Tab Suspender

Pinned or not, having too many tabs opened in your Chrome web browser can put a strain on the system resources, increasing the RAM usage and, ultimately, affecting not just the browser’s responsiveness, but also the performance of the entire system and the battery life, if you are using a laptop. Moreover, studies prove that a large number of opened tabs lead to reduced productivity due to unnecessary tab switching.

Tab Suspender is a Chrome extension that can address this issue, providing a way to control unused tabs and hibernate those that have not been visited for a while. Its development team assessed that Chrome takes up three to five times less memory with suspended tabs.

Let’s start by saying that you must go through a simple configuration to have the extension working as you need it to. Thanks to the built-in wizard, you are guided step-by-step through configuring the basic settings, but you can also opt to stick to the default, predefined settings.

The wizard enables you to set the idle amount of time before an unused tab is put to sleep which, by default, is 30 minutes. But what is interesting (although the wizard does not mention it) is that Tab Suspender features adaptive auto-suspender. This means that the extension can determine the auto-suspend timeout based on your interaction with a tab.

In addition to this, it is possible to instruct Tab Suspender to automatically look for most rarely used or unused tabs and close them without your intervention.

Tab Suspender can be accessed via its small icon, right next to the address bar in Chrome. Just pin the icon to the toolbar to have it at hand whenever necessary. Even if you decided to choose the default configuration, you can still change the extension’s settings by clicking on the icon.

Extra options allow you to set an exception for the currently opened website or tab. With just the click of a button, you can suspend a tab, a Chrome window, all the other tabs except the currently opened one. A history of all your actions (suspended and closed tabs) is available.

To avoid battery depletion, Tab Suspender can be configured to automatically suspend tabs when the battery level is below a certain level. Moreover, you can confiugure it to discard tabs altogether, not just unload them and save up even more RAM and battery this way. Optionally, tabs that play music and pinned tabs can be ignored by the add-on.

Every single tab you open in Google Chrome takes up some amount of RAM, depending on the page type. In other words, the more tabs you have opened, the more memory the browser will require to work properly. This can, of course, lead to browser and system crashes.

While there are solutions to this problem, such as using bookmarks instead of pinned tabs for the websites you want to have at hand, creating reading lists and tab groups, Tab Suspender is a good alternative that needn’t change the way you work. Not just that it can speed up the browser, but it lowers resource usage and helps you declutter tabs easier.