Browser extensions have become an important component of the browsing itself. There are several powerful extensions without which I can’t even imagine surfing the web. While these small programs add functionalities to the browser, on the other hand they consume system resources just like any other program installed on user’s computer.
This limits the usability of
extensions as their performance ultimately affect the performance of the browser. Mozilla has been working on optimizing add-ons for long, and already released many “best practice” tips for the developers. Mozilla team has also introduced “Jetpacks” – a new platform for developing add-ons for Firefox, Thunderbird and other Mozilla products.
Now
Google Chrome team has also started its efforts towards optimizing its extensions by reducing the resource consumption. Although, Chrome’s extension APIs are already much optimized and
sandboxed, Chrome team has proposed a new feature to reduce memory consumption.
This new feature will allow developers to use a new
Event Pages, instead of usual background pages. Actions defined through the event pages will executed only when dealing with the events. Chrome team describes this as, “Once an event page becomes idle, it is unloaded, freeing memory until the next time it’s needed”. Thus, this new mechanism will ensure less memory consumption – resulting a much smoother web browsing even on the less featured systems.
This new mechanism is currently available in the pre-release channels of the Chrome and developers should refer
this documentation for implementing.
(With Inputs from Arpit Kumar)