Chrome slowing down your laptop? Google’s new performance controls could help the browser run faster

Fed up with Chrome running sluggishly? New features to pep up browser performance are rolling out now

News By Darren Allan published 30 October 2024

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).

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