Google Chrome And Reduce RAM Usage with New feature Tab Freezing

Google Chrome is without a doubt one of the biggest memory hogs on Windows, and the more you use it, the more RAM it eats up on your device. Google is testing a new feature for Chrome that lets the browser 'freeze' tabs that have been running in the background to free up memory.

Google knows it very well that Chrome needs better resource management and, in fact, the company has already released several tools to help reduce the impact it has on system performance. The new feature, Tab Freeze, works in a similar way, but gives you more control over when background tabs are suspended, and for how long.

Back in 2015, for example, Google rolled out a feature whose purpose was specifically to improve the way the browser allocates resources for each running tab, eventually being able to step in and cut tabs that require too much RAM.

This new feature is part of the latest Canary build, and you can give it a try by enabling it from the flags screen.

Tab Freeze is available to test in Chrome 79 Canary. To give it a try, visit chrome://flags/#proactive-tab-freeze and select one of the options from the drop-down menu. These are:

- Default (off)
- Enabled (unused tabs are frozen after five minutes)
- Enabled freeze – no unfreeze (tabs won't unfreeze until clicked)
- Enabled freeze – unfreeze for 10 seconds every 15 minutes
- Disabled

Enabling the flag means Google Chrome will automatically freeze the tabs that have been inactive in the background for 5 minutes, while the third option lets the browser freeze them without unfreezing at a later time.

Once this feature is enabled and running on your device, you can see the current status of the tabs and manually freeze or unfreeze tabs by typing the following code in the Chrome address bar:

The next stable version of the browser is Google Chrome 78, and it is projected to ship to supported platforms later this year.