New Update 'Freeze Dried Tabs' improve Chrome's startup by 20% on Android

silversurfer · Sep 19, 2022

Android users who run Google Chrome on their devices may have noticed an improvement in the startup time of the browser. Thanks to a new feature that Google calls Freeze Dried Tabs, Chrome's startup is 20% faster on average than before according to Google.

The startup of mobile browser apps on Android may feel slower than the startup of other applications. One of the main reasons for that is that the process of displaying the first webpage requires lots of background work, including the downloading of website assets, the running of JavaScript and the actual rendering of the webpage.

One of the initial ideas of speeding up the loading of the browser on start was to display a screenshot of the site immediately until it was fully available. While that speed up the initial start of the browser, it had the disadvantage that users could not interact with the site.

Chromium engineers came up with the concept of Freeze Dried Tabs to improve the loading speed of Chrome while keeping a certain level of interactivity. At its core, Freeze Dried Tabs are a snapshot of the actual website that provide content and interactivity. Unlike screenshots, which are static and do not show content that is below the fold, Freeze Dried Tabs include support for links, zooming and the scrolling of content.

credit: Google