Google Chrome has had a bad reputation on the Mac for over a decade. Its bad reputation was attributed to the fact that it consumed far more resources than the memory required by the web browser. But those days may be over.

Chrome product manager Mark Chang details the changes in a post on the Google Chrome blog focusing on the improvements in Chrome M89. This version is available now (we checked, it's on a MacBook Air with M1) and uses a number of Google's own technologies to improve performance on both macOS and Windows 10 machines.

This starts with a reduced memory footprint, with savings of up to 8% or over 1GB in cases Google has tested. Of course, your mileage may vary.

You should be able to hear the difference, as Google has found that background tabs improve Apple Energy Impact scores (a metric that appears in the Activity Monitor) by up to 65%. In other words, if you are using dozens of background tabs (no criticism), the role of tabs in your system's performance may be much smaller.

If word gets out that this new Chrome is that good for your Mac, it could help Google break Safari's 36% share of the macOS desktop browser market (according to NetMarketShare). However, one of the major features of the browser that Apple is touting is just performance.

On Windows, where Chrome is king (71% according to Netmarketshare), there are even bigger improvements; Chang broke down the memory savings into three different sections. Up to 22% improvement in the browser process, 8% in rendering, and 3% in the GPU.

This is achieved with Google's memory allocator PartitionAlloc, which is optimized for efficiency. Previously, Chrome used PartitionAlloc only for its rendering engine, Blink. Now, PartitionAlloc is used everywhere in Chrome on 64-bit Windows and Android.

In February of this year, we tested the memory management of Chrome, Firefox, and Edge on Windows and found that each of these browsers consumed a lot of memory; Firefox consumed 200MB more memory than Chrome and up to 1GB consumed less memory; only in the 20 tab round did Chrome consume more memory, consuming 1.8GB versus Firefox's 1.6GB.

Here's how to make sure you have the latest version of Chrome on your Mac:

Just as easy on a PC: [19]