Chrome has a reputation as the app that quietly eats every gigabyte of RAM on your laptop. According to a report from Engadget published Sunday, that reputation is mostly folklore, the same kind of recycled joke that keeps Microsoft Edge tagged as slow and outdated long after both claims stopped being accurate.
The core argument: Chrome does use a lot of memory, but that's because of how the modern web works, not because the browser is careless. Websites in 2026 behave more like apps than static pages, and Chrome is expected to keep dozens of tabs and extensions ready to go instantly. To do that, browser makers choose between sharing memory across tabs to save RAM, or giving each site its own process to keep things fast and stable. Chrome picks the second option.
Why separate processes matter
Giving every website its own slot in memory isn't just about speed. It means one crashed tab doesn't take down the other twenty you had open, a problem anyone who browsed the web in the 2000s will remember. Chrome also sandboxes each site's process, so the operating system keeps them apart, making it harder for a malicious page to reach into whatever you have open in another tab, including your banking or email.
Engadget also pushes back on the instinct to treat low RAM usage as a virtue. Unused memory is wasted memory. PCMag's general guidance puts 8GB as enough for most everyday PCs, several times what a single browser actually needs, which leaves room for Chrome to use what's available rather than hold it back.
What to check if Chrome feels sluggish
The real warning sign isn't a high number, it's a number that keeps climbing on its own. That's a memory leak, where a program grabs memory and never releases it. Chrome's built-in Task Manager, opened with Shift + Esc, shows which tab or extension is responsible so you can close the offender rather than the whole browser.
Chrome also ships a feature called Memory Saver, which puts tabs you haven't touched in a while to sleep and reclaims the memory, reloading the page when you click back. It's available to everyone now, tucked into Settings under Performance, and you can exempt sites you want to keep active, like one streaming music in the background.
Rival browsers handle the same tradeoff differently. Microsoft Edge, built on the same Chromium base as Chrome, uses a similar process model but adds its own sleeping tabs and Energy Saver tools. Firefox instead groups tabs into fewer shared processes and unloads them when the system is short on memory. Neither approach eliminates the tradeoff between speed and memory use, it just shifts where the cost lands.
If Chrome still feels slow after checking Task Manager for a runaway tab, Engadget's advice is to look elsewhere, at a nearly full hard drive or a weak internet connection, before blaming the browser. Restarting Chrome remains the simplest first step.
SDFiled by The Software Desk
Apps, platforms, operating system releases, security fixes and the features arriving in them.
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