduction in total memory footprint in addition to a 20% reduction in browser process memory, improving the Chromebook browsing experience in both single and multiple tabs," says Yushkina.

Finally, Yushkina detailed common shutdown hang-ups and how the team solved them. Basically, a few years ago the Chrome development team added a local cache that speeds up browser startup. Later, it was discovered that this cache increased complexity on certain operating systems, consuming more memory and causing shutdowns. It also did little to improve speed; the Chrome development team removed the cache and resolved the shutdown hangs.

"This was a great example of the principle that cache is not always the answer!" Yushkina said.