When Google opened the floodgates to deploy Chrome version 108 at the end of November, the web browser inherited two important new features: a power saving mode and a memory saving mode. These two new features, still in development at the time, were still being tested and were therefore not enabled by default in Chrome. Three months later, the Chrome development team seems to have finished working on both features as Google is rolling them out on Chrome 110.
Chrome now on a diet
To take advantage of these two new features, you must first check that your Chrome version is up to date. To do this, click in the main menu and then click About Chrome in the Help menu. The browser then automatically queries the Google servers to check the availability of an update. Energy Saver and Memory Saver, the two currently launched features, are available in Chrome 110.0.5481.104 (Windows) and Chrome 110.0.5481.100 (macOS).
Once the browser has refreshed and restarted, a new performance menu will be added to the menus that already exist in Chrome settings. When Chrome’s memory saver is active, the browser will automatically take care of freeing up the memory used by inactive tabs without you having to do anything. The browser should thereby gain speed, while the cooling system of your computer is less burdened. When a tab is frozen in this way, Chrome will display a small icon in the address bar to indicate that the tab is active again. A message also informs you of the amount of RAM that could have been freed while that tab was not used. However, you can configure exceptions for specific websites in the settings associated with this option.
By default, the power saving mode is activated as soon as the browser detects that the battery level of your laptop is less than or equal to 20% charge. If it’s not possible to set the charge level at which it triggers, you can only activate it when your computer is unplugged. Once activated, it takes care of reducing visual effects (flow when scrolling, frame rate in videos) as well as background activities to save battery life.
However, if your browser doesn’t already allow you to access these two features, you can manually force their integration into Chrome by enabling the appropriate flags. To do this, in the address bar of the browser you need to type chrome://flags/#battery-saver-mode-available to enable the energy saving flag and chrome://flags/#high-efficiency-mode- available to enable the enable memory saving mode.