Make Google Chrome Faster

Chrome is already set up quite well, but there are a few things you can do to make it even faster…

How To Make Google Chrome Faster

Advanced Chrome Settings

The first thing I’m going to cover is the advanced/hidden settings of Chrome. To access these, open a new tab and type “about:flags” into the address bar (without quotation marks).

You will see a list of settings with the word “enable” under each one. Enable the following:

Override software rendering list

This will override the built-in software rendering list, which enables GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) acceleration on unsupported system configurations. Most of the PC’s nowadays have dedicated graphical processing units that can be used to render pages and browser games more efficiently.

GPU compositing

Uses GPU-accelerated compositing on all pages, not just those that include GPU-accelerated layers.

GPU-Accelerated SVG and CSS Filters

As the name suggests, this uses the GPU to accelerate the rendering of SVG and CSS filters

HTTP Pipelining 

I was a big fan of this option in Firefox, so I’m very happy to see Google support it in Chrome. HTTP requests are usually sequential, meaning that one request has to complete before another is made. With pipelining, HTTP requests can be made simultaneously.

Delete Unused Temporary Data

One of the things you can do to make Google Chrome faster (or any browser) is remove unneeded temporary files. To do so in Chrome, press Ctrl+Shift+Del. You can choose what you want to delete. I like to delete everything except the auto-fill data and the passwords. If you don’t store your passwords in Chrome or use auto-fill, you can select every option.

How To Make Google Chrome Faster Under The Hood

To access the Under The Hood options (or Under The Bonnet if you have a UK version of Chrome), first click the spanner icon in the top right-hand corner, then settings, then Under The Hood/Bonnet on the left-hand side. Then uncheck the following:

- Use a web service to help resolve navigation errors
- Automatically send usage statistics and crash reports to Google
- Use a prediction service to help complete searches and URLs typed in the address bar

Remove Unneeded Extensions

If you have installed any extensions, check out the extensions page, quite often there are a few extensions there that you might not necessarily need or use. The less extensions you have, the better. To access the extensions page, click the spanner icon in top left-hand corner, then click Tools, then extensions. You’ll see that you can either disable or remove the extension, disabling is not the same as removing, get rid of whatever you don’t use. If you don’t know what the extension is, just Google it.

Third-Party Tools & Final Words

One of my favourite tools is CCleaner. CCleaner is an essential tool that gets rid of a many many unneeded files on your computer, not just all your junk Chrome files. You can download it for free from the developers website.

That’s it, now you know how to make Google Chrome faster.