The fact that Chrome is the most commonly used web browser on the planet means that Google has to ensure people have an optimal experience, regardless of the device they use. For a resource intensive browser like Chrome, the Memory Saver feature introduced in February this year is rather important. Gradually, Google is making this utility more customizable. To this effect, the latest Chrome Canary has a new button to prevent Memory Saver from closing specific websites.
If you haven’t kept up with Chrome changes lately, Google introduced Memory Saver on desktop to ensure your active tabs always had adequate RAM to deliver a smooth user experience. Inactive tabs get snoozed after a period of time, but when you revisit one, Chrome reloads it for you. Energy Saver, a notebook-centric utility, rolled out alongside this to reduce Chrome’s impact on your battery life.
Where to find the ‘Never deactivate this site’ button
Browser expert Leopeva64 on Twitter has spotted another Memory Saver change in the latest Canary build. Chrome’s developers have added a user-facing option to prevent specific domains from being dumped from the RAM, even if Memory Saver is active. You can do this by clicking the performance icon in the Omnibox and then selecting the Never deactivate this site button.
The card should also display information about how much memory Chrome freed by dumping the tab, helping you make a better decision. It may still be beneficial to snooze some resource-heavy websites, even if you visit them frequently.
Chrome also curates a helpful list of all the websites you have prevented Memory Saver from deactivating. The list is available under Settings -> Performance -> Memory Saver, just underneath the master toggle for this feature. You can manually add websites to this list here, or remove existing exceptions. The list makes it convenient, so you don’t have to wait for Chrome to dump an important tab once before you can whitelist it.
Such a feature could be handy for people playing ambient music in a Chrome tab, or when waiting for a flash sale for the newest phone — basically anything you don’t want to miss, without killing Memory Saver entirely.
Memory Saver has other personalization options as well. Canary users can customize the duration after which Chrome dumps tabs to free up RAM. An aggressive setting may be suitable for low-end machines while a more liberal option may suit users better when they seek an optimal experience without turning the feature off entirely. While these are mostly limited to the Canary 115 build on desktop, Chrome 114 in beta has a bunch of new features as well.
