Google is bringing in some new measures to help streamline Chrome’s resource usage and make the web browser run more smoothly, including updates to existing functionality.
Google announced the fresh moves, which are rolling out now, in a blog post, and the centerpiece of the changes here is a new ‘Performance Detection’ tool.
The feature proactively looks for performance issues and offers an immediate solution to the user. So, if you’re browsing a demanding website and things are slowing down a bit, Chrome might chip in to suggest that the pile of other tabs you have open could be deactivated to free up system resources.
Google notes you’ll be offered a ‘performance issue alert’ and this notification will come with a button to ‘fix now,’ so this is essentially a single click fix for any resource hogging problems – in theory, anyway.
Google has also bolstered its existing Memory Saver feature which frees up RAM from being gobbled by inactive browser tabs. This now has three settings: moderate, balanced and maximum (as previously rumored, although the settings went by different names in a past leak).
With moderate mode, Google says that Chrome deactivates inactive tabs based on ‘your system’s needs’ whereas maximum mode deactivates them more swiftly after you switch away from any given tab.
Balanced mode strikes a balance between your system needs and browsing habits, so as you’d expect, it’s a middle road (tabs which go inactive take longer to come back to life when you do return to them, so the maximum setting is aggressive, and not ideal in this respect).
Finally, Google has brought in some new options to tweak Chrome’s performance controls, so if there’s a website you don’t ever want to be inactive with Memory Saver, you can specify this (if it’s a site that works in the background for example). It’s also possible to turn off parts of the interface related to this functionality, such as the icon showing a tab is inactive, and details on memory usage for a tab.
Analysis: More 'go-faster' stripes for Chrome
Google is making some useful expansions here in terms of achieving better performance with Chrome, but of course, all these features are optional – you don’t have to turn them on. If you don’t like the idea of your browser confronting you with performance alerts, the new Performance Detection tool can simply be disabled.
Chrome has famously been regarded as a memory hog and generally a sluggish piece of software historically, but that perception is slowly (ahem) changing, as Google puts more work into features like this to help the browser become a more streamlined force in the world of web browsing.
Even so, Chrome is not regarded as the fastest web browser out there by any means. But it’s definitely improving, although Microsoft Edge remains the top pick in our roundup of the best web browsers, and is notably nippier (though still not perfect in some respects, it should be noted).
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