Google introduced its Memory Saver to Chrome in early 2023, but the company isn’t done improving it with subsequentChrome releases. Once turned on, the feature automatically freezes background tabs you haven’t opened in a while, leaving them visible in your tab bar to give you quick access to reload them when needed. With Chrome Canary 116, we can look forward to some much-needed visual improvements.
As spotted by prolificChrome sleuth @Leopeva64, the card that appears below a tab that you hover on will give you some more information when it’s snoozed. Specifically, you will be able to see how much RAM exactly Chrome saved by freezing the tab in question. The small but welcome tweak makes it clearer how exactly Chrome’s Memory Saver works all without having to dig into any extra menus.
Google is additionally working on adding this same information to the Memory Saver badge that appears in the address bar when a frozen tab is activated again. Here, Google is looking to add a pseudo graph that is meant to depict if the amount of memory you saved is a lot or not. While this graphical depiction is arguably more useful for the average browser user than the raw MB savings, the addition to the hover card still gives yousomeinformation that’s easily glanced at.
Meanwhile, the grayed out icons for inactive tabs that you can see is another interface tweak that Google is working on to make Memory Saver’s workings more transparent. You can check out all of these changes in Chrome Canary by flipping on thechrome://flags/#memory-saver-savings-reporting-improvementsflag.
