Freeze Dried Tabs, which saves tabs as “interactive snapshots,” will soon be available in Google Chrome, significantly reducing load times.
Google says the new feature increases the speed of the browser’s cold startup on Android devices by 20%, as stated in a post on the Chromium blog.
By allowing users to click links and scroll across the entire length of pages before they are fully loaded, the new feature is an improvement over the previous method of displaying unloaded pages (via screenshots).
Quickening the pace of Google Chrome
In order to display images and captured links “dynamically as the user scrolls,” so-called “freeze drying” stores a page’s visuals as vector graphics before rasterizing them.
Font files, which can be several megabytes in size, have had unused lettering removed to make the new tabs load faster.
For example, Google determined that “the median time taken to draw all the information of the website is just 2.8s from launch” while using Freeze Dried Tabs.
Google thinks that the new tab loading method will be especially helpful for “transitional views” and pages with particularly huge amounts of material that would otherwise take a long time to load.
It asserts that because the interface of Freeze Dried Tabs and fully loaded sites are identical, Google Chrome will now appear even faster because users will scarcely notice the shift from snapshot to full page.
Freeze Dried Tabs are presently only available in Google Chrome for Android, but they may soon be elsewhere.