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michael31986

macrumors 601
Original poster
Jul 11, 2008
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I have around 6 google chrome tabs and its making the fan on my computer run louder than usual. I have a 2018 mac book pro i7 core.

Is it because of the google tabs?
[doublepost=1535941284][/doublepost]I just turned off hardware acceleration in google chrome settings.

Is it just the browser that does this? for example would safari?
 
Chrome is well known to be not as optimized as Safari as far as power consumption is concerned. As for whether you'll experience the same kind of heat increase and thus triggering the fan, my guess is no, but you can verify it by testing with Safari.
 
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Chrome is well known to be not as optimized as Safari as far as power consumption is concerned. As for whether you'll experience the same kind of heat increase and thus triggering the fan, my guess is no, but you can verify it by testing with Safari.

As this guy said, Chrome isn’t that well optimised for macOS.

Even when I run it on my windows desktop, CPU and RAM usage grows with the number of tabs I have open. It seems to be a Chrome thing, it’s always been a ‘hungry’ browser.
 
If you open up a lot of tabs, try using The Great Suspender chrome extension. Basically it suspends unused tabs and frees up memory. This doesn't really help if you open up a bunch of tabs at once, but if you keep tabs open for a long time it helps keep the memory usage low and seems to not tax my CPU as much. With this extension activated I notice my memory footprint is much lower than normal, even compared to Firefox, Safari and Opera.
 
I have around 6 google chrome tabs and its making the fan on my computer run louder than usual. I have a 2018 mac book pro i7 core.

Is it because of the google tabs?
[doublepost=1535941284][/doublepost]I just turned off hardware acceleration in google chrome settings.

Is it just the browser that does this? for example would safari?
Interesting. I didn't even know that Chrome was forcing the Radeon to kick on. That said, I turned it off and relaunched and it looks like my 2018 is still using the radeon with chrome open.

edit: a restart brought the intel card back.
 
Interesting. I didn't even know that Chrome was forcing the Radeon to kick on. That said, I turned it off and relaunched and it looks like my 2018 is still using the radeon with chrome open.

edit: a restart brought the intel card back.
How did you turn it off?
[doublepost=1535993054][/doublepost]Strange that a 2018 32 GB ram would even do that.
 
How did you turn it off?
[doublepost=1535993054][/doublepost]Strange that a 2018 32 GB ram would even do that.

In chrome advanced settings. When I turned it off and restarted the browser ATM was still reporting the radeon being used. Once I restarted the machine it went back to the intel card and hasn't turned the radeon on with chrome since.

My guess it's just Chrome saying if this is available, let's use it. Safari doesn't turn the radeon on.

edit: I should note that I have never heard the fans kick on with my 2018, other than when it was installing Mojave.
 
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In chrome advanced settings. When I turned it off and restarted the browser ATM was still reporting the radeon being used. Once I restarted the machine it went back to the intel card and hasn't turned the radeon on with chrome since.

My guess it's just Chrome saying if this is available, let's use it. Safari doesn't turn the radeon on.

edit: I should note that I have never heard the fans kick on with my 2018, other than when it was installing Mojave.
Yeait only happened with multiple Google tabs. Otherwise I use virtual machine t log into work and have all.other apps open. No problem.
 
Yeait only happened with multiple Google tabs. Otherwise I use virtual machine t log into work and have all.other apps open. No problem.
It must be the content of those tabs. I generally have 6-10 open at once when I'm doing dev work and haven't experienced that. Hopefully turning off the hardware acceleration gets you sorted. And as an added bonus, saves some battery life too.
 
It must be the content of those tabs. I generally have 6-10 open at once when I'm doing dev work and haven't experienced that. Hopefully turning off the hardware acceleration gets you sorted. And as an added bonus, saves some battery life too.
Yea seems a bit better. I'll just use safari. Not sure why I ever even got Google tbh.
 
Yea seems a bit better. I'll just use safari. Not sure why I ever even got Google tbh.
Unless you're a developer and need access to the inspector (the dev tools is safari are terrible), or are a frequent user of Google Drive / Docs / etc I personally don't see the need for it. Also, the touch bar integration in Safari is a lot better.
 
Google tabs hog system resources.
If you think that's bad wait until you have a few Chrome extensions.....that's when things get really interesting.
Oh well, at least they have extensions.
 
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