Want to test your Mac’s fans (if your Mac has fans)? Download and launch Google’s Chrome browser for Mac and open a tab or two to start runnin’ hot!
Chrome is a very popular browser, but it’s also a serious drain on a Mac. It uses plenty of RAM and keeps the CPU humming. It’s bad enough that one of the best ways to speed up the performance of an older Mac is to switch from Chrome to Apple’s Safari browser.
Google is aware of the problem with its software, and it worked to make the macOS version of Chrome M89 less of a resource hog. The changes improve the way the browser handles web pages open in the background.
A new post on the Chromium blog says, “Chrome is also shrinking its memory footprint in background tabs on macOS, something we’ve been doing on other platforms for a while. We’re seeing up to 8% memory savings, which is more than 1GiB in some cases!”
“With more data from the field on tab throttling, we’re seeing up to 65% improvement on Apple Energy Impact score for tabs in the background, keeping your Mac cooler and those fans quiet,” Google says.
MacDailyNews Take: We have to use the Chrome browser to watch YouTube TV on our Macs, but that’s all we use it for because it’s such a resource hog. (Firefox also works for YouTube TV.)
To check for a Chrome update, go to Chrome > About Chrome and if an update is available, relaunch the app.