Like all the latest web browsers, Google Chrome also allows you to open multiple tabs in a single window. Chrome actually create a separate process for all these tabs so that the resources of one tab do not affect others. This is very useful as it prevents the hanging of the browser due to some rendering problem in a tab. But opening multiple processes corresponding to various tabs in Chrome might end up in using lots of your system memory. If you are concerned about tabs in Chrome hogging your memory, then you use the TabMemFree extension for Chrome to automatically park such idle tabs.
This extension does this job by switching the selected tabs to an new blank tab while the icon (favicon) and title of that tab stays the same. Later when you switch to those tabs, the contents are reloaded. Here are some of the features of the TabMemFree extension :
- Idle inactive tabs are parked to a lightweight page (title and icon stay the same).
- Faster browser start with previously parked tabs.
- You can click on extension icon to temporary activate/deactivate extension.
- You can right-click on extension icon to go to Options page.
- Options to tweak maximum tab idle time and check frequency, whitelist pinned tabs.
After you install this extension in Google Chrome, it puts an icon in the omnibar, on the right side of the location bar. You have to click on this icon to toggle on or off the TabMemFree extension. When TabMemFree is enabled, it looks for any idle tabs and if found parks them and redirects them to an blank page while keeping the title and icon unchanged. By default, it assumes that any tab not used for 15 minutes is idle.
On the settings page, you can change the amount of idle time after which TabMemFree parks those idle tabs and saves your precious memory. Additionally, you can also check the frequency of how often it checks for the idle tabs. By default, this frequency period is 1 minute but you can adjust it to your likes.
So if you are a Chrome user who opens multiple tabs in your browser and often many of the tabs stay unattended for many minutes and hours, then you are going to find this TabMemFree extension very useful as it helps you free memory claimed by these idle tabs in Chrome. This may result in a faster and more responsive Chrome browser for you. You can download and install this extension from https://chrome.google.com/.