Chrome slows down your laptop? Google’s new performance checks can make the browser run faster
Google is introducing a number of new measures to streamline Chrome’s resource usage and make the web browser run more smoothly, including updates to existing functionality.
Google announced the new steps, which are now being rolled out, in a blog postand the centerpiece of the changes here is a new ‘Performance Detection’ tool.
The feature proactively searches for performance issues and provides the user with an immediate solution. So if you’re browsing a demanding website and things slow down, Chrome can step in by suggesting that the stack of other tabs you have open can be deactivated to free up system resources.
Google notes that you’ll be presented with a “performance issue alert” and this notification comes with a “fix now” button, so this is essentially a one-click fix for any resource issues, at least in theory .
Google has also beefed up its existing Memory Saver feature, which keeps RAM from being eaten up by inactive browser tabs. This now has three settings: moderate, balanced, and maximum (as previously rumored, although the settings had different names in an earlier leak).
With Moderate mode, Google says Chrome deactivates inactive tabs based on “your system’s needs,” while Maximum mode deactivates them more quickly after you switch from a particular tab.
Balanced mode strikes a balance between your system needs and browsing habits, so as you’d expect it’s a middle ground (tabs that become inactive will take longer to come back to life when you return to them, so the maximum setting is aggressive, and in this not ideal in this respect).
Finally, Google has introduced some new options to customize Chrome’s performance controls, so if there’s a website you never want to be idle with Memory Saver, you can specify this (for example, if it’s a site that runs in the background ) . It is also possible to disable parts of the interface related to this functionality, such as the icon indicating that a tab is inactive and details about the memory usage for a tab.
Analysis: More go-faster stripes for Chrome
Google makes some useful extensions here in terms of better performance with Chrome, but all these features are of course optional – you don’t have to enable them. If you don’t like your browser showing you performance warnings, you can simply disable the new Performance Detection tool.
Chrome has historically been known to be a memory hog and generally a slow piece of software, 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 internet. surfing the internet.
Still, Chrome isn’t considered the fastest web browser out there by any means. But it’s certainly improving, even if Microsoft Edge remains the top pick in our roundup of the best web browsers, and is noticeably more convenient (although it’s still not perfect in some respects, it should be noted).