Google Chrome to get Mac-friendly

Google is giving a Mac-friendly makeover to Chrome, addressing a number of concerns raised by Apple users over the years.

Google's Chrome emerged among the most popular internet browsers, due to several reasons including simplicity and design that was intuitive, yet powerful and adaptable.

However it was by no means perfect as the internet-browsing muscle took up processing space and ate into battery life.

Safari, Apple's own browser, is rated by many as being far more  efficient on Macs, but Google now plans to close the gap.

According to senior Chrome engineer Peter Kasting forthcoming Chrome updates would boost the browser's efficiency by tweaking the way it rendered background tabs (the pages that remained open, but which users were not currently looking at).

"Before: Renderers for background tabs had the same priority as for foreground tabs," Kasting explained in a post. "Now: Renderers for background tabs get a lower priority, reducing idle wakeups on various perf test, in some cases by significant amounts (e.g. 50% on one test)."

Though no official timetable had been drawn up for the release of the improvements, the updates would be expected to go live in the coming months. According to Kasting Google engineers would also be working to improve Chrome's RAM usage.

Google had also recently announced a new feature for the Chrome beta release - not loading 'non-critical' Flash plugins they were clicked by the user a minor change that could substantiall impact performance.

According to commentators, it seemed that Google was committed to regaining its crown as the power-user's browser; but whether users would be won back from Firefox remained to be seen.