Chrome slow with too many tabs? Measure before closing

If Chrome on a Mac slows down once the tab strip fills up, the fix that works fastest is not closing tabs at random. Open Chrome's Task Manager, sort by Memory, and close or disable whatever is at the top. Then turn on Memory Saver so tabs left alone are put to sleep, and close finished tab groups instead of individual tabs so nothing is lost. If every number in Task Manager is small and the Mac is still sluggish, the problem is outside the browser, and Activity Monitor's Memory Pressure graph will say so. The rest of this page goes through each of those steps with the exact menu names, checked against Google's and Apple's help pages on October 18, 2026.

The four checks, in order

Most guides on this topic list a dozen tips with equal weight. In practice the checks have an order, because each one rules out a whole class of causes before the next.

Step	Where	What it tells you	Time
1. Task Manager	More menu, More tools, Task Manager	Which tab, extension or frame is heavy	1 minute
2. Memory Saver	Settings, Performance	Whether idle tabs are being put to sleep	30 seconds
3. Tab groups	Right-click a group, Close group	Whether finished work can leave the strip safely	1 minute
4. Activity Monitor	Memory tab, Memory Pressure	Whether the whole Mac is short of memory	1 minute

Doing them in this order matters. Turning on Memory Saver first can hide the real culprit, because the heavy tab is often one that Memory Saver will never touch, such as a tab playing audio or a page with a half filled form. Measuring first means every later change can be checked against a before number.

Step 1: find the heavy row in Task Manager

Google's own page, Speed up Google Chrome, gives the route: at the top right select More, then More tools, then Task Manager, and select "Memory" to sort tasks by memory usage. The same page adds a tip that is easy to skip: look for any items labeled "Background page." Those rows are extensions, not tabs, and they keep running whether or not any tab is open.

Once the list is sorted, read the names in the first five rows. They fall into a few kinds.

• Tab rows carry the page title. If these dominate, the original hunch is right and the number of open pages is the cause.
• Extension and background page rows carry an extension name. A single extension can outweigh many ordinary tabs, and closing tabs will not move it.
• Subframe rows belong to content from another site embedded in a page: a video player, a map, a chat widget, an analytics panel. One dashboard can produce several of them.
• GPU process is a single row for drawing. It grows with video, maps and constantly repainting pages, not with the raw number of tabs.

After that, sort by CPU as well. Memory and CPU often point at different rows. A large but idle page explains slowness when switching apps. A small page stuck in a loop explains a fan that will not stop.

To end a task, select it and choose End Process. Google's note on that page is worth repeating: any unsaved work in that task will be lost. For a mail draft or a form, finish it first.

Extensions are switched off from More, then Extensions, then Manage Extensions. Turn off one suspect, reopen Task Manager, and compare. Measuring twice is quicker than guessing, because the expensive extension is rarely the one that looks expensive.

Step 2: set Memory Saver so idle tabs stop costing memory

Chrome already has a setting that deactivates tabs that have not been used for a while. It is in More, then Settings, then Performance, under the name Memory Saver. According to Google's page Personalize Chrome performance, there are three levels:

• Moderate. Tabs become inactive after a longer period of time.
• Balanced (recommended). Tabs become inactive after an optimal period of time.
• Maximum. Tabs become inactive after a shorter period of time.

An inactive tab reloads when it is opened again. That is the trade: memory is returned, and the price is a short reload the next time the tab is used.

The same page lists what stops a tab from being deactivated, and this list explains most cases where "Memory Saver is on but Chrome is still heavy":

• Active audio or video, including calls
• Screen share
• Page notifications
• Active downloads
• Partially filled forms
• Pinned tabs
• Connected devices over USB or Bluetooth

Pinned tabs are the one most people miss. Pinning mail and chat feels tidy, and it also exempts those tabs from deactivation for good. If the heaviest rows in Task Manager are pinned tabs, Memory Saver will never touch them, no matter which level is selected.

Two more settings on the same pages help with measuring. On a Mac, Settings, then Appearance, has "Show memory usage on tab hover preview card." With it on, hovering over a tab shows how much memory that page holds, which makes the guessing step unnecessary. Back in Performance, "Always keep these sites active" is the exclusion list for sites that must never sleep, for example a web based phone or a dashboard that has to stay live. Every site added there is a site Memory Saver gives up on, so it is worth keeping short.

