Google Chrome could detect websites that are bogging down performance - and deal with them

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Google has a potential change inbound for Chrome to further help cure the browser of its reputation for resource hogging, whereby it'll detect websites that are draining resources and flag them up to you.

This change is only in testing for Chrome right now, in the Canary builds, as spotted by regular leaker Leopeva64 on X.

As you can see in the animated GIF in the above tweet, Chrome picks up on tabs that are consuming too much in the way of resources. These are brought to your attention in a pop-up panel, and to improve performance, you're offered the chance for Chrome to make them all inactive. You can do so simply by clicking the 'Fix now' button, or alternatively, you can dismiss the warning - or you can individually close some of the offenders, picking and choosing which sites are for the chop.

For those who might not be keen on any kind of pop-up intruding on their browsing experience, note that Leopeva64 has previously observed an option to turn off performance issue alerts in Chrome - including this latest initiative. That toggle is also in testing, as you might expect (and was spotted in a Canary build at the start of July).

As far as we're concerned, this looks like a very welcome bit of performance monitoring and streamlining, or it will be if Google brings the tweak to fruition. As ever, changes in testing - especially early testing - may not make the cut for the final release version of the web browser.

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