Google Senior Software Engineer Peter Kasting announced this week that his development team has been working to address all complaints and claims from Chrome users on OS X, complaints mainly focused on battery consumption when using the browser and for this they have committed to improving its performance, especially in areas where Safari seems to do better.
For now and although work continues on it, Chrome for OS X has already received a number of improvements that should translate into faster performance and longer battery life during browsing sessions, this means that now requires considerably less CPU usage when result pages are loaded via Google search or other websites.
According to the information coming from Google, technical changes suffered are the following:
http://crbug.com/460102
Before: Renderers for background tabs had the same priority as for foreground tabs.
Now: Renderers for background tabs are given a lower priority, reducing occasional wakeups which in some cases were excessive
http://crbug.com/485371
Before: On a Google results page, using the Safari user agent to get the same content that Safari would get, Chrome performs 390 requests and 0.3% CPU usage as opposed to Safari's 120 and 0.1 % CPU usage.
Now: With 66% reduction in timer and CPU usage. Chrome reaches 120 requests and 0.1% CPU usage, on par with Safari.
http://crbug.com/489936
Before: At capitalone.com, Chrome made 1.010 activations against the 490 in Safari.
Now: Approximately 30% reduction in requests. Chrome is about 721 requests
These are just a few examples of the small improvements that are being introduced to improve performance that globally makes the improvement palpable with each update.