How to Enable the Hidden Google Chrome Memory Saver Feature

Google Chrome is notoriously aggressive when it comes to consuming system memory. If you have 30 tabs open—even if you haven’t looked at half of them in hours—Chrome historically kept all of those pages active and rendering in the background, starving your operating system of RAM and causing your entire computer to lag.

To combat this, Google recently introduced a powerful “Memory Saver” mode. When enabled, this feature aggressively snoozes tabs you haven’t interacted with recently, freeing up gigabytes of memory for the active tab you are actually reading.

How to Enable Memory Saver

1. Open Google Chrome on your desktop or laptop.
2. Click the three-dot menu icon in the extreme top-right corner of the window.
3. Select Settings from the drop-down menu.
4. In the left-hand navigation sidebar, click on Performance.
5. Locate the toggle switch labeled Memory Saver.
6. Toggle the switch to the On position.

How to Whitelist Specific Websites

Memory Saver is highly effective, but it can be disruptive if it snoozes a background tab that is actively performing a task, such as uploading a massive video file to YouTube or rendering a complex web-based spreadsheet.

To prevent Chrome from ever putting a specific website to sleep, you must whitelist it.

1. Directly beneath the Memory Saver toggle, click the Add button next to the text “Always keep these sites active.”
2. A small pop-up box will appear. Type the domain name of the website (e.g., youtube.com or sheets.google.com).
3. Click Add.

Chrome will now strictly enforce the Memory Saver rules across your entire browser, except for the specific domains you have whitelisted, ensuring your critical background tasks are never interrupted.