There are few constants in the universe, but one of them is that Chrome likes to eat up computer memory. Having half the chance Google browser will gobble up your available RAM, slowing down your computer and draining your battery in the process. Fortunately Google may have found a way to help alleviate the problem.
Of course, we’ve heard Google make those kinds of promises countless times in the past, and Chrome remains as greedy as ever. But this time we hope it actually works, thanks to a feature that may be coming our way: A system that automatically pushes inactive tabs.
This feature was spotted in the Canary build of Chrome by Reddit user u/Leopeva64-2 (opens in new tab) (via Android Police (opens in new tab)). The Memory Saver feature, as mentioned, comes as part of the new Performance page in the settings menu. Once enabled, it will force inactive tabs to hibernate and “free up your computer’s resources for other tasks and keep Chrome fast.”
Inactive tabs “look empty” by design, but will automatically load when you click to open them. If this sounds familiar, it’s because there are Chrome extensions that can do this already. It seems that Google has taken the same principle and applied it to the browser.
Chrome takes things a little further, and screenshots (opens in new tab) on Reddit displays a popup that appears after the tab has been reactivated. In it Chrome shows you how much memory was freed by being in sleep mode.
This is nice for the curious minds out there, but I can see this getting old very quickly. Especially if you tend to have a lot of tabs open at once.
The settings menu also contains a whitelist, ensuring that certain sites are always kept active. So if there are any pages that can’t be reloaded while in use for whatever reason, you can tell Chrome to perform a digital equivalent of force-feeding those tab stimulators.
Sadly, this is only available in Canary right now, which is an officially unstable version of Chrome known for housing various new and untested features. The kind of stuff that needs a lot of work before it gets to Chrome proper.
This means that the Memory Saver feature may not be available for quite some time, and anyone using it in Canary will no doubt find that things don’t always work as they should. But that’s software development for you.
Let’s just hope Google can make the process run smoothly so we can all enjoy Chrome’s voracious appetite for RAM a little longer. And hopefully it’s much more visible than Google’s past efforts.
