More transparency is always welcome
We usually speak of Chrome’s memory usage with a negative connotation, even though Google’s browser is one of the best options out there. With Chrome 108, Google started taking decisive steps to shed this image, rolling out new features like Memory Saver to help reduce RAM usage and extend battery life. Now, it seems Chrome wants to be more up front about exactly what is hogging all your memory.
The way Memory Saver works right now, it tells you how much memory it freed when Chrome automatically snoozed a tab on your computer. The feature is turned on by default in Chrome 110 and you may have seen it in action by now. Chrome expert and Android Police reader Leopeva64 on Twitter found a new Chromium Gerrit commit suggesting the browser could soon show you specific memory usage for every open tab when you hover your cursor on it.
You can always pull up Chrome’s built-in task manager utility under three-dot menu -> More tools –> Task manager, or by hitting Shift + Esc to view per-tab RAM usage statistics. The interface also shows you network and CPU usage for all the tabs, but hovering a cursor on the tab is just way more convenient. Specific use cases for the task manager will still exist, but if you’re struggling with several tabs on a tired Chromebook, you shouldn’t have to rely on guesswork when deciding which tabs to close.
The remarks on the Gerrit still suggest the feature is rough around the edges, so it could be a while before we see it even in Chrome Beta. If you aren’t rocking one of the best Chromebooks or a powerful computer, you can let Memory saver do all the legwork in the background after updating to Chrome 110. Chrome 111 just rolled out in the stable channel on March 1, so we likely won’t hear more about this feature until the Chrome 112 beta release slated for March 9. The task manager is always around if you want tab-specific statistics, until then.
