Google Chrome is a browser that is constantly evolving. Every so often, Google includes new functions and features to make browsing easier for users, while eliminating less popular or no longer used functions to streamline the browser. With the arrival of Chrome 84, Google removed a feature designed for developers that was used to measure the fluidity of web pages: a counter of frames per second, or FPS. Following complaints from developers, it appears that with the release of Chrome 90, Google will return this feature to the browser.
Chrome’s FPS counter, also called the FPS Meter , allows users and developers to control the frames per second a web page runs at. In this way, developers can fine-tune the performance and smoothness of their web pages, preventing them from being excessively slow.
With the arrival of Chrome 84, Google decided to replace this classic counter with a new indicator, based on percentages, which allowed us to know the frames loaded in a relative way over time. The developers did not like this change, who did not take long to ask the company to return the classic counter . They even opened a bug report in Chromium thinking that this new system was a bug, which was even seconded by one of Chrome’s GPU engineers.
After several months of silence, it seems that Google has finally reconsidered, and is going to re-enable the classic frame counter in its browser. Of course, from version 90.
How to open Chrome’s FPS counter
This is a feature intended primarily for developers. As we have explained, its main objective is to allow you to analyze how your website loads in certain circumstances so that you can see where to follow the development to finish optimizing it. However, being a tool available to all users, anyone who knows of its existence can use it too, if they want. Thanks to it, we will be able to check how any website loads on our PC, or see if any of them (such as Netflix) are causing problems for any reason. We can also use it to check if the GPU acceleration is working well.
To launch this counter, what we must do is open the Chrome developer tools using the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + Shift + I. Once open, we will press the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + Shift + P to open the tool finder and we will type ” Show Frames ” in this search engine to launch this corresponding tool.
Once this viewer is open, we can see it in the upper left part of the web that we have open. And to close it, just close the Chrome developer tools.
Available again in April
Google has finally reverted the changes and will return the original operation of this feature with the launch of Chrome 90. This version of the browser is currently in Canary phase , so if we have this version we can see how, indeed, this counter is back in the browser.
Otherwise, we will have to wait until April 13 of this year for Chrome 90 to become part of the stable version of the browser. We do not know, for now, if Google will also return this function to versions 88 and 89 of the browser.