There’s no denying that Chrome can be resource intensive at times, which is why we’ve created this guide to help you make Chrome less resource-hungry.
These tips will help reduce the load on your processor and reduce the amount of memory your browser uses. Hopefully following these tips will improve performance whether Chrome is in the foreground or running in the background.
We’ll start by taking a look at Google’s optimization tips and then discussing lesser-known tools.
Steps to improve Google Chrome
Our first suggestion would be to install the latest Google Chrome updates. This may include new optimizations and fixes for potential incompatibilities with your current hardware.
To update Google Chrome, click on the three dots in the upper right corner. At the bottom, hover your mouse over “Help” and then click “About Google Chrome.”
You will be taken to a page where you can find out if you need to update Chrome.
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If an update is available, you will be notified and can update Chrome.
Once you’ve checked if Chrome has been updated, you can now navigate to Chrome’s built-in Task Manager. This menu is something most people don’t know about, and it can help you reduce Chrome’s memory and CPU usage.
To access the Task Manager, click the three dots in the upper right corner. Hover your mouse over “More Tools” and select “Task Manager”. In the Task Manager, you will be able to see which apps and tabs are using the most memory and CPU power in Chrome.
You may be surprised at some of the uses here. For example, I had a Google Drive tab in the background and it was using 430MB of RAM and I wasn’t even using it. You can close apps and tabs here, or close Task Manager and then manually close them.
General Chrome maintenance tips
Apart from these two tips, you should know how many tabs are open at the same time, and this will help Chrome consume fewer resources. Each tab has a different impact on your performance, so 10
or more tabs will only increase the load on your computer tenfold.
If you want to further reduce the load, you can take the apps you use outside of Chrome by downloading the standalone software. For example, taking Word, WordPad, or even the desktop version of Google Drive instead of using Chrome.
You can also use Spotify instead of YouTube for music. Consider using offline apps for everything to keep Chrome from taking up a lot of memory, and remember to close those apps when you’re not using them.
Remove extensions and viruses
You can find potentially dangerous apps or extensions installed on your Chrome browser by visiting chrome: // settings / cleanup.
In some cases, malicious extensions may have been installed on your computer, and this page shown above will remove them for you. Malicious extensions can cause pop-up advertisements or run other processes in the background, which can increase the load on your computer from Chrome.
Sometimes unsafe extensions can also have a big impact on the performance of your Chrome. To check your extensions and remove those you don’t need, visit chrome: // extensions / and consider removing those you don’t need.
You may find that there are extensions installed that you are not even using, and they may be running in the background. If you’re not sure what impact a particular extension might have on your performance, you can refer to the Task Manager we mentioned earlier. There will also be extensions. However, you will have to remove them from the extensions page.
Use performance management extensions
After removing unnecessary extensions, installing additional extensions may seem counterintuitive, but there are some extensions that can improve performance. Below, we have selected three that people may not know about. All this helps to track and reduce the load on your computer using Chrome.
OneTab
OneTab is a Chrome extension that can move all open tabs into one list. Then you can use the list to reopen or close the tabs at any time. The list will not affect your performance much, and it is much better than having all these tabs open and running in the background.
Tab Wrangler
Tab Wrangler is another option specially made for those who forget to close all their tabs. Tabs will be automatically closed after they have been inactive for a certain amount of time.
You can also set up certain apps, tabs or websites to never close, and set up additional rules to keep things automated. At the end of the day, all you need to worry about is web browsing, and Tab Wrangler does the rest for you.
The Great Lift
The Great Suspender is similar to the Tab Wrangler, but instead of closing the tabs, The Great Suspender simply pauses the tabs you are not using. This means you can view many open tabs without compromising performance.
When you switch tabs, those tabs start working as usual again. There are settings to whitelist specific websites or prevent pinned tabs from being blocked, so you have complete control over how the extension works.
Summary
This concludes our guide on how to make Chrome less resource intensive. We hope this guide was helpful. If you need more tips or advice, please leave a comment and I’ll try to help when I can.
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