Recently we reported Chrome is getting a new Profile Picker interface and Ephemeral profiles. Google is now looking to make sure resources are freed up when a profile’s last window is closed. Generally, this happens when Chrome is closed completely.
If you use multiple profiles, when you use one profile, the non-active profile still consumes memory and other resources. When you close Chrome, they will be cleared. Instead of waiting for Chrome exit to happen, the Chromium team now ensures when a profile’s last browser window is closed, that profile will be destroyed immediately.
The resources saving feature is available behind a flag in Chrome 88 Canary.
Enable Chrome’s “Destroy profile on browser close” feature
To get started
- Launch Chrome
- Visit chrome://flags
- Search for “Destroy Profile on browser close”
- Click on the dropdown arrow and select “Enabled”
- Relaunch browser.
The chromium team has started to act on a bug submitted in 2011. The issue requests to shut down the profile immediately instead of hanging it till the closing of the Chrome browser.
Memory improvement can only be possible if you use multiple profiles. The feature or memory savings may not be necessarily applied to a single profile.
Recently, Edge has gained the Sleeping Tabs feature to save battery, memory, and CPU. So the battle is on between Chrome and Edge.
While Microsoft has claimed Segment Heap improves Edge memory usage, Google is yet to take a decision on enabling it again. But a healthy competition between Chrome and Edge browsers helps users to get a better browsing experience in either of them.
What’s your take on this? This change may keep your RAM happy to a little extent. Let us know in the comments below.
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