I stopped Google Chrome from slowing down my laptop by changing this one setting
Android Police 2026-06-29 13:30:11
Context: The author, Rahul Naskar, a tech journalist with eight years of experience covering Android, was experiencing issues with Google Chrome slowing down his laptop due to excessive memory usage. He had been using Chrome since its introduction but started looking for alternatives when he switched to a laptop for daily use. The laptop's limited resources made Chrome's memory-hogging issue more noticeable, prompting Naskar to seek a solution.
Key Facts
- The author's laptop would slow down significantly when he had multiple tabs open in Chrome, especially with resource-intensive content like YouTube videos, graphic design web apps, and text-heavy articles with ads.
- Google Chrome introduced a feature called Memory saver in 2023, which deactivates inactive tabs to free up memory and prevent the browser from slowing down the laptop.
- To enable Memory saver, users can navigate to Chrome's settings, select Performance, and toggle on the Memory saver feature, which automatically chooses a balanced memory savings option by default.
- The Memory saver feature has three options: Balanced, Moderate, and Maximum, allowing users to customize how often tabs become inactive, with the Balanced option providing a middle ground between memory savings and tab accessibility.
- By enabling Memory saver, the author noticed a significant improvement in his laptop's performance, no longer experiencing slowdowns or having to restart his PC due to Chrome's excessive memory usage.