Chrome flags are a collection of experimental features that aren’t ready for public release yet. But that doesn’t mean you can’t take advantage of them. In fact, most of these flags work quite well, despite what the warnings that may have lead you to believe.
Some of these let you play with upcoming features, while others reduce RAM usage. I recently tweaked a few Chrome flags that specifically targeted the performance and ended up with a browser that was noticeably faster and lighter.
GPU rasterization
Put your GPU to good use
Screenshot by Pankil Shah — No attribution required
Rasterization is a process in which your browser turns website codes into text and images into pixels you actually see. Every button, font, and photo has to be converted into pixels. Typically, much of this is handled by your PC’s CPU.
But when you enable GPU rasterization, that part is handled by your graphics card instead. Since GPUs are specially designed to process visual data quickly and efficiently, the time it takes to render everything is much less. The difference is especially noticeable on media-heavy websites. And of course, it frees up your CPU so it can handle other background tasks and apps.
Zero-copy rasterizer
Screenshot by Pankil Shah — No attribution required
The best way to understand what the zero-copy rasterizer does is to first understand how Chrome actually renders a page. Before content is handed over to the GPU for rendering, Chrome needs to copy data to different parts of the memory. As you can imagine, that step where Chrome writes the data and hands it over to the GPU takes time. And the zero-copy rasterizer flag forces Chrome to skip that.
Instead of writing data to one place and then handing it over, Chrome sends it directly to the GPU for processing. This means less overhead and faster rendering, which improves page loading times. It also reduces unnecessary workload on your system, which can be helpful with responsiveness and, in some cases, even battery life.
Glide through pages
When you scroll through a webpage and something changes on your screen, Chrome may sometimes redraw the entire frame even if a small portion has actually changed. Partial swap is a Chrome flag that forces the browser to update only the part of the screen that has changed instead of refreshing everything.
This not only reduces workload but also improves the scrolling experience. The difference may not be obvious on all websites, but if you often scroll through long pages or browse content-heavy sites, the partial swap flag is something you should enable.
Another flag that helps with this is smooth scrolling. By default, when you scroll through a webpage, the movement can feel slightly jumpy or abrupt. That’s because the page moves in small steps rather than flowing naturally. Smooth scrolling is a Chrome flag that adjusts how the page transitions as you move your mouse wheel.
Unlike some of the other flags on this list, this one doesn’t improve speed. It’s more of a visual trick. Still, it’s worth enabling it because it makes scrolling easier on the eyes.
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Experimental QUIC Protocol
Modernize how Chrome talks to servers
Screenshot by Pankil Shah — No attribution required
QUIC stands for Quick UDP Internet Connections, and it’s a protocol developed by Google. What it does is change how your browser talks to servers. Unlike traditional TCP connections, QUIC runs over UDP and reduces the number of back and forth trips needed to establish a secure connection.
With older protocols, your browser and server exchange several messages to say hello and agree on encryption. QUIC combines steps and reduces those round trips. This means less waiting for you before a page actually starts loading.
Since most popular websites, including Google’s own services, support QUIC, enabling this flag can make browsing feel more responsive. You’ll notice pages loading quickly, videos buffering less, and the whole experience feeling snappier.
Parallel downloading
Who doesn’t love fast downloads?
Screenshot by Pankil Shah — No attribution required
No matter what you use Chrome for, downloading files is something that all of us do. Typically, when you download a file, Chrome downloads it from start to finish using a single connection.
Enabling the parallel downloading flag changes the game by splitting a file into multiple smaller chunks and downloading those simultaneously. So, instead of one connection, Chrome opens several connections to fetch different parts of the file at the same time. It then stitches everything together to complete the download.
This process can improve the download speeds dramatically, especially when you’re dealing with larger files. It makes better use of the available bandwidth and reduces the time it takes for the download to complete.
Enabling Chrome flags is easy enough
The good thing is Chrome makes it straightforward to manage all these flags, despite their experimental nature. To start, type chrome://flags into the address bar and hit Enter. Once you’re on the Flags page, use the search box to look for the flag you want to tweak and then use the drop-down menu to enable or disable it. It’s that easy. Note that you’ll need to restart Chrome for changes to take effect.
And if you’re worried about some of these flags breaking something, there’s even a Reset all option that reverts all the flags to their default settings, so it’s quite safe to try.
