Google: Chrome on Windows has gotten a lot faster recently

Google rolled out a new feature called Native Window Occlusion, to all Chrome installations on Windows in October 2020 with the release of Chrome 86. The company has published information on the performance benefits of the feature now in a new blog post on the Chromium website.

Native Window Occlusion extends a Chrome feature that limits the priority of background tabs to reduce browser resource usage and leave “more memory, CPU, and GPU for foreground tabs.”

Google engineers noticed that some Chrome windows were completely covered by other windows, but their priority was not lowered. Google’s native window occlusion feature does this to improve browser performance. Google notes that “almost 20% of Chrome’s windows are completely covered by other windows.”

Through experiments, we found that almost 20% of Chrome’s windows are completely covered by other windows, that is, occluded. If these occluded windows were treated as background tabs, our hypothesis was that we would get significant performance benefits. So, about three years ago, we started working on a project to track the occlusion status of each Chrome window in real time and reduce the priority of tabs in occluded windows. We called this project Native Window Occlusion, because we had to know the location of native non-Chrome windows on the user’s screen.

Chrome is monitoring the occlusion status of each of the browser windows in real time to lower the priority of open tabs on windows that are completely occluded in Windows.

Performance has improved significantly in core areas according to Google as a result of enabling the occlusion check feature in Windows.

8.5% to 25.8% faster startup
3.1% reduction in GPU memory usage
20.4% fewer render frames drawn overall
4.5% fewer customers experiencing renderer crashes
3.0% improvement in first entry delay
6.7% improvement in first paint with content and paint with highest content

The faster startup performance is the result of Chrome skipping the occluded window work to save resources, which can benefit the foreground window.

Google also found that the feature reduced locks by 4.5%.

All benefits require Chrome users to have at least two Chrome browser windows open on their devices, and one of these windows to be completely occluded on the desktop.

Native window occlusion is only available in Chrome for Windows. Google doesn’t reveal if it will bring the feature to Chrome for Mac OS and Linux in the future.

Closing words

The 20% occluded Chrome windows figure seems quite high, although it only takes into account scenarios where Chrome users have launched at least two Chrome windows on the Windows system.

Now youHow many browser windows do you typically use and how do you align them?

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