What are those circles on your Chrome tab?

You may have recently noticed that the tabs in your Chrome browser have circles around the tab icon, and the icon itself is slightly smaller and faded. What is it about – and can I change it back?

Chrome’s new memory saving feature, Google Sea, “Automatically frees memory from tabs you haven’t used in a while.” Circular tab icons indicate tabs that are currently inactive You need to click on it to enable it again.

I tend to use a lot of tabs throughout the workday – and I’m sure many of our readers do the same. Some of these tabs stay there until I need them, while others are completely forgotten until I decide it’s time to clean the house. Now each of these tabs represents a web page and each of these pages consumes memory. So if I get too excited about collecting my tabs, things can slow down.

This has been a problem for Chrome for a long time, so Google has come up with a solution – or at least an improvement Memory Saver forces a tab to become inactive when it has not been used for some time and frees up the memory it used to use. You can find the storage capacity by hovering the cursor over the tab.

When you click on the tab, it will become active again, but it may take a second or two to fully load.

If you find it annoying, you can turn off Memory Saver mode by clicking the three-dot menu icon in the top-right corner of Chrome. Settings > Performance > Save memory. You can either turn it off completely or keep it on and create a list of websites you want to always be active on

However, another major Chromium-based browser, Microsoft Edge, has had this feature for some time. If you are an Edge user, you can go Settings > System and performanceAnd in said section Performance improvementYou can turn on or off the ability to slip inactive tabs, hide dormant tabs, and choose which websites to keep active.