If something has always characterized Google Chrome is its high consumption of resources. As we use the browser, it keeps more and more data in its memory. And, in the end, everything means that the browser starts to slow down, until it becomes impossible to continue browsing normally.
When Google Chrome is slow, the best we can do is close it and reopen it. However, this process, although it is fast, makes us lose everything we have open, having to restore the session (something that does not always work well). And it can waste more time than it should.
Luckily, Google Chrome hides a function that allows us to restart the browser in a second , closing the instance and reopening it, recovering the session, and all the open pages, just as we had them. That’s how it works.
chrome: // restart, the useful and unknown hidden function
When we notice that the browser is slow, to recover its original speed, all we have to do is open a new tab (or we can do it in the current tab, without problems) and execute the following quick command:
chrome://restart
When you press Enter, all browser windows will close, and will instantly reopen. In a second we will resume the navigation at the point where we had it at the time of executing said command. All the tabs will be loaded (although refreshed) and we can continue browsing as before. Some tabs, yes, will remain in the background until we open them to save resources, and the scripts that were running will be terminated, freeing the CPU of that load. If a tab had been locked, after restarting it will be unlocked again, and it will not give problems.
We should not confuse this function with “resetting” the browser. When executing restart we only close and reopen the browser in an instant, but we will not lose any configuration or the data saved in it.
Other ways to optimize and speed up Google Chrome
This previous trick can help us to troubleshoot and free up some resources when Chrome goes over RAM and CPU usage, but it doesn’t work miracles either. Despite the fact that Google has greatly optimized and improved the performance of the browser with its latest updates, it still leaves a lot to be desired. Especially in mid-range or low-end PCs.
Therefore, if our CP has limited power, and we want to improve the general performance of Google Chrome a bit, we can resort to some tricks such as the following:
- Uninstall the extensions that we do not need. And if we can uninstall them all, the better.
- Have few tabs open at a time.
- Clear cookies, cache and temporary.
- Reset the browser to its factory settings.
- Try extensions like The Great Discarder to suspend tabs.
- Enable hardware acceleration and background boot.
Finally, if our Chrome continues to run very slowly, it may be time to try another browser. We are not going to recommend making the leap to another browser such as Edge or Firefox, since they all sin, to a greater or lesser extent, the same. But we can look for a lightweight browser for Windows that gives us the best possible performance.
