Google Chrome – Simple tip shows which tabs are slowing down your PC
Google’s Chrome is a popular web browser that’s hugely powerful.
As a result, it can sometimes slow down a computer but there is a simple hack to see how Chrome is performing and gets things running faster again.
The Chrome Task Manager is a way to manage the browser to best refine the experience for the maximum speed for you.
Opening lots of tabs is sometimes needed but that can chew through processing power. So which do you close? And how do you know if Extensions are eating up power? This guide will help you decide.
How to make Chrome faster
First up you’ll need to get the Chrome Task Manager open. This is easily done once the browser is open.
Select the Chrome menu in the top right that looks like three vertical dots and then pick the “More tools” option.
Then simply pick out the Task Manager to bring up the tool on the screen. This should open in a new pop-out window.
If on a Windows machine you can use a keyboard shortcut to open the Task Manager by pressing Shift + Esc.
This will then allow you to see and close tasks to save memory and gain speed. But how do you know which to pick?
How to speed up Chrome using Task Manager
The Chrome Task Manager will show you a list of tabs open as well as Extensions running and information about what they are using on your machine.
This information covers memory, CPU and network usage of each tab and Extension.
If you see any one particular tab or Extension is using up an inordinately large amount of memory, CPU or network then you can simply select it and select “End process”.
This will shut the tab or Extension and everything within it so be sure it’s nothing that needs to be saved before you kill the tab task.
To be sure you can right-click the task to get more information like private memory, image cache, shared memory, CSS cache, script cache, JavaScript memory and SQLite memory.
For Windows users, there is the option to select “Stats for Nerds” to get all the detailed metrics displayed.
Be sure to open the Chrome Task Manager when your computer slows down as often a crashed tab or Extension can be the cause and by closing that all the other tabs can be saved from a total restart.
If you’ve found this tip useful you can find more Chrome tricks here.