SuperchargePerformance: EVERY Feature Explained (2026)

Most performance extensions pick one lane. Tab suspenders ignore ads. Ad blockers ignore RAM. SuperchargePerformance (Perf for short) covers both — 13 features spanning memory management, content blocking, page speed, and crash recovery. The tab suspension alone saves around 80MB per idle tab. The content blocking engine runs 186,645 rules from 22 curated sources. Both run simultaneously, locally, with zero telemetry. Available on Chrome and Microsoft Edge.

This page covers every feature in one place. New installs from the welcome page can start with the Quick Reference table, then branch into whichever section matches their priority.

Quick Reference — All Features at a Glance

Every feature, what it does, its control type, and the default state.

Performance Level Indicator

The popup header shows a current performance level: Disabled, Standard, Optimized, or PRO. This indicator reflects the combination of active features — not any single slider. Turn on content blocking at High and tab suspension at Medium and the level climbs to Optimized. Add a PRO feature and it shows PRO. The level updates live as you toggle features in the popup.

This single label is the fastest way to confirm Perf is actually doing something on a given session.

Tab Suspension

Tab suspension is the feature most people install Perf for. Open Chrome Task Manager (Shift+Esc) with 20 tabs and you’ll see 20 renderer processes consuming RAM. Perf watches idle time per tab and calls chrome.tabs.discard() when the threshold is reached — Chrome natively unloads the page from memory, keeping the tab visible in the strip with a reload-on-click behavior. When reopened, your scroll position is restored. Suspension is adaptive: when it picks which tabs to free, it ranks them by memory footprint combined with idle time rather than just discarding the oldest.

Tiers. Three preset timers:

Medium is the default. For most users with 15+ tabs, five minutes is the practical sweet spot — it catches research tabs opened and forgotten while keeping anything you’re actively reading alive.

Auto-protected apps. 25+ web apps are permanently excluded from suspension, regardless of idle time:

Figma, Notion, Linear, Miro, Canva, Lucid, Airtable, Asana, Monday, Slack, Discord, Teams, Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Slides, Gmail, Google Drive, Google Calendar, Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, SoundCloud, WhatsApp, Telegram, Google Meet, Zoom, Whereby.

These are apps where an unexpected reload destroys in-progress work. If your critical app isn’t on the list, the whitelist (covered below) covers custom exclusions per domain.

Additional protections. Pinned tabs are never suspended. Tabs playing audio are never suspended; Perf checks for active audio before discarding. Tabs with unsaved form data (modified fields that haven’t been submitted) are also protected. And any tab created within the last 30 seconds gets a grace period before the idle timer starts.

Suspend Now. The popup has a manual “Suspend Now” button that immediately discards all eligible tabs, skipping the timer entirely. Useful before stepping away from the computer or before a call where you want Chrome to stop competing for RAM.

RAM estimate. The stats dashboard uses 80MB as a conservative per-tab estimate. The actual figure varies by site; heavy SPAs and media tabs use considerably more.

Content Blocking

Perf’s ad and tracker blocking uses Chrome’s native Declarative Net Request (DNR) engine. Rules are compiled into static rulesets at build time, so no JavaScript runs on every request. The browser evaluates matching internally.

Four tiers:

High is the default. 186,645 rules total, sourced from 22 curated lists, split across three tiers (about 100K Free, 65K Medium, 22K Pro). The lists cover EasyList, EasyPrivacy, uBlock’s filter lists, and multiple malware/phishing feeds.

Script blocking is a separate slider with its own tiers:

PRO script blocking is the strongest tier but requires testing on sites with third-party login flows. Perf automatically allows scripts from known auth providers and payment processors even at PRO tier.

Video Ad Blocking

YouTube and Twitch have ad delivery mechanisms that evade standard DNR rules. Perf handles each separately.

YouTube. YouTube delivers ads through multiple pathways — pre-roll, mid-roll, server-side insertion, overlay banners, and anti-adblock enforcement. Blocking one pathway is not enough because YouTube falls back to the others. Perf intercepts all of them simultaneously: ad-serving domains are blocked at the network level, ad data is stripped from video player responses before playback starts, mid-stream ad segments are detected and skipped in real time, and YouTube’s adblock detection is neutralized so you never see the “ad blockers are not allowed” overlay. Seven distinct interception points run in parallel, each targeting a different delivery mechanism.

