Google Chrome's Latest Version Includes Tools To Address Its Memory Hog Problem (theverge.com) 59
Google has released optimization features designed to improve battery life and memory usage on machines running the latest version of its Chrome desktop web browser. From a report: Chrome's new Energy Saver and Memory Saver modes were first announced in December last year alongside the release of Chrome 108, and now as noted by Android Police, the two optimization utilities are starting to roll out globally onto Chrome 110 desktops for Mac, Windows, and Chromebooks.
Memory Saver mode essentially snoozes Chrome tabs that aren't currently in use to free up RAM for more intensive tasks and create a smoother browsing experience. Don't worry if you're a tab hoarder though, as these inactive tabs are still visible and can be reloaded at any time to pick up where you left off. Your most used websites can also be marked as exempt from Memory Saver to ensure they're always running at the maximum possible performance.
Memory Saver mode essentially snoozes Chrome tabs that aren't currently in use to free up RAM for more intensive tasks and create a smoother browsing experience. Don't worry if you're a tab hoarder though, as these inactive tabs are still visible and can be reloaded at any time to pick up where you left off. Your most used websites can also be marked as exempt from Memory Saver to ensure they're always running at the maximum possible performance.
So it's a FEATURE (Score:3)
... that windows stop updating when they aren't in focus. Here I thought it was a bug that made me visit each window to have it update to the current screen, dropping information that came in between views.
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Corrected Headline: Chrome is now "optimized" for shitty PCs with inadequate RAM.
Which is probably most PCs out there. 8GB of RAM is not enough for Chrome and there are still many 8GB or less PCs out there.
This was supposed to roll out months ago in Chrome 108. I got tired of waiting and enabled chrome://flags/#high-efficiency-mode-available. It helps, a lot.
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Why not just use FireFox?
Re:So it's a FEATURE (Score:4, Informative)
Firefox is also a huge resource hog.
I used it for a while after Pale Moon because of the container feature, but when the ESR version went to 100-something, all of a sudden it chocked my 4GB RAM laptop. Split processes added a huge load. Reducing it to 1 manually didn't help much.
Now I'm on Pale Moon again with some selected add-ons to improve my usage, but it's still ridiculous that browsers gobble up 200MB per tab for simple websites.
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but it's still ridiculous that browsers gobble up 200MB per tab for simple websites.
No shit. Used to be able to run a whole operating system in what it takes to render a single webpage with more modern hardware. Fortunately still can so long as there is no need for web browsing.
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but it's still ridiculous that browsers gobble up 200MB per tab for simple websites.
How much is the browser, and how much is shit web coding. There seems to be quite a lot of that. Google make quite a bit of it.
Re:So it's a FEATURE (Score:4, Informative)
Re: So it's a FEATURE (Score:2)
How much is shit coding and how much is the streaming ad popups that insist of blocking the page you want to see?
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Why not just use FireFox?
I switched from FF to Chrome years ago because FF was a memory hog. Sad to see browser makers effectively competing based on how much bloat they can make run acceptably on whatever given hardware.
Re:So it's a FEATURE (Score:4, Informative)
You should switch back, for the same reason. Though you should have done that years ago.
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Firefox is better on RAM usage, but worse on battery life. Pick your poison.
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My phone can go several days without a charge. My laptop can make it through an entire workday without a charge. I'll take the RAM.
Re:So it's a FEATURE (Score:5, Funny)
8GB of ram is perfectly fine for Chrome unless you're a psychopath collecting tabs like a coked up hamster in autumn.
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WTF? Clicking that little star icon and having a bookmarks bar always visible at the top of the screen is hard to use? I mean it may be hard for people who can't write a coherent sentence, but that isn't common, that's just you.
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8GB of ram is perfectly fine for Chrome unless you're a psychopath collecting tabs like a coked up hamster in autumn.
I usually have 10 or 12 tabs open. Chrome's working set according to Process Explorer right now is using about 2.5 GB of memory. Much better than it was before this change.
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8GB is plenty of ram. With Chrome and Firefox, they use loads of memory when you have loads of memory free. When you don't have the memory to spare, it doesn't *usually* consume it.
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8GB is plenty of ram. With Chrome and Firefox, they use loads of memory when you have loads of memory free.
Chrome appears to consider swap/pagefile space as "available memory". Nothing good comes from that behaviour.
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Try using ZRAM for swap. Helps a lot when you have "only" 4GB RAM. You should still add (or keep) normal file swap but at lower priority.
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Corrected Headline: Chrome is now "optimized" for shitty PCs with inadequate RAM.
How's that job in tech support working out for you? Sounds like you're ready for a promotion.
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The bug is designing a shitty website that loads everything through async JavaScript, and can't handle it being paused.
Think about mobile users. They probably don't want your website draining their battery while they aren't looking at it.
Ok (Score:2, Informative)
So, now they're finally just adding in what Microsoft already did with Chrome, but less so. Edge is just optimized Chrome. They cut out a bunch of bloat, and already had the snoozing tabs. Between the two browsers Edge is almost always going to be better optimized. There is literally no reason to use standard Chrome, unless you have some sort of absolute hate boner for Microsoft and somehow not Google.
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**On Windows**
Not gunna get into the other OSes.
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Edge also works on Linux and it has this feature on Linux also. Even on Linux I prefer Edge to Chrome because it is lighter on the system.
