An improved chart parser based on active edges sharing the leftmost common elements is presented. After analyzing the mechanism of avoiding redundant work in the traditional chart parsing algorithm, the inefficient treatment on active edges possessing the same leftmost common elements was discovered. Then a new presentation of the active edge was proposed to share the same leftmost elements, and thus an improved chart parser was realized with great decrease of generated active edges. The experimental results on Chinese Treebank show that the improved chart parser significantly outperforms the packed chart parser in terms of both speed (about 10 times faster) and space consumption.