One of my favorite things about Google Chrome is the sheer volume of addons available on the web store. There’s an application or extension for pretty much anything these days- from games to email to sharing content on social networks. There’s a rather unfortunate side effect to addons, however… install too many, and you might see your browser starting to get slow and bloated.

It’s not just addons, either. It could be that some websites you visit are memory heavy, or cause Chrome to chomp down system memory like it’s at an all you can eat buffet.

Don’t worry. This is a problem that’s rather simple to manage.

Chrome’s Task Manager

See, Chrome’s got a lovely tool known as the Chrome Task Manager. It’s pretty much what’s written on the box- it’s a built-in function in Chrome that lets you see exactly how much system memory each open tab and extension happens to be using up at any given time. When you see a process or tab that seems to be gobbling up an unusual amount of memory (as a general rule, anything over 80-90,00 k is pushing it), you can kill it and try to sort out exactly what’s wrong with it.

To access the task manager, all you need to do is click on the little wrench in the upper right hand corner of Chrome. On the context menu that pops up, go to tools, then select task manager from the list. Simple, right?

Addon Management 101

Granted, I've no plans to uninstall this one, because it's awesome.

Now, in the case of addons, you might want to ask yourself the following questions:

1. Do I really need this addon? Does it help me in any noticeable fashion?
2. How often do I use the addon?
3. Are there other addons that do the same thing?

Now, the reason for the third step is that a lot of people who develop addons for Chrome aren’t actually full-fledged programmers by trade. Some of them are amateurs. As a result, some applications and extensions suffer from nasty little bugs known as ‘memory leaks’. Basically, the addons start to chew up an unusual amount of system memory due to errors in the code. If there are other addons on the Chrome Web Store that accomplish the same task as the one that’s currently giving you problems, it might be worth looking into uninstalling them and finding new ones.

How to Uninstall Applications and Extensions

Ah, but you’re going to want to know how to uninstall extensions and applications, aren’t you?

To uninstall an application, it’s as easy as right clicking on it on your start page and selecting the “uninstall” option from the context menu that appears. Extensions are a bit more complicated, but still pretty easy. To uninstall an extension, all you need to do is click on the wrench menu, go to tools, and then click on extensions. You’ll then be taken to a page that shows all your currently installed extensions, at which point you’ll have the option to either disable the addon in question or uninstall it entirely. In the case of some extensions, you can also access ‘options’ to customize what the extension does. Again, not really an intimidating process, is it?

Like what you read?

If so, please join over 28,000 people who receive our exclusive weekly newsletter and computer tips, and get FREE COPIES of 5 eBooks we created, as our gift to you for subscribing. Just enter your name and email below: