Solving The “Too Many Tabs Opened” Problem

Are you also a tab maniac having tens of tabs opened in your browser and wondering why your internet works so slow? This week’s discovery might be something you were looking for a long time. I came across this great Google Chrome extension called The Great Suspender. Cool name huh?

If you work in just one tab, whilst not clicking through to the other hundred tabs that you’ve opened before, they still use a lot of memory and CPU. You can see that once you switch back to the remaining tabs, they reload, causing browsers to crash, if you had a lot of tabs running at the same time.

The Great Suspender frees up system resources by simply freezing or ‘suspending’ the unused tabs and allowing you to work in the tabs you need in a faster way.

You can suspend the tabs manually or set a rule that after a period of time, they have to shut down automatically. The tabs are not closed, their loading activity is just paused. If you click back on the suspended page, it will go back to live status. If some of the tabs need to run in the background, you can add those websites to your whitelist to avoid automatic suspension.

One other advantage – if you ever close the window and open up again, the likelihood of crashing Chrome is high, because the tabs have to reload. With the extension you can avoid this problem. Only the tab that was unsuspended will reload.


How to Set it Up?

Remember, it’s a Chrome extension, so it will only work in a Chrome web browser. Go to The Great Suspender plugin page and download it to Chrome.

Once it’s added, you will be redirected to the settings page automatically:

Customize your settings – do you want to freeze all pages? Is there any time frame that you want the tabs to be suspended for?

I added a separate extension button in the right corner menu, so every time I work on something, I can click on the button and freeze particular tabs or all of the unused tabs. It’s so easy!

What are the advantages of using The Great Suspender? Check your memory usage or battery life if you’re working on your laptop. See this screenshot showing how many tabs running in the background are using a lot of memory compared to the after situation with The Great Suspender installed. Only those tabs that were unsuspended were running online.

I hope this extension will be soon available for other browsers, such as Safari or Mozilla. I’m also wondering if such an extension will be ready for mobile and tablet users? My iPad is running very slow and I could make use of that for sure!

We will be happy to hear your thoughts

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