Auto Tab Discard for Chrome

Browsers, especially Chrome, are well-known for their out-of-control resource consumption. Add dozens of tabs or more, and your computer will start to feel slower, and that's not only your imagination. One easy way to ensure Chrome is not hogging your memory is to permanently keep the number of active tabs in check. If that's not a possibility, Auto Tab Discard for Chrome will help you free up some memory by automatically discarding inactive tabs.

Discarding a tab is not the same thing as closing it. After a tab gets discarded, it just gets erased from the memory, so it cannot use your CPU or memory by running background scripts. While in the discarded state, a gray dot will be placed over the tab's icon.

Accessing a discarded tab requires nothing more than clicking on it. Once activated, a tab will simply auto-refresh and re-display its contents. Why re-display? Because in discarded state, the tab in order will be just a blank page, thus requiring no resources.

Access the Option's menu by clicking the extension's icon. From there you can start to define certain conditions. For example, you can determine the interval after a tab gets discarded, or after a certain number of tabs is exceeded.

You can white-list certain sites, causing the add-on to ignore discarding tabs, disregarding the time/tab limits. You can choose to permanently delete tabs if they are inactive for a number of hours, also determined by yourself.

Auto Tab Discard might seem the type of add-on for users with medium to low-spec builds, but even a high-end machine can suffer if an excessive number of tabs are in use. The add-on works in a clean manner, keeping the tabs afloat, so you can come back later without fear of losing them.