When Google’s Chrome web browser first hit the streets, it quickly earned a reputation as one of the speediest browsers around. But as it continued to gain market share over the years, it also earned a well-deserved reputation as a memory hog and a resource-intensive application that would shorten your laptop’s battery life.
Now Google says it’s taking aim at both issues. The company says the latest version of Chrome for desktop operating systems includes optional features that will reduce the browser’s impact on memory usage and battery life.
That’s not to say that Chrome will use fewer resources moving forward by default. You’ll need to enable the optional new features.
Memory Saver
Google says its new Memory Saver mode can free up RAM by dropping data from background browser tabs from active memory. This allows the websites you’re actually looking at to run smoothly while reducing memory usage by up to 30 percent.
That could free up memory that could be used by other apps on your computer. And when you go back to the browser tabs that had been inactive, they’ll reload when you need them.
I can think of a few reasons you might not want to use this feature. First, it might not take a few seconds for inactive browser tabs to load when they become active. And second, if you have unsaved data in one of those tabs (like a blog post, or items added to a shopping card for an online store you are not logged into), I’d be worried that you might lose some data when the tab reloads.
But if you regularly notice Chrome’s memory usage causing problems on your computer, it’s nice to have an option to reduce the memory footprint. And Chrome does allow you to designate certain websites that won’t be affected by Memory Saver. So if you know which sites are likely to cause problems if they reload unexpectedly, you can put those on a block list.
Memory Saver can be enabled or disabled from Chrome’s settings.
Energy Save
Chrome’s new Energy Saver mode kicks in automatically when you’re using a battery-powered computer (like a laptop or tablet) and the battery level drops to 20 percent.
At that point, Chrome will “save battery by limiting background activity and visual effects for websites with animations and videos.”
But if you’d rather get the full web experience until your battery dies, you can disable Energy Saver from your browser settings.
This is just Chrome pulling in a feature that MS Edge had added and PR’d into Chromium over a year ago. 🤷♂️
I don’t get it. My machine is hardly high end, only 8GB of ram, but Task Manager says about 3GB is still free and that Chrome is taking up less than 400MB of ram. What are people doing on their computers that Chrome is a big deal? (Maybe I should look at the wife’s computer–she leaves a lot of tabs open.)
Doing this I noticed that Outlook takes up only about 10% of the ram as Thunderbird. Odd.
How about a feature that blocks autorun videos on websites like Yahoo?
Simply add uBlock Origin to Chrome on your own; proper memory management can’t reasonably be described as an optional feature and should have been incorporated in Chrome long, long ago. Alphabet doesn’t own Yahoo, but since it profits substantially from ads on sites it does own (like Youtube), one can hardly expect it to go out of its way to facilitate blocking ads on them.
Imagine, not keeping inactive tabs’ data in RAM all the time — Google’s genius knows no bounds!