After pulling the plug on uBlock Origin, leaving millions of users susceptible to intrusive ads, Google is making headlines with yet another Chrome-related announcement. Fortunately, this time around it’s something positive.
The new Performance Detection tool promises to identify potential performance issues and offer solutions to address these problems. Basically, whenever Chrome detects that your browsing experience degrades, it will pop up a notification that you can click to, hopefully, fix the problem.
The “Performance issue alert” notification only appears if Chrome detects and issues. Simply click “Fix now” to improve your browsing experience. This usually means that Chrome will disable some of the tabs that you have opened in order to speed up the current one.
It’s important to mention that the Performance Detection tool will let you know in advance what tabs are using extra resources. Once you click “Fix now,” the browser will deactivate those tabs.
Thankfully, you can manage performance manually and completely disable the Performance Detection feature in Settings.
Chrome’s new Performance issue alert notification | Image credit: Google
Another improvement added to Chrome is related to the Memory Saver. This is meant to make your browser faster by freeing up memory from inactive tabs. The latest Chrome update adds three new Memory Saver modes: Moderate, Balanced and Maximum.
With Moderate mode enabled, only tabs based on your system’s needs will be deactivated, while Balanced mode considers both the user’s browsing habits and system needs. Finally, the newly added Maximum mode deactivates tabs after the user stops using them more quickly than the other two modes.
The new modes can be enabled/disabled from the Settings menu in Chrome. Just make sure to select “Performance” to be able to access whichever you think it’s more useful for you.
Besides the Performance Detection tool and Memory Saver modes, Google also added a few more personalization options for the performance controls. You’ll now be able to specify websites that should always remain active, as well as turn on/off the visual indicators for inactive tabs and memory usage in tab hovercards.
