Google has revealed this week that its fixes for the Spectre CPU vulnerabilities have caused its Chrome browser to use more memory. In a blog post, spotted by Thurrott, Google details its new Site Isolation feature for the latest Chrome 67 release. It’s a feature, now enabled by default, that’s used to protect against the Spectre side-channel attacks that use the speculative execution features of most processors to access parts of memory that should be restricted. Unfortunately, it has also increased Chrome RAM usage as a result.

“Site Isolation does cause Chrome to create more renderer processes, which comes with performance tradeoffs,” admits Google software engineer Charlie Reis. “There is about a 10-13 percent total memory overhead…

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