Twitch. Twitch embeds ads directly inside the video stream data rather than serving them as separate requests. Perf intercepts the stream before Twitch’s player processes it, strips the ad segments, and returns a clean video feed. The stream plays without interruption. No purple “ad in progress” screen.

Both are covered by the single Video Ad Blocking toggle, which is On by default.

Smart Page Cleanup

Three behaviors bundled into one toggle:

AutoConsent. Based on the AutoConsent library, Perf automatically detects and rejects cookie consent banners. The “Accept all” / “Reject all” prompt dismisses without user interaction — Perf selects the privacy-preserving option.

Persistent ad and banner hiding. Cosmetic rules hide ad slots and promotional banners that survive network-level blocking. These are CSS-based injections that do not affect page functionality.

Popup blocking. Perf intercepts window.open() calls from page scripts and suppresses popups that don’t originate from direct user gestures. Legitimate popups triggered by user clicks (file downloads, OAuth windows) are unaffected.

All three run as a unit under the Smart Page Cleanup toggle.

Page Speed Features

Four features target load time rather than content blocking.

Prioritize Visible Content. Lazy-loads off-screen images, iframes, and at PRO tier, off-screen scripts. The browser downloads what’s in the viewport first and defers everything below the fold. On media-heavy pages, this measurably reduces time-to-interactive. Default: Med.

Preload Pages on Hover. When your cursor hovers a link, Perf triggers a prefetch request before you click. By the time you click, the browser has already started downloading the destination page. Same-site mode limits this to links on the same domain (safer, less bandwidth). All pages mode prefetches any link. Default: All pages.

Predictive DNS Prefetching. Perf scans links on the current page and injects <link rel="dns-prefetch"> elements for the linked domains. DNS lookups resolve in the background, trimming the latency spike when you navigate to a new domain. Default: Off.

Optimize Web Fonts. Low and Med tiers block custom font requests, falling back to the browser’s default serif or sans-serif. PRO tier goes further — it forces the system font stack (San Francisco on macOS, Segoe UI on Windows, the system sans on Linux). Pages load faster; text renders immediately without a FOIT (flash of invisible text). Default: Off. Worth enabling if you find font loading adds visible delay on content sites.

Stop Autoplay

Two levels of autoplay blocking:

Allow Common. Blocks autoplay on most sites but exempts 22 media and meeting domains: YouTube, Netflix, Twitch, Vimeo, Dailymotion, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Zoom, Slack, Skype, Microsoft Teams/SharePoint, Webex, Zoho, GoToMeeting, ClickMeeting, Vonage, Adobe, Intermedia, RingCentral, and Pluralsight. This is the practical setting — news sites and landing pages stop blasting audio, but video and meeting platforms work normally.

Block All. Blocks autoplay everywhere without exceptions. Manual play still works — a user-gesture click within a 1-second window after the page loads is detected and allowed through. This preserves playback on pages where you explicitly click Play, while stopping anything that fires automatically.

Default is Off, so no autoplay behavior is modified unless you enable it.

Stats Dashboard

The popup shows five animated stat cards, each with a count-up animation that runs every time you open it:

Stats persist across sessions in local storage. They reset only if you clear extension data. The count-up animation starts from zero on each popup open, landing on the current value — this is intentional visual design, not a reset of the underlying numbers.

Toolbar Badge

The Perf icon in the Chrome toolbar doubles as a live RAM counter. The badge shows the cumulative RAM saved, displayed as a number with a GB or TB unit on the next line.

Theme-aware rendering. In light mode, the badge uses a blue bird icon with a blue background. In dark mode, it switches to an amber bird on a black background. Perf detects Chrome’s theme via the chrome.action API and swaps both the icon and the badge color scheme automatically.

The badge renders at 4x resolution via OffscreenCanvas before being drawn to the extension icon. That prevents the pixelation most extension badges show at standard DPI.

When Perf is globally paused, the badge displays “OFF” instead of the RAM counter.

Whitelist System

The whitelist lets you exclude specific domains from specific features — or from everything.

Per-domain, per-feature granularity. You can whitelist a site from just content blocking while keeping tab suspension active. Or whitelist from just suspension while keeping ads blocked. Or whitelist everything at once.

