Google has released a new version of Chrome that it claims will make your browser faster and give your laptop battery extra life.
Chrome is the world's most-used browser, but it ain't perfect. All those nifty Chrome extensions and useful background apps take up a tremendous amount of your computer or smartphone's memory, slowing them down in the process. And Chrome guzzles power from your laptop or phone battery. So Google sought to address both those gripes in its latest Chrome update this week. To fix the speed issue, Chrome will now look for data no longer being used that's just sitting in your computer's memory. When the time is right, Chrome will take out the garbage (believe it or not, that's actually the computer science term for what the new version of Chrome is doing). Google (GOOGL, Tech30) had already been doing some garbage collecting in previous versions of Chrome. But now, it will wait until Web pages are finished loading and completely idle -- then it will "aggressively clean up old, unused memory." By waiting until a page is idle until it drops the ham...