Google has introduced a new Chrome feature called Shared Memory Versioning to improve the way cookies are handled, resulting in enhanced performance across all platforms. In the past, single-process browsers managed cookies easily by keeping data in memory, but modern browsers like Chrome use multiple processes to boost performance and security. This complexity led to repeated cookie requests, causing slow interactions and significant delays, especially when multiple sites made rapid requests simultaneously.
Through their investigation, Google discovered that 87% of cookie accesses were redundant, with some websites fetching cookies hundreds of times per second. To address this bottleneck, Chrome now maintains a local copy of the cookie data and its version number, allowing the browser to check if a cookie has the latest data without repeatedly querying the network service. This new system, enabled by default in March, has drastically reduced unnecessary cookie requests.
According to Google engineers, this change has reduced the number of cookie-related messages by 80% and sped up cookie access by 60%. The feature works by pairing each value of document.cookie with a monotonically increasing version, which is cached by each renderer. The network service hosts the version of each document.cookie in shared memory, enabling renderers to verify the latest version without needing inter-process communication.
The early tests of Shared Memory Versioning have shown a performance improvement of up to 5% across all platforms. As a result, more websites are now passing Core Web Vitals, which measure page loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability on real devices. This update has led to faster page loading and improved overall browsing efficiency, marking a significant enhancement in Chrome’s performance.
