Chrome will now use more RAM (approximately 10%) in order to protect against Spectre side-channel attacks which take advantage of the speculative execution optimizations used in modern CPUs. This is due to Chrome using site isolation which causes the browser create more renderer processes. Google’s Chromium Project states “Site Isolation offers a second line of defense to make such attacks less likely to succeed. It ensures that pages from different websites are always put into different processes, each running in a sandbox that limits what the process is allowed to do. It will also make it possible to block the process from receiving certain types of sensitive data from other sites. As a result, a malicious website will find it more difficult to steal data from other sites, even if it can break some of the rules in its own process.”.
You can read more about the changes coming to the Google Chrome browser here.
