Is Chrome using too much memory on Mac? Try these tips

If you explore the internet frequently and use different browsers for that activity, you will know that Chrome can make an intensive use of your resources. You can check this by using the Activity Monitor on your Mac; Chrome is likely to be on top of the list.

Let’s try to understand why Chrome uses so much memory on Mac. Back in the days, Chrome had a reputation for using too much RAM, however, recent changes to Chrome have resulted in an improved memory usage over other browsers such as Mozilla, Edge, Opera, or Safari. In recent tests, Chrome appeared right in the middle when it comes to performance, however there is evidence that Chrome uses more RAM than other browsers. It is one of the fastest solutions out there, but it needs a lot of RAM for that.

In order to allow you to browse seamlessly and make use of all the different extensions available for Chrome, it requires an extensive use of CPU and RAM resources. When the browser gets slow, we know what is happening in the backend, there are background apps feeding off RAM resources, as well as extensions or any active tabs, plus all the data exchange that happens in the background.
Don’t worry, there are ways and tips you can take into account to speed up your Chrome browser.

1. Carry out a smart restart. Doing this will refresh Chrome whilst keeping all of your tabs untouched, and you can even add this command as a bookmark so that you can speed it up in one click. You simply need to run “chrome://restart”.
2. Disable hardware acceleration. Even if you might think this will do the opposite, you’re wrong. When you disable acceleration, your Chrome will become faster and load things quicker. You just need to go to Settings, then click on Advanced / System and side the toggle left to deactivate hardware acceleration.
3. Maintain your Mac clean from system junk, as browsing data will build up and cause Chrome to slow down over time. These are temporary files, cache and broken items. If you clean these items, you will help improve system performance. Remember to keep your system clean almost every single day because this is one of the best ways of improving your system performance and reducing the use of RAM by Chrome browser.

On top of that, you may notice that Chrome uses a lot of battery power. This can be due to Chrome being out of date, having many tabs open or unwanted processes in the background or system junk weighing down performance. If you wish to help Chrome use less battery, you can try doing the following:

1. Make sure you use the last version of Chrome
2. Do not keep many tabs open at the same time
3. Stop any unwanted processes using the Task Manager
4. Use Page Prefetch to open pages faster
5. Find heavy memory consumers on Mac

Using these simple tips, you will manage to speed up the performance of your Chrome browser.