Microsoft has announced that Windows 10 May 2020 Update ships with massive segment heap memory improvements, which allow for a substantial reduction in the amount of memory used by browsers, including here the kind of Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome.

And needless to say, Microsoft Edge is the first browser to profit from these changes, and also the company claims it's observed a 27 percent improvement in the May 2020 Update.

As I said just a few hours ago, it was only a matter of time until Google discovered the refinements in Windows 10 May 2020 Update and began focusing on similar updates for Google Chrome.

And today it looks like Google really wants to bring segment heap to Chrome too, and the company has started the work in connection with this.

"This is why we want segment heap"

In a commit spotted by WL, a Chromium engineer explains that going this route may help Chrome reduce memory usage by "hundreds of MB."

"Adding a SegmentHeap admission to the chrome.exe manifest will inform recent-enough versions of Windows (20-04 and beyond) to opt chrome.exe into while using segment heap instead of the legacy heap. Details are in the bug but it appears the default Windows heap is tuned for server workloads where throughput is what matters most, and Chromium (especially because of its multi-process architecture) also has of looking after about memory footprint," the commit reads.

"Experiments with per-machine opting-in towards the segment heap for chrome.exe shows that this could save countless MB in the browser and Network Service utility processes, amongst others, on some machines. Actual results will vary widely, with the greatest savings developing many-core machines."

Google engineers also discuss segment heap in Chrome, using Microsoft's 27% memory improvement as living evidence of "why we would like the segment heap."

"We could enable it now but that would cause build warnings. Therefore enabling it's blocked on a change to the Windows 10.0.19041.0 SDK that is currently blocked on some mysterious build failures," they say in a thread.

Each one of these improvements are only possible on Windows 10 May 2020 Update devices.