Energy Saver, also under Performance, is a different tool. Google's page says it works only when the device is unplugged or the battery is low, and does not turn on when the device is plugged in. On a desktop Mac or a plugged in laptop it will not help with tab load.

Step 3: close whole tab groups instead of single tabs

Many people keep forty tabs open because closing them feels like losing work. Chrome's tab groups solve that specific fear. Google's page Use tabs in Chrome describes the steps: right-click a tab, choose Add tab to group, then New group or an existing group. Right-clicking the colored circle or the name of the group lets it be renamed and given a color.

The useful part is closing. Right-click the group and choose Close group. Google states that a closed group is not deleted. It is saved in the bookmarks bar or in the menu, and can be opened again from More, then Tab groups. To make sure groups show up in the bookmarks bar, turn on "Show tab groups in bookmarks bar" under Settings, then Appearance.

That changes the habit. Instead of closing tabs one by one and worrying about each, finish a piece of work, close its group, and reopen the group when the work comes back. The pages stop using memory and the set of pages is not lost.

Two details are worth knowing before relying on this:

• Close group and Delete group are different commands. Delete group removes it on the device and on other devices signed in with the same Google Account.
• Ungroup also deletes the group on the device and on synced devices, while leaving the tabs open.

Groups work best for project tabs that come and go. They are a poor fit for the tools that are open all day, which leads to the last check.

Step 4: check whether the Mac itself is out of memory

If Task Manager shows nothing unusual and the Mac is still slow, open Activity Monitor and click Memory. Apple's guide View memory usage in Activity Monitor explains that Memory Pressure is determined by free memory, swap rate, wired memory and file cached memory, and that Swap Used is space on the startup disk being used to move data to and from RAM.

The figure to read is the color of the graph, not the amount of free memory. Apple's page Check if your Mac needs more RAM gives the three readings:

• Green: the Mac is using all of its RAM efficiently.
• Yellow: the Mac might eventually need more RAM.
• Red: the Mac needs more RAM.

The same page notes that free or unused memory does not necessarily improve performance, because macOS manages all of the memory on purpose. A low free memory number with a green graph is normal.

If the graph is yellow or red, sort Activity Monitor's Memory column and see whether Chrome is actually the largest item. Sometimes it is a video editor, a virtual machine, or a set of chat apps, and no amount of tab tidying in Chrome will change the color.

What each result means

What the checks showed	What helps	What does not
Background page or extension near the top	Turn the extension off in Manage Extensions	Closing tabs
One page with many subframes	Close or reload that page	Closing other tabs
Many tab rows, mostly idle	Memory Saver at Balanced or Maximum, close finished groups	Removing extensions
Heavy rows are pinned tabs	Unpin them or move them out of the strip	Raising the Memory Saver level
High CPU, modest memory	Pause video, close the page that refreshes itself	Freeing memory
Memory Pressure yellow or red, Chrome not the largest	Quit the heavier app	Changing Chrome settings
Every number low, still feels slow	Reduce how many tabs must be searched by eye	Any setting change

The last row is common. With forty favicons the same size, the delay is often the few seconds spent finding the right tab. That is a real cost, but it is not a memory problem, which is why it survives every settings change.

Why the strip fills up again within a week

After a cleanup, the strip almost always refills. The reason is what survives the cleanup. Search results, articles and one-off documents are easy to close. Mail, calendar, chat, the project tracker and the notes tool are never closed, because they are used all day. Those are also the tabs most likely to be pinned, to hold notifications, and to stay active, so they are exactly the ones Memory Saver leaves alone.

So the strip holds two kinds of things at once: permanent tools and temporary pages. Tab groups handle the temporary pages well. For the permanent tools, a common answer is to take them out of the browser strip altogether. Chrome's own option, described in Use web apps, is More, then Cast, save, and share, then Install page as app, which gives the site its own window outside the tab strip. Another option is an app aggregation browser, which gives each web app its own window and its own signed in session, so mail and chat no longer sit in the same row as forty research tabs. The Features page lists what that kind of browser includes, and the Supported apps page shows which services are set up ready to add.

For people deciding between products of that type, the Ferdium comparison lays out free plan limits and platform differences without needing to install anything.

What to change first

Open Task Manager, sort by Memory, and deal with the top row before touching anything else. Then set Memory Saver to Balanced, unpin anything that does not need to stay awake, and close finished work as tab groups. If the heavy tabs turn out to be the everyday tools, move them out of the strip; SpaceDeck does this on a free plan with one workspace and up to three apps.