How to fix Google Chrome performance issues on Mac OS X/MacOS Sierra

Google Chrome is probably the most widely used web browsers on all the platforms. Be it Android, iOS, Windows or MacOS, Google Chrome is what becomes the very first preference for the average users to access web. Google Chrome is not a great choice among computer geeks. The reason is its resource usage i.e. the RAM of your computer. Chrome is capable of making your entire computer slow. Apart from that, Google Chrome eats up more battery power of your laptop. There are more problems with Google Chrome running Mac OS X and MacOS Sierra than there are on the Windows platform.

Google Chrome on Mac OS X and MacOS Sierra can come up with issues like mouse freezing at times, keyboard lag, it doesn’t let the tabs open up sometimes and it also results in very slow loading speed of web pages. These issues are a real mess for a user who finds Google Chrome very user-friendly and he is forced to choose another browser just because it isn’t working fine for him on Mac OS X and MacOS Sierra platform. If you go on trying to figure out the culprit behind this performance lag of Google Chrome on Mac, you will find out many reasons. We will have a look on the settings of Google Chrome that we can tweak and get rid of all these issues. At least that’s what worked for me. Let’s go through them now.

How to fix Google Chrome performance issues on Mac OS X and MacOS Sierra

Turn off hardware acceleration in Google Chrome

Google Chrome uses hardware acceleration to provide a performance boost. Hardware acceleration makes the use of GPU of a computer to load webpages. It doesn’t entire depend on the CPU to work. Hardware acceleration does not always boost up the performance, it can go in the opposite direction as well. If your Google Chrome is lagging, then tweaking this option might just workout for you. Here’s how you can do that.

1. Go to Google Chrome Settings.
2. Scroll all the way down and click on “show advanced settings”.
3. Scroll all the way down again and uncheck “Use hardware acceleration when available”.
4. Restart chrome now.
5. You are all good to go!

Reset Google Chrome flags to default

1. In your Google Chrome address bar, type chrome://flags/ and hit enter.
2. Now click on “Reset all to default”.
3. Restart Google Chrome.
4. That’s all 🙂

Delete Google Chrome Cache Files and Cookies

1. Go to Google Chrome settings.
2. Click on show advanced settings.
3. Now click on Clear Browsing Data and clear the cache, cookies and other content you wish to delete.
4. Alternatively, open finder and click Go > Go to folder > Type ~/Library/Caches/Google/Chrome/Default/Cache and hit enter. Delete all files showing up in this folder.
5. Now once again, click Go > Go to folder > Type ~/Library/Caches/Google/Chrome/Default/PnaclTranslationCache and hit enter. Delete all files showing up in this folder.

Other solutions

Although the solutions listed above should work well for you, but just in case those are not working, you may try deleting your existing Google Chrome Profile and creating a new one. You can also try resetting your Google Chrome browser to default settings.

We hope that the guide above helped you. Let us know which solution worked for you. In case you have come across a new method, let us know and we will add it here.