Suspending Browser Tabs for Memory Conservation

Update: As of February 2021, The Great Suspender is no longer available due to the releases being overtaken by a malacious owner.  Modern Chrome versions are said to have better memory management anyway, so you may find a separate extension unnecessary.

If you’re like me and have upwards to 30-50 browser tabs open at the same time, you may notice that your computer becomes sluggish.  In my case this was because all the tabs still consume memory even though I might not need them for some period of time.  I still like to keep some tabs that I might need to quickly refer back to later.

I recently found a Chrome extension called The Great Suspender that automatically replaces the tab with a placeholder page after a certain period of time, optionally with a screenshot of what the page looked like.

An example of a suspended tab

With the click of the mouse anywhere in the placeholder, the actual page reloads.

The extension also allows you to manually suspend tabs if you know you won’t be needing the tab for a while, and whitelist certain pages or sites to never suspend automatically.

I’ve found I can save a few GB of memory, which could be nearly 20% of my total system memory.  Every bit counts!

Google Chrome

Google is releasing a beta of its browser application, Google Chrome, finally.  The scheduled release date is tomorrow (Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008).

Google Chrome uses the WebKit rendering engine, which is currently being used in Apple’s Safari browser among others.  I personally prefer Safari’s speed at loading pages, and I hope Google Chrome using the same engine can achieve same or better speeds than Firefox or Internet Explorer.

Also it seems like each tab in Google Chrome will be run in its own process, which should make memory leaks easier to manage (well hopefully there won’t be any to start off with).

The Google Chrome team put together a comic book outlining the development for this browser.  Very interesting read.

Google Blogoscoped has a post on Google Chrome quickly listing a few features and also another post with screenshots of the new browser.  Google’s official blog also has a post mainly for announcing Google Chrome’s release date.  Yet another post on All Things Digital discusses Google’s tactical moves invading the browser market.

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