Google Chrome can sometimes produce a very poor internet experience that portrays itself as poor network performance.  This can be very noticeable when watching YouTube content.

This could caused by a number of things but to find out if it's a Google Chrome specific problem follow the steps below:

• Press Left Control + Left Shift + Esc at the same time
• Task Manager should now open

• Make sure you click More details to expand the view
• Click the Performance tab at the top
• Keep an eye on the percentages of the CPU, GPU, Disk & Memory

If your performance is fine then we will recommend alternative Chrome specific solutions below.

If this is a Chrome specific problem what typically happens is that the video starts and plays for 2-3 seconds, buffering then occurs for around 10-15 seconds and then starts playing again. In other browsers YouTube works just fine.

This is also not just confined to YouTube, you may experience very slow responses from other websites when using Google Chrome, even speed tests through Google will show poor performance, slow speeds and lots of lag.

Google’s own technical forum recognises this as a problem and suggests the following course of action to resolve it:

• Clear your browsing data
• Reset your browser settings
• Turn off hardware acceleration by going to Settings > Advanced Settings > Under 'System' uncheck Use hardware acceleration when available
• Create a new Chrome user and see if it still occurs
• Use Chrome Clean-up Tool and check for any errors

They also suggest that if all else fails, you should uninstall Google Chrome and reinstall it from scratch.

You can download the latest stable version from here

https://www.google.com/chrome/browser/desktop/index.html

Google Chrome Canary

There is also a Developers “Beta” version of Chrome, called “Chrome Canary”, which has the newest of the new Chrome features, and can be run side by side with the current stable version of the Chrome browser, but it comes with the following disclaimer:

Caution: it's designed for developers and early adopters, and can sometimes break down completely

If all else fails we recommend you to utilise a different browser such as Opera or Firefox.