Chrome very laggy on 2018 mac mini

[djc6]

I have a 2018 mac mini with 16GB RAM and the 3.2Ghz six core i7 processor along with a 1TB SSD.

Its been fine to use since new (bought right when it came out) and i've not really had any desire to upgrade because it works well for my needs still.

Suddenly in the past month Chrome has become unusable when 10+ tabs are open or when using Google Maps. It gets so slow it takes a second or two for characters I type in the address bar to appear. I've re-installed the app, I've deleted all browsing data going back forever. I've removed all extensions except for Lastpass. When I run Activity Monitor what I see are dozens and dozens of "Chrome Browser Helper (Renderer) processes. The worst is Google Maps it just glitches and large areas of the map don't render at all.

I started trying other browsers and I noticed Brave doesn't have any of these issues. I can have 20 tabs open and no slowness, google maps works again, and only a handful of these Renderer processes will exist. Don't both Chrome and Brave use the same rendering engine Chromium?

I've also tried Safari built into macOS and its doing fine as well.

Why can't I use Chrome? I've searched here and reddit and other places online and don't see a bunch of posts about recent chrome regressions or anything. Any other browser recommendations I should check out beside Brave?

 

[!!!]

Check to make sure you have GPU acceleration enabled in the settings. Or if it is enabled, try disabling it.

Otherwise, check your memory usage, make sure you have "Show All Processes" enabled in Activity Monitor.

While Brave & Chrome are both built using the same underlying codebase, there will be small changes, both in terms of customization by Brave, as well as the fact that they might be using slightly different builds.

I personally use Firefox. I can use an AdBlocker, and Mozilla isn't spying on me in various ways.

 

[Honza1]

You can try to clean up the Chrome cache... Or, maybe, start with creating first a new Chrome user profile. That is kind of cleaning up Chrome without loosing anything... And, if that still does not help, make sure your Chrome profile is saved (=you know where your bookmarks and passwords are and have a copy) and then delete the Chrome.app, including your profile, cache etc. ChatGPT or any other AI will be able to provide step by step instructions - after you backup what you need so you do not loose anything important.
It is possible something is corrupted or just too much history etc. Clean up as much as you can and then reinstall Chrome.app and see. This is not normal.
If nothing works, create a new user on macOS and install Chrome there. That is sure to be new and clean profile. If that does not help, the issue may be SSD file system corruption, but that is unlikely as that would impact everything.
Once you know where the problem is, fix that - new profile, cleaning cache, whatever. But there are many possible sources of problems, you need to narrow it down to the one which is broken.

 

[mrdunderhead]

chrome eats ram on the mac mini unless you have 32 gigs of ram or better dont run chrome right now until they debug it for silicon or intel.