If your Mac has been feeling sluggish and you use Google Chrome, there's a good chance the two are connected. Chrome is powerful and popular, but it has an unusual relationship with your Mac's RAM (RAM is the temporary workspace your Mac uses to hold whatever is currently running).
The reason Chrome is hungry by design is worth understanding quickly, because it changes how you fix it.
Why does Chrome use so much memory on Mac?
Most apps run as a single process: one app, one block of memory. Chrome does something different. It runs each tab as a completely separate process, as though each tab were its own small application. This is a security feature called Site Isolation: if one tab is compromised, it cannot read the data from another tab because they're isolated from each other in memory.
It's a genuinely good design from a security standpoint. But the cost is memory. A typical Chrome tab uses somewhere between 100 and 500 MB of RAM. If you have twenty tabs open, that's easily 2 to 4 GB of your Mac's memory taken up by Chrome alone, before you've opened any other app.
Add your installed extensions on top, and each of those runs its own background script on every page you load. Ten extensions visiting ten tabs means a hundred small scripts running in parallel.
This is why Chrome can make a Mac feel slow even when the Mac itself has plenty of RAM. Freeing up RAM on a Mac in general involves quitting apps and clearing processes; with Chrome the situation is a bit more specific, and there are targeted steps that help more.
How do I check Chrome's memory usage?
Before making changes, it helps to see what you're dealing with. There are two ways:
Chrome's own task manager: In Chrome, click the three-dot menu in the top-right corner, choose More Tools, then Task Manager. This shows you exactly how much memory each individual tab and extension is using inside Chrome.
macOS Activity Monitor: Press Command-Space, type "Activity Monitor", press Return. Click the Memory tab. Sort by the Memory column. Chrome will typically appear several times in the list because of its multi-process design; add up all the "Google Chrome" entries to get the total. See how to use Activity Monitor on Mac for a longer walkthrough.
Either way, you'll quickly see why Chrome sits at the top of the list. Now let's actually reduce it.
How do I reduce Chrome's memory step-by-step?
Step 1. Enable Memory Saver in Chrome settings
This is the single most impactful change you can make, and most people haven't done it. Chrome includes a built-in feature called Memory Saver that puts inactive tabs to sleep, freeing the RAM they were using.
How to turn it on:
- In Chrome, click the three-dot menu in the top right.
- Choose Settings.
- Click Performance in the left sidebar (or type
chrome://settings/performancedirectly into the address bar and press Return). - Turn on Memory Saver.
Once enabled, Chrome will automatically put tabs you haven't clicked in a while into a dormant state. A small sleeping icon appears on the tab. Clicking the tab wakes it up and reloads it. You don't lose the tab; it just isn't actively using memory while you're not looking at it.
For most people with twenty-plus tabs open, this alone can cut Chrome's memory usage in half.
Step 2. Audit your extensions and disable ones you don't use
Extensions are useful, but most people accumulate them over time and forget what they installed. Each extension runs a background script on every page you open, adding to Chrome's memory footprint.
How:
- Click the three-dot menu, choose Extensions, then Manage Extensions.
- Go through the list and toggle off anything you don't recognise or haven't used in months.
- If you're not sure whether you need something, disable it rather than remove it. You can always re-enable it later.
Pay particular attention to extensions that claim to "enhance" websites you don't frequently visit. A coupon finder, a defunct password manager from a job you left, a translation tool for a language you no longer study: these all use memory on every page you open, even when they're doing nothing.
Step 3. Close tabs you haven't touched in over an hour
Even with Memory Saver enabled, you can help Chrome by being a bit more deliberate about what you keep open. If you haven't clicked a tab in the last hour, ask yourself whether you actually need it. Bookmark it if you do, then close it.
Twenty fewer tabs can free 1 to 2 GB of RAM, even accounting for Memory Saver already handling some of those tabs. The habit of keeping tabs as a to-do list is common; a proper bookmark or a notes app is a more memory-efficient way to park things for later.
Should I switch to Safari?
Honestly, sometimes, yes. Safari uses substantially less memory than Chrome for the same browsing. Apple has optimised it tightly for macOS and for Apple Silicon (the M-series chips in Macs from 2020 onwards). For basic reading, email, watching videos, and shopping, Safari handles it all while using a fraction of Chrome's memory.
That said, I understand why people stay on Chrome. If you have Chrome extensions you depend on, or certain web apps that behave better in Chrome, switching entirely isn't realistic. But using Safari for tasks that don't need Chrome and keeping Chrome for the things that do is a reasonable split that makes a real difference.
Step 4. Try Safari for tasks that don't need a Chrome-specific extension
This doesn't require committing to Safari as your only browser. Just try opening a new Safari window for reading, news, or anything that doesn't depend on a Chrome extension. Let Chrome focus on the tabs that actually need it.
On an Apple Silicon Mac, Safari also handles video more efficiently and uses less battery doing it, which is a side benefit worth mentioning.
Step 5. Quit Chrome entirely at the end of your session
Closing the Chrome window is not the same as quitting Chrome. When you click the red dot to close the last window, Chrome typically keeps running in the background. All its processes, all its extensions, all its memory: still loaded. The Dock icon might still show a dot underneath it.
To actually free Chrome's memory: with Chrome active, press Command-Q. Or right-click the Chrome icon in the Dock and choose Quit. This tells every Chrome process to shut down and hand its memory back to macOS.
If you're not actively using Chrome, quitting it is the single biggest memory release available to you. It's worth doing at the end of your working day as a habit.
What if reducing Chrome's memory isn't enough?
Sometimes you've done all of the above and your Mac still feels heavy. A few things to consider:
Check what else is running. Chrome might not be the only culprit. Slack, Microsoft Teams, Spotify, and Notion all use several hundred megabytes each. See the common reasons Macs slow down for a broader view.
Watch the Memory Pressure graph. In Activity Monitor, there's a graph at the bottom of the Memory tab called Memory Pressure. If it's green, your Mac is fine even if the numbers look large. If it's consistently yellow or red, that's the signal that your Mac is genuinely struggling. See what memory pressure on Mac actually means for more on reading that graph.
Check with Apple's own guidance. Apple has a page on checking whether your Mac needs more RAM that's worth a read if you're regularly hitting the red zone.
Step 6. Use a memory tool like Shiny to clear what Chrome leaves behind
Even after quitting Chrome with Command-Q, small helper processes sometimes linger. macOS is usually good at cleaning these up, but not always immediately. A menu-bar app like Shiny closes those orphaned processes and asks macOS to release any memory that hasn't been fully given back yet.
Disclosure: I make Shiny, so take this with appropriate scepticism. The steps above are all free, and doing them consistently will genuinely help. Shiny is useful if you find yourself running through the manual steps more than once a week and would rather have a single button do it. $4.99 once, no subscription.