Chrome is a performance hog, but these new features could help

Google Chrome has long had a reputation as a performance hog, and the search giant has been looking to address these issues in recent years. Now, Google has announced some more additions in this regard.

The company announced several tools to help improve Chrome’s resource management and performance, starting with the so-called performance detector. This is a pop-up menu that notifies you when background tabs are taking up excess resources. The menu also offers a button to quickly disable offending tabs so you can reclaim resources for the current tab. Fortunately, you can disable this tool if you don’t like it.

Google launched a Memory Saver feature in Chrome in 2022 to free up RAM from background tabs. The feature now has three specific modes: moderate, balanced and maximum. Setting Memory Saver to moderate mode will disable tabs and free up memory based on current system needs. Meanwhile, maximum mode disables tabs and frees up memory much faster. These modes can be found by visiting Settings > Performance > Memory Saver. It’s also worth noting that the balanced setting is the default mode.

Finally, Google noted that Chrome now has more performance customization options in the Settings menu. A welcome addition is the ability to specify websites that should always remain active. This should be very useful if you have important tabs running in the background that are frequently disabled.