You may have noticed recently that the tab icons on your Chrome browser have circles around them and the icon itself is smaller and slightly faded. What’s this all about – and can I change them back?
According to Google, Chrome’s recent Memory Saver feature, “automatically frees memory from tabs you haven’t used in a while.” Circular tab icons indicate which tabs are currently inactive. To activate them again you just have to click on them.
I tend to use a lot of tabs during a work day – and I’m sure a lot of our readers do too. Some of those tabs just sit there until I need them, and others are completely forgotten about until I decide it’s time to do a little house cleaning. Meanwhile, each of those tabs represents a webpage, and each of those pages takes up memory – so if I get too excited about my tab collection, it can start to slow things down.
This has been a long-term problem for Chrome, so Google has come up with a solution – or, at least, an improvement. Memory Saver dictates that if a tab is not used for a period of time, it becomes inactive, and the memory it might have used is freed. You can see how much memory there is by hovering your cursor over the tab.
If you click on the tab, it will become active again, although it may take a second or two to load completely.
If you find this annoying, you can turn off Memory Saver by going to the three-dot menu icon in the top right corner of Chrome Settings > Display > Memory Saver, You can either turn it off completely or keep it on and create a list of sites you want to always keep active.
Incidentally, another major Chromium-based browser, Microsoft Edge, has had this feature for some time. If you are an Edge user, you can go to Settings > System & displayAnd in the section it is called optimize performanceYou can turn on or off the ability to put inactive tabs “to sleep”, to fade those sleeping tabs, and to choose which sites should remain active.