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That's good to know. I have no recent practical experience with different browsers on Linux, though I did know Edge was available.
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And it's improved ram usage by... A rounding error.
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Which is all the more reason to use Edge instead of Chrome. Those webpages and their programmers should burn.
Isn't this basically what Safari on iOS does? (Score:4, Insightful)
Seems the usual behavior on Safari is that if you're browsing in another tab, when you return to your previous tab it just reloads the page. This can actually be a huge pain in the ass if you were in the middle of writing a post or working on an eBay listing, go to look something up, and then when you return everything you were working on is gone. I hope Chrome's implementation is smart enough to recognize you have a partially filled form and keeps such tabs in memory.
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Seems the usual behavior on Safari is that if you're browsing in another tab, when you return to your previous tab it just reloads the page.
I use iOS Safari to post on Slashdot all the time, that includes flipping back and forth between tabs so I can copy/paste relevant excerpts, and I cannot recall the last time I've seen the behaviour you've described. I don't know if they're just better at capturing a snapshot of the state of the browser or if the iPhone got a RAM upgrade.
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Hope is the first step on the road to disappointment [youtube.com]
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Seems the usual behavior on Safari is that if you're browsing in another tab, when you return to your previous tab it just reloads the page. This can actually be a huge pain in the ass if you were in the middle of writing a post or working on an eBay listing, go to look something up, and then when you return everything you were working on is gone. I hope Chrome's implementation is smart enough to recognize you have a partially filled form and keeps such tabs in memory.
I think Safari actually does that already. I routinely write /. posts on my iPad while bouncing between other pages and apps to pull up information, even coming back to it the next day. The behavior you describe tends to only happen if you switch to doing something else entirely, at which point it isn’t unreasonable that the browser would eventually cede the memory back to the OS for use on whatever tasks you switched to, but so far as I’ve seen it tries to hang onto the pages where you’ve
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Safari is just garbage in general. Only absolute morons use Safari. Anything is better than it. Opera is better than Safari and I wouldn't recommend that browser to anyone, either.
Maybe it's just me, but ... (Score:2)
Memory Saver mode essentially snoozes Chrome tabs that aren't currently in use to free up RAM ...
I generally close tabs that aren't in use and that seems to free up RAM too. :-)
I also close the browser entirely when I'm not actively browsing -- so not running it for days/weeks at a time...
(I use Firefox for 99.99% of browsing, Chrome very rarely -- like 0.01% :-) -- and Edge never.)
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There are times you want a tab not in focus to keep updating, for example my discord tab.
Just because I switched to another tab doesn't mean discord isn't in use.
You can whitelist URLs to avoid sleeping for just that reason.
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I had it in 108, but it was a hidden feature that had to be enabled.
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I generally close tabs that aren't in use and that seems to free up RAM too. :-)
I also close the browser entirely when I'm not actively browsing -- so not running it for days/weeks at a time...
I restart Chrome when there are updates. I also restart Windows when there are updates. Regularly restarting anything just for stability should have been no longer a thing decades ago.
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Regularly restarting anything just for stability should have been no longer a thing decades ago.
I just don't keep things running when I'm not actively using them. For example, while I usually keep Thunderbird up during the day, I shut it down before I go to sleep and restart it the next time I want to check my mail...
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I just don't keep things running when I'm not actively using them. For example, while I usually keep Thunderbird up during the day, I shut it down before I go to sleep and restart it the next time I want to check my mail...
I leave things running all the time, but you do you. IMAP will still sync all the email in the end regardless.
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IMAP will still sync all the email in the end regardless.
Yup, although I (still) POP my mail and keep it all local ...
Cute (Score:1)
And right on the heels of "stopping support for 32bit", where not hogging memory is a bit more needed.
"Don't be evil", indeed.
is this really that big of a deal? (Score:2)
I'd kind of wonder why this is as big of an issue as it is, but it's brought up, so I guess it is...
Is it really a problem if a bunch of your memory is in use? It's there to be used, and if your machine never hits memory saturation, it might be over-provisioned. (I mean realistically, I see time and again people sharing shots on reddit, proud that they have a beast of a machine and always have it looking like it's idling), Not saying that's a horrible thing...
Anything an app doesn't use memory for to cac
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Is it really a problem if a bunch of your memory is in use?
People make it a bigger issue than it actually is. However, it is a potential problem for people on older hardware or with limited RAM.
I do sort of agree with some other comments here, which mentioned things like heading back to a page, only to have it reload and lose your place, well that's exactly why it uses the memory in the first place. Maybe it should just be a setting, but I'm sure it will never be perfect.
It is a setting in Chrome. You can turn the whole feature on/off, or just disable it for specific domains.
BarTab (Score:2)
Kudos to philikon who got to tab discarding 1.3 decades [github.com] before Google.
wish this was for firefox (Score:2)
firefox when? i sometimes close and reopen firefox after using 14 GB of ram
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There's plenty of Tab Suspender addons available for Firefox.
It's an aggravating feature (Score:2)
Using features that make them inaccessible goes against even having them open.
Memory Hog problem (Score:2)
Nothing new (Score:2)
This has been available for years as an extension. First The Great Suspender I think it was called; then when that was co-opted by crooks, the Marvelous Suspender I think it's called.
Next Google needs to fix session restoration if a crash.