Google Chrome is a resource-hungry app and that trait is unknown to none. On top of that, we tend to keep a million tabs on the browser, further escalating the situation. Due to such high resource usage and multiple extensions and tab working in the background, many times Chrome occupies all the free RAM available on your computer which makes the other programs suffer.

Fortunately, you can enable the ‘Memory Saver’ feature on Chrome, which will help you reduce RAM usage and your computer’s resource footprint.

What Exactly is Memory Saver in Chrome?

The Memory Saver feature in Chrome helps you reduce the RAM by deactivating inactive tabs. It then automatically reloads the inactive tabs when you access them. This not only helps other browser tabs to access more RAM to provide you with a smoother experience, but it also helps other programs to run smoother and better.

Since less RAM will be used, battery-operated devices will also be able to save some amount of battery due to less power strain. The feature is available in Chrome version 110 or higher, so make sure to update your browser first.

Memory Saver, along with the Energy Saver feature, will make Chrome a much more efficient browser. According to Google, the combination of these features will lead to up to 40% and 10 GB less memory usage on behalf of Chrome.

Tab Activities that Prevent them from being Deactivated

Though if you wish to save maximum memory you need to keep a few things in mind as some activities will prevent the tabs from getting deactivated. For your convenience, below is a list:

  • Audio or Video (Playback or call)
  • Screen sharing
  • Active downloads from the website
  • Forms that have been filled partially.
  • USB or Bluetooth devices interacting with the website
  • Website notifications

Toggle Memory Saver On or Off in Chrome

From the browser’s Home Screen, click on the ‘ellipsis’ icon and click on the ‘Settings’ option.

After that, click on the ‘Performance’ tab from the left sidebar.

If you are here to disable the feature, click on the toggle to disable it.

Otherwise to enable the feature, click the toggle to enable the ‘Memory Saver’ feature on the browser.

You can add specific websites, domains, and sub-domains to the whitelist. Once added, tabs with those websites will always remain active. So, if you wanted to disable the feature because it was interfering with some important websites, you can keep it enabled and add those websites to the whitelist instead.

To do so, click on the ‘Add’ button. This will bring up an overlay window on your screen.

Now, to exclude specific domains and sub-domains, you can enter just the hostname. For instance, you can type google.com in the provided space and it will exclude all the google sub-domain websites such as drive.google.com, calendar.google.com, etc.

You can also exclude specific domains but not their sub-domains, just include a dot (.) before the hostname in the URL. For instance, if you enter .google.com it will prevent the deactivation of the www.google.com, but will deactivate all the subdomains like forms.google.com, mail.google.com, etc.

To exclude any specific subdirectory from deactivation, you can include the complete URL path to it. For instance, www.google.com/news prevents all the news-related tabs from being deactivated. However, the main Google pages (www.google.com) will still be deactivated.

You can also use wildcards in the URL to disable the deactivation for all the matches. For example, you can enter www.youtube.com/watch?v=* and it will disable the deactivation of YouTube videos playing in the background.

Also note, you cannot have wildcards placed anywhere in the URL but at specific places. Wildcards placed in the hostname or even in the substring will not match and won’t prevent the deactivation of the pages. For instance, *oogle.com or www.google.com/* will not prevent any deactivation of the tab.

There you go, people. Using the Memory Saver feature of Google Chrome is a very simple and straightforward process. Hopefully, now Chrome will shed its reputation of being a memory hog.