Chrome makes for a clean, speedy alternative to IE or Firefox, especially if you live a lot in the land of Google. One persistent challenge is memory usage. Chrome gobbles up tons of memory as you open more tabs and browse from one page to another. Here's some tips for Windows users at least.

* Shift-Escape brings up the Chrome task manager. You can see which tabs, including all those new extensions you might be adding, are consuming which amounts of memory. Closing tabs will release some memory.

* If you add "--purge-memory-button" (without the quotes) to the shortcut that launches Chrome, then when you open the task manager, you will have an additional button there that forces Chrome to release memory is no longer is using.

* Another memory manager helper is to add the HotCleaner "Click & Clean" extension. See it here http://www.hotcleaner.com/clickclean_chrome.html,

* Last idea: Under Options, check the box to delete temp internet files on exit. This affects disk space more than RAM, and is also worth doing if you run into problems.

The Linux and Mac versions of Chrome are new and may also have memory issues, and it may be that forthcoming releases for all versions will solve them. Meanwhile, try these.