Site toggle in popup header. A quick toggle at the top of the popup adds or removes the current domain from the whitelist in one click. This is the fastest path for whitelisting a site that’s breaking — click the toggle, reload, and Perf skips that domain entirely.

Subdomain inclusion. Adding reddit.com to the whitelist automatically covers redditstatic.com, redd.it, and other related subdomains. You don’t need to add each subdomain separately.

The whitelist is stored locally and never transmitted anywhere.

Global Pause

The master toggle at the top of the popup pauses all Perf features for one hour. After the hour, Perf auto-resumes via Chrome’s alarm API — no manual re-enable required.

During a global pause, Safe Mode remains active. Everything else — content blocking, tab suspension, video ad blocking, page speed features — is suspended.

The popup shows a countdown while paused: “Paused — X min remaining.” If you want to re-enable before the hour is up, click the toggle again.

Safe Mode

Safe Mode detects when Perf’s content scripts may have broken a page — a blank render, a JavaScript error thrown during injection, or a page that loads visibly incomplete.

When a broken state is detected, Perf shows a recovery toast at the top of the page: “Something looks off — Reload without optimization?” Clicking the toast reloads the page with Perf’s content scripts disabled for that domain and adds the domain to a temporary exclusion list.

The toast is non-blocking. If the page rendered fine, dismiss it or ignore it. It disappears automatically after a few seconds.

Safe Mode is On by default and runs independently of the global pause. It is the reason you can install Perf on any machine without worrying about silently breaking a critical work page.

PRO Tier

PRO unlocks features that require deeper intervention than Perf’s free defaults.

PRO-gated features:

PRO is available as a one-time $29 lifetime license. The waitlist is open at superchargebrowser.com/pro. When PRO is active, a PRO badge appears in the popup header and the Performance Level Indicator shows PRO.

No subscription, no recurring billing, no account required for the free tier.

Settings and Customization

Beyond the per-feature sliders in the popup, a few global settings live in the Settings panel:

• Theme: Auto (follows Chrome’s system theme), Light, or Dark. Auto is the default and drives the theme-aware badge and icon behavior.
• Performance Level badge: Updates automatically — no manual refresh needed.
• Changelog, Support, and Privacy links appear in the popup footer. The Privacy link goes to the extension’s privacy policy, which documents zero telemetry and 100% local data handling.

Chrome Settings Worth Knowing

These settings live in Chrome, not in Perf, but they interact with what Perf does.

Chrome Memory Saver (chrome://settings/performance). Chrome’s built-in memory tool discards tabs reactively when memory pressure builds. Perf’s suspension is proactive — it runs on a timer regardless of pressure. Running both is fine. Perf’s timer fires first; Chrome’s threshold acts as a second pass for any tabs Perf didn’t catch. Chrome’s Memory Saver reduces total Chrome RAM by roughly 30-40%; Perf’s proactive suspension on a 20-tab session reduces it by 70-75%.

Extension permissions (chrome://extensions). Perf requests broad host permissions for content scripts. You can review these in the Extensions page. The permissions are used for content blocking, video ad stripping, and cookie consent rejection. None of the data leaves the device.

Pin Perf to the toolbar. Click the puzzle piece icon in Chrome’s toolbar, find SuperchargePerformance, and click the pin icon. After pinning, one click opens the popup directly. Without pinning, you navigate through the extensions overflow menu each time.

Using Perf With SuperchargeNavigation

The two extensions were built to complement each other. When both are installed:

• Nav’s side panel shows a sleeping tab indicator (moon icon) on any tab Perf has suspended — you can see at a glance which tabs are actively running versus discarded
• The Alt+K command bar in Nav gains three Perf-specific commands: Suspend all tabs, Toggle site whitelist for the current domain, Toggle SuperchargePerformance on/off
• Nav’s tab lock prevents those tabs from being suspended by Perf — a tab locked in Nav is treated the same as a pinned tab by Perf’s suspension logic

Neither extension requires the other. Both are fully functional standalone.

If your main problem is too many tabs eating RAM, start with tab suspension at Medium and leave everything else at defaults. If your main problem is intrusive ads slowing pages down, content blocking at High with video ad blocking on handles most cases. If you want both — and most users do — every feature here runs concurrently without conflict.

Zero telemetry, 100% local, no account required. All of the above except the PRO-gated features are free.