I’ve uncovered a little-known Google Chrome tool that could speed up your broadband – try it now for instant boost

THERE’S nothing worse than slow internet.

But sometimes it’s your device performance that makes your broadband seem like it’s moving at a snail pace.

A tab using too much memory can slow your machine down

If you’ve got too many apps open this will affect how fast your phone or PC will work.

Similarly, having loads of tabs open can have an impact.

It’s easily done when you see something useful you want to come back to.

Before you know it, you have a heap of tabs sucking up your gadget’s power and RAM.

But if you’re wondering which tab is consuming the most, Google Chrome has a little-known trick to tell you.

Unfortunately it’s only available on computers, so you can’t do it on Android or iPhone.

If you hover over the tab, it tells you the memory usage.

A “good” memory usage is around 200MB.

Anything significantly above that may be slowing down your machine.

In which case, you should close the tab and you may notice a boost to your device’s speed.

Inactive tabs

If you’re especially guilty of leaving loads of tabs open there is another way to free up memory.

There’s a setting in Chrome that essentially pauses inactive tabs.

When Chrome notices you haven’t touched a tab for a while it kicks in automatically.

And when you want to use it again, the tab will reactivate again.

To switch it on, type chrome://settings/performance in the address bar.

From there, switch on Memory saver.

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