Tech Tip: Tweaks To Speed Up Google Chrome

Most of you have probably heard of Google Chrome. There’s been some news about it recently with the Rich Notification Center and Google Now. This article will show you a few tips and tricks you can use to speed up Google Chrome. Some are hidden settings and some are regular ones that you might not know about. We don’t want to disable things like images and such because what fun is a browser if it just shows you text?

First, make sure your browser is up to date. To do this, click on the Chrome menu button (it looks like three lines) and go to About Google Chrome. This page will automatically check for updates and let you know if you have the latest version or not.

Next, clean up your browsing data every once in a while. Go back into the Chrome menu, and go to Settings. Then click on Show Advanced Settings and click the button for Clear Browsing Data…

Also, be sure to check your Chrome Apps and Extensions and disable and uninstall anything that you’re not using.

Now time for some hidden settings! In the URL bar type in chrome://flags and press enter. Go through the following options.

Override Software Rendering List

Enable this setting. It will override the software rendering list and it will enable GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) based rendering. Most of the modern computers have built in dedicated GPU which can be used instead of software rendering for browsing and games.

GPU compositing

By enabling GPU compositing, GPU accelerated composition will be used on all pages.

GPU-Accelerated SVG Filters

As the title says, it will accelerate SVG and CSS filters with GPU unit instead of using software based acceleration.

HTTP Pipelining

By default HTTP pipelining is disabled on Chrome. For faster browsing experience you can enable HTTP Pipelining. HTTP requests are generally sequenced, which means one request has to be completed prior to make another request. By enabling HTTP pipelining HTTP requests can be made concurrently.