Google Chrome may be most people’s favorite browser, but it’s far from perfect. One of its biggest flaws is how much of your computer’s RAM it eats up.
Most laptops don’t come with a huge amount of RAM; once the allotted memory is full, the computer can’t process any more actions.
Each new tab that is opened in the browser will consume more RAM. In Chrome, 15 tabs can range from 1 GB to 2 GB of memory used, depending on the media content.
Take a look at how much memory your Chrome tabs and extensions by copying chrome://memory-redirect/ in your browser.
After doing a few tests with the same 15 tabs open in Mozilla Firefox, memory usage is 35 to 45% lower. Firefox appears to be a far more lightweight browser, a drastic improvement over older versions.
If you don’t want to switch from Chrome, try downloading one of the following Chrome extensions to help reduce memory usage. I would recommend downloading only one, as more extensions will use more RAM.
OneTab: Download for free.
Reducing the number of open tabs saves RAM. With the OneTab extension it doesn’t matter how many tabs you have open because OneTab converts all your open tabs into a single list, so those open tabs are merged into a single tab. Depending on how many scripts are running inside your tabs, moving them to OneTab can also speed up your computer by reducing the CPU load.
OneTab advertises saving up to 95% memory in Google Chrome; when I tested it, I didn’t get that good of a result, but still saved over 600 MBs of RAM with 15 tabs open.
The Great Suspender: Download for free.
The Great Suspender also helps reduce Chrome’s memory footprint but still lets you display your many tabs. This extension will unload, park, or suspend each tab while retaining its favicon and title text. A tab can be restored by clicking anywhere on the page when it is needed. This reduces the number of dom elements on the page and ensures no memory leaks or excessive javascripts are running. Your old computer can now handle as many tabs as you desire.
Tab Hibernation: Download for free.
Tab Hibernation does one thing and does it well: sends your tabs to sleep. It hibernates all tabs except the active tab. Your tabs won’t get lost and you can restore them with a single mouse click. It’s not as versatile as Great Suspender, but it’s less buggy.
Those are the extensions I tried out, and they all worked well in cutting down on memory usage. Let’s hope the next version of Chrome will be more lightweight and not so RAM greedy.
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