Google’s Chrome browser has quite the reputation for being a memory hog, despite the search giant’s best efforts to reign the browser in. Well, now Google is adding even more performance management features to Chrome that will hopefully let users reclaim some system resources.
In a blog post, Google detailed the new capabilities, which include a performance detection tool and enhancements to Chrome’s existing Memory Saver mode.
The performance detection tool is a pop-up that appears when Chrome detects that background tabs are taking up extra resources. The pop-up shows offending tabs and offers a ‘Fix now’ button that makes the listed tabs inactive to conserve system resources.
This sounds a lot like Microsoft’s Edge browser, which offers a ‘Browser essentials’ feature that includes performance monitoring that notifies users when certain tabs are acting up.
GIF credit: Google
As for the Memory Saver feature, it’s getting three modes for greater control over performance: moderate, balanced and maximum. Moderate will deactivate tabs and free up memory based on current system needs, balanced will take both system needs and browsing habits into account, and Maximum will deactivate tabs after you stop using them much more quickly than the other modes.
Again, this sounds a lot like Edge’s performance optimization tool that can automatically ‘sleep’ unused tabs to conserve system resources. It also includes a variety of customization settings to make the optimization more aggressive, sleep tabs more quickly, and even block certain tabs from going to sleep.
Notably, Chrome can do this, too, with a new performance personalization option in Settings. Users can specify websites that should always remain active and make other tweaks to Chrome’s performance settings there.
Overall, these new features all sound like steps in the right direction and will hopefully give users more control of Chrome and its resource use. At the same time, it feels like Google is playing catch up to some other browsers on the market right now. Microsoft’s Edge browser, which runs on the same underlying engine as Chrome, is quite efficient on Windows. In my own testing, I’ve found Edge consistently handles performance and resource use better than other options on Windows devices.
Source: Google Via: Android Authority
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