Your browser has its own task manager, and it exposed my most memory-hungry tabs

Published Oct 5, 2026, 4:00 PM EDT Mahnoor Faisal is a tech journalist covering AI and productivity tools with bylines at XDA, SlashGear, MakeUseOf, Laptop Mag, and Android Police. She's been writing professionally since she was sixteen, and has since penned hundreds of articles. This includes in-depth coverage of AI tools like NotebookLM to breaking news across the AI space. Her passion for technology started when she received her first iPod Touch (4th generation) on her 8th birthday, and she's been deep in the tech world ever since. Currently pursuing a degree in computer science, Mahnoor brings both a journalist's eye and a technical foundation to her coverage of how AI is reshaping the way we work and learn. I got my current work laptop when I was a broke student. Granted, I’m still a broke student, but back then, all I really knew was that I wanted a MacBook and that my bank balance was embarrassing to look at. So, I went with a MacBook Air with 8GB of RAM, figuring it would be enough for the kind of work I do. Well, it’s been four years since then, and my MacBook still works like new. I’m not quite ready to part ways with it just yet, though. However, if there’s one thing I could’ve changed about my decision back then, it would’ve been to get more RAM. Given the number of browser tabs I keep open at any given time, those 8GB have their work cut out for them. Something I didn’t realize for an embarrassingly long time is that my browser has its own task manager! Most mainstream desktop browsers have a built-in task manager My browser knew exactly what was eating my RAM While Activity Monitor is something I regularly use to check what’s consuming my MacBook’s resources (especially when I get the annoying “Your system has run out of application memory” notification), I hadn’t thought to look for a similar tool within my browser. The thing is, Activity Monitor could only tell me so much. It could show me that Chrome was using a ridiculous amount of memory, but it couldn’t easily tell me which of my dozens of open tabs was actually responsible. I then realized there was a task manager within my browser itself, which could show me how much memory and CPU each tab was using. Most mainstream desktop browsers offer one, including Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Brave, Opera, and Vivaldi. In Chrome on macOS, for example, you can find it by clicking Window in your menu bar and selecting Task Manager from the list of options. In Opera, you can open it through Menu > Developer > Task Manager on Windows and Linux, or Developer > Task Manager from the menu bar on macOS. In Edge, click the three-dot menu and select More tools > Browser task manager. Brave follows a similar path: Menu > More tools > Task manager. In Vivaldi, select Tools > Task Manager from the main menu. Firefox users can go to Menu > More tools > Task Manager, or simply type about:processes into the address bar. Safari is the notable exception here, as it doesn’t offer an equivalent built-in task manager. If you use Apple’s browser, you’ll need to turn to macOS’s Activity Monitor to check its resource usage. Once I knew where to find it, I wanted to see whether the tabs I assumed were eating up the most resources were actually the ones causing the problem. As it turns out, some of the results were pretty different from what I expected. My busiest tabs weren’t always my most demanding ones My worst offenders weren’t the ones I expected With the task manager open, I clicked the Memory footprint column to sort everything by memory usage. I had a mix of research pages, work tools, ChatGPT conversations, and a YouTube study video open, so there were plenty of tabs competing for those 8GB. I had a pretty good idea of which ones I expected to be at the top, but the results weren’t quite what I anticipated. Right off the bat, what surprised me was my LinkedIn feed topping the list at 1.2GB. Another LinkedIn tab was using 786MB, bringing the pair to roughly 2GB. I knew keeping multiple tabs open added up, but seeing two LinkedIn tabs account for that much memory made it harder to justify leaving them around when I wasn’t using them. A later check looked completely different. This time, Asana was sitting at the top at 1.6GB, while a ChatGPT conversation I had open for research was using another 1GB. LinkedIn had dropped to 928MB, Reddit was using 694MB, another ChatGPT tab was at 522MB, and even Gmail was taking up just over 500MB. That was probably the biggest thing I learned from checking the Task Manager more than once. There wasn’t one website I could permanently blame for all my memory problems. The biggest offender changed depending on what I had open and what I was doing at the time, which made checking actual usage far more useful than simply assuming Chrome itself was the problem. Memory was only one part of the picture, though. When I looked at the CPU column, Google Meet stood out. Across two checks, it was using roughly 39 to 49% CPU while its memory footprint stayed around 490MB. YouTube was using more memory at the time, but Meet was keeping the processor considerably busier. That distinction matters when I'm trying to figure out why my MacBook suddenly feels sluggish. Sorting by memory tells me which tabs have the largest memory footprints, while sorting by CPU shows me which ones are actively making the processor work hardest. A tab doesn't necessarily need to top both lists to be the one causing trouble. Finding the problem tabs made them much easier to deal with Once I found the culprits, fixing the problem was easy Once I knew which tabs were responsible, the obvious solution was to close the ones I didn't need. But that somewhat defeats the point if, like me, you keep tabs open precisely because you expect to need them again later. Thankfully, most browsers have some way of freeing up the resources used by inactive tabs without forcing you to close them altogether. Chrome's Memory Saver, for example, deactivates tabs you haven't used in a while and reloads them when you return. You can also create exceptions for websites you always want to keep active. Other browsers take slightly different approaches. Opera automatically snoozes inactive tabs, while Brave has its own Memory Saver with an exception list for sites you never want deactivated. Vivaldi gives you even more control, with different memory-saving levels and the option to manually hibernate individual tabs, Tab Stacks, Workspaces, or every background tab. Firefox handles things a little differently. It can automatically unload tabs when your system is running low on memory, but you can also unload them yourself without closing them. Its about:unloads page is particularly useful, since it shows information such as each tab's memory usage and when you last accessed it. Edge's Sleeping Tabs feature is similarly configurable. You can choose how long a tab should remain inactive before Edge puts it to sleep, ranging from 30 seconds to 12 hours, and exclude sites that need to stay active. Ultimately, the task manager hasn't magically given my MacBook more than 8GB of RAM. What it has done is stop me from blindly blaming my browser whenever my laptop starts struggling. Now I can see which tab is actually responsible and either close it, let my browser put it to sleep, or decide that it deserves the resources it's using.