Google’s Chrome browser is largely thought of as a rather snappy browser, and despite people’s own personal experiences with it, across the board this is generally the case. Chrome has always been a RAM hog though and this alone is enough to have turned some people off from using it. A new feature which the Chromium development team is testing may be able to attack this issue though. According to Google’s Francois Beaufort, the new feature can be found and accessed via the Canary build of the browser, and then by enabling the “Site Engagement Service” flag. Keep in mind this is an experimental feature at this point and there’s no guarantee it will even make it to a stable version of Chrome.
To access it, make sure you’re using Chrome Canary, then type up chrome://flags in the address bar to see all the experimental functions. Scroll to find the Site Engagement Service, enable it, then type up chrome://site-engagement to see the internal debug page and have a look at how much you’re engaging with specific sites. These measured scores would essentially allow Chrome to divide up resources to all the websites that are requesting them including things like battery life and disk space, which could result in an overall lower usage of RAM.
Since the feature can only be accessed in Chrome Canary at this time, users who don’t fancy being part of the bleeding edge environment will still have to make do with how resources are allocated currently. If things go well with the feature then Google will pass things on to the Dev Channel and eventually the beta channel of Chrome, and if it makes it that far then soon enough Chrome stable will end up seeing the integration. This is certainly an interesting way to get Chrome to better spend the resources of your computer, one that many users likely are hoping will make it to the version of the Google’s browser that the majority of its users have installed and interact with on a daily basis. Whether or not that happens is up to Google.