If you are working on a smaller notebook device then you have to be careful about how many applications you can run at the same time. This is because smaller devices with not so impressive specs have a low end CPU and limited amount of RAM. If you open multiple windows, run too many applications or even open dozens of Firefox tabs, these devices will become intolerably slow and you won’t be able to do any productive work in a timely manner.
As far as Firefox browser is concerned, you can use it without affecting the system resources that much if you use “Auto Tab Discard” extension in the browser. This extension can clean the memory used by the background tabs and disable them which leads to recovery of the RAM as well as reduced load on the system processor. Disabling the background browser tabs does not affect the performance of the browser and as soon as you switch back to the disabled tabs, these tabs are restored back to their former state.
After the installation of “Auto Tab Discard” extension, you can access it from its icon in the Firefox toolbar. You can click on this icon and find options to discard the current tab, discard all inactive tabs, discard inactive tabs in the current Firefox window, discard all inactive tabs in other Firefox windows, do not discard the current domain etc. You get the same options no matter if you left-click on the icon or right-click on the icon.
In the settings for “Auto Tab Discard” extension, you can configure discard options, discard conditions and exceptions. These options allow you to decide when a tab is considered inactive, and which menu items are to be displayed. There are conditions such as do not discard a tab if media is playing in it which helps you keep a tab active for example, if you are listening to online radio stream in it. Creating an exception list is very helpful when you want certain webpages always remain completely untouched by all actions and settings.
“Auto Tab Discard” extension for Firefox allows you to disable background inactive tabs to increase the performance of your computer when you are using Firefox browser.
You can get the “Auto Tab Discard” extension for Firefox from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-discard/