Do you love Chrome’s Memory Saver tool? Google will soon give you more control over how aggressive it is
Google introduced the Memory saving function to its Chrome browser in February 2023 and has been improving it ever since. A new option now gives users even more control over Memory Saver by introducing a way to configure its aggressiveness.
While Memory Saver is an excellent tool (as it addresses Chrome’s RAM problem by identifying tabs that aren’t being used and removing them from memory), there’s nothing in the way of checking when a tab is marked as inactive and is therefore put on snooze. But a recently discovered flag in Chrome Canary by Windows report shows Google testing a feature that gives you three options for Memory Saver: Conservative, Medium, and Aggressive.
Once the toggle setting is enabled, you can access these three settings:
- Moderate memory saving: This setting makes your tabs inactive after a long period of time. It strikes a balance between memory usage and keeping recently opened tabs active.
- Balanced memory saving: If you select balanced memory savings, your tabs will become inactive after a certain period of time.
- Maximum memory savings: If you choose maximum memory savings, your tabs will become inactive after a shorter period of time. This aggressive mode minimizes memory usage but may require more frequent tab reloads.
Google is also adding a new visual indicator for inactive tabs: a dotted circle that appears on inactive tabs to indicate that they have been put to sleep and are no longer consuming memory.
According to the report, Google has been extensively testing the tool for some time. The tech giant “tested a multi-state memory mode option with heuristic mode, fixed timer and discard, and offered options behind flags to select the time at which tabs can be discarded.” And while those tests ultimately yielded nothing in terms of new features, they were improvements affected made to Memory Saver.
There’s currently no timetable for when this Memory Saver update will roll out to all Chrome users, but once it does you should be able to access it from the performance settings on chrome://settings/performance.