Google Chrome has long been accused of being a memory hog, but it looks like the browser may be trying to change its ways. A new feature found in its latest Beta seeks to free up RAM, and it's available for testing now on Mac, Windows, Linux, Chrome OS and Android.
Found by Chrome Story, a new feature named "Skip best effort tasks" aims to reduce background task processes. The notes for the feature, which is hidden in the latest build of Chrome Canary state "With this flag on, tasks of the lowest priority will not be executed until shutdown. The queue of low priority tasks can increase memory usage."
After you enable this feature, you'll see a slightly ominous note reading "Stability and security will suffer." Specifically, the note states "it is expected that some non-visible operations such as writing user data to disk, cleaning caches, reporting metrics or updating components won't be performed until shutdown."
But, dear reader, if you feel ready for the risk, here's how to enable Skip best effort tasks in Chrome.
2. Open the googlechrome.dmg installer file.
3. Drag and drop Chrome Canary to Applications to install it.
4. Open Chrome Canary.
5. Navigate to chrome://flags/#disable-best-effort-tasks
6. Click Disabled.
7. Click Enabled.
8. Click Relaunch Now.
You're now testing Chrome's memory freeing Skip best effort tasks tool. Best of luck!
Looking to learn more about Chrome? Check out our guide to Chrome's dark mode and other themes.
