Summary
- Chrome for desktop and mobile have different features, and the former has a task manager built-in.
- It can help with memory management and resource utilization, and was just updated with a new design.
- The new design has a tabbed interface, and is available in the Canary version for testing.
Google Chrome has dug its heels in as one of the best web browsers on Android, and the company is in a dominant position across operating systems. Chrome is immensely popular on desktop, just as it is on Android. However, the browsers are not built the same and the features aren’t the same across the board. The lack of extensions on Chrome for mobile stands out prominently, but the desktop version also gets an integrated task manager that’s just received a slight visual update.
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Chrome has earned a bit of infamy for resource-hungriness on computers, burdening the system with high RAM utilization as you open more tabs. You can hover on each tab in the tab bar to see its memory utilization, but the task manager paints a more holistic picture with CPU and network utilization as well. You can also use it to see all your active browser processes in one place, to kill off the power-hungry ones. To simplify memory management, Google also introduced Memory Saver last year.
The folks over at ChromeStory just spotted a new design for this task manager. Google seems to have added a search bar to look up specific tabs you might want to cull. Moreover, the processes have been categorized, and you can cycle between Tabs, Extensions, and Browser on the left side. You might also notice the prominent End task button is now placed above the scrollable table of active processes instead of underneath.
A minor but welcome change
The new design is simpler too
Old Chrome task manager (left); New Chrome task manager (right)
In our testing, we didn’t see the new task manager design in Chrome 132 stable or version 134 Canary either, even though ChromeStory notes that it is available on the latter. That leads us to conclude that there might be a limited test with a few users, or people in a specific region only. You could check if you have the new design for the task manager by installing Canary yourself, but be warned, it is usually unstable and new features still in development are locked behind flags you need to toggle manually.
In any case, Google usually expands testing for new features before their eventual release, so we will keep an eye out for this one. It would be a great asset to users who juggle between dozens of tabs, or developers like extension coders who build for Chrome given its market dominance.