Speed Up Chrome For Android With This Settings Tweak

Speed Up Chrome For Android With This Settings Tweak

Android: Chrome is one of our favourite Android browsers, but it can be a little sluggish sometimes. This settings tweak, thanks to Redditor erythrocytes64, may give you a tidy speed boost, depending on your device.

In short, what you’re doing is giving Chrome access to more memory, and eliminating that stutter you get when scrolling up and down pages. All you have to do is open a new Chrome tab on your Android device, and paste this in the address bar:

chrome://flags/#max-tiles-for-interest-area

Bump that up to 512. Your changes won’t take effect until the next time Chrome is restarted, but you’ll see a button at the bottom that says “relaunch now.” Tap that, and Chrome will close, then re-open. It should be much snappier than before. I tested out the tweak, and sure enough, I saw better scrolling and navigation performance on my Moto X. It won’t make pages load faster, but it definitely makes them easier to browse.

A couple of other commenters in the Reddit thread note that giving Chrome access to more memory means Android will be more aggressive with closing other idle apps in order to make sure Chrome has all the food it needs — so if you’re on an older device or one with less built-in RAM, you may want to start with 256 (the default is actually 128) to find your sweet spot. 512 worked for us, though.

erythrocytes64 notes a few other flags that might improve your performance as well:

Other flags that are (relatively) useful:
enable-offline-mode – AFAIK allows to access pages stored in cache on the device without Internet connection.

enable-spdy4a2 – as reported by ElTimablo, may help show better results on some pages, notably Facebook, but other people experienced glitches when using it.

enable-cast – only in beta “Enable experimental Chromecast support allowing to play and control videos from the Web on Chromecast devices.”

Enabling SPDY/4 alpha 2 will improve sites that support it, like Facebook, for example, but you won’t see much payoff elsewhere. You could also enable the “show-fps-counter” to see if you’re actually getting the performance boost promised by the tweak. Hit the link below to check out the whole thread.

How I Sped Up Chrome on My Device [Reddit]


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