Chrome Faster is that web browser that’s been on the rise since its release in 2008. It’s so on the rise that it seems to threaten the Internet Explorer dominance in the market share. Right now.. its market usage share chunk stands at 17.64%. But… for many people, it’s best but with a great drawback! Which, as you might have guessed, is about its memory hogging issue. Chrome hogs memory (aka RAM) like no other computer program. Sure, it’s fast and pretty good at user experience, but its memory hogging problem is one that sashes a lot of its potential users. This has also been the most complained thing about Google Chrome – that Chrome eats memory as if it is in infinite supply.
But it doesn’t do so without a good reason. Here’s a why Google Chrome uses so much memory? In short, Chrome creates a separate process for each of the active tabs, extensions, plugins and active theme. This intelligent organization is so that when one of the plugins like Flash crashes, not all tabs are affected.
Although there have been many improvements and the team behind Chrome has been rolling its sleeves up to fix the problem, the problem as of this time, persists. So is there any solution to this problem? Any tweaks to at least reduce memory usage of Chrome?
Yes, there is.
Presenting The Great Suspender & Chrome Faster
It reduces the memory hogging so much that, I have personally found an improvement of 95% in memory. Yeah, the fact is I have suffered from memory eating problem of Chrome myself for quite a while until I came across The Great Suspender. The Great Suspender is a neat Chrome extension that suspends tabs that have been inactive for a specified amount of time.
So how it works?
- Install The Great Suspender.
- It will work by itself via default configuration. Now.. once it’s installed, the open tabs that have been inactive and not toggled to for a specified amount of time will be suspended. The suspended tabs do not eat any memory; inactive tabs are automatically suspended as well as manually, it’s up to you which tabs you want to suspend manually.
- Suspended tabs are retained if the browser window is shut down directly. Upon restoring, these tabs will be retained but are not reloaded altogether. You click anywhere in the tab to unsuspend it.
- To manually suspend, unsuspend a tab, just right-click or click the extension’s icon. You can even tell it to bulk suspend or unsuspend tabs. More than anything, you can whitelist certain addresses. The Great Suspender won’t suspender whitelisted addresses make sure the Chrome Faster will be increasing.
By default, pinned tabs are not suspended. To pin a tab, just right-click the tab and select “Pin tab”.
Awesome, right?