6 ms·

This is the equivalent of closing all tabs, with the added bonus of having a list of what you just closed. I refuse to compromise on functionality because Chro

This is the equivalent of closing all tabs, with the added bonus of having a list of what you just closed. I refuse to compromise on functionality because Chrome can't get its memory deal together.

IgorPartola 14y ago
Firefox seems to be no better: http://www.arewesmallyet.com/ http://www.arewesmallyet.com/
- revelation 14y ago
  Thats alright. A single chrome tab is regularly >150MiB, and thats for plain sites! (edit: this seems to measure the size of the installer binary. I think you wanted to link https://areweslimyet.com/ https://areweslimyet.com/ which shows Firefox using <512MiB with 30 tabs for popular websites open)
  - IgorPartola 14y ago
    Yes, you are right. That's the one I was aiming for. Need more coffee...
- jlongster 14y ago
  You just link to a graph showing the sizes of the Firefox binary on various platforms across different versions. It has nothing to do with RAM. Firefox definitely wins out in memory with more tabs because Chrome's process-per-tab model accumulates overhead for every process, while Firefox's tabs are more lean.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
waxjar 14y ago
Chrome actually already has this built in, too. If you close your window, you'll get a browsable "x tabs" entry in your browsing history. An additional 20-30 MB of memory could be saved by not installing this extension.
- srgseg 14y ago
  True, but this extension will help you distinguish between the tabs you want to close forever and the tabs you want to return to later.
  - redhatter 14y ago
    I like it. Was actually looking for something like this.
  - roc 14y ago
    So do bookmarks. And this overlap becomes obvious as people inevitably ask for Chrome or OneTab to allow them to cluster tabs by topic/project -- because a linear scan is never going to 'work' for people who leave enough tabs open that it becomes a 'problem'. The underlying problem here is workflow. People are leaving tabs open as a reminder of things to which they intend to return. (Regardless of whether they will or not; that's another discussion.) And they're not bookmarking, because bookmarking begs organizational overhead, which leads to its own mess. (neither tags nor folders are great or sufficient) And who knows if a bookmark will still point to the content you intended, when you finally get back to it? So the problem is ultimately that bookmarking is broken, both for quick reference and longer-term storage. So why not fix that? Why not a system where bookmarking a site saves a copy to a (cloud-stored) cache. [1] And then searches can be done on the content in that cache. And hits can be served both from the cache, and a simultaneously downloaded 'live' result, available with a toggle. [2] So that one can bookmark a brag-post about a neat jquery-enabled dropdown list and not have to worry about categorizing it, nor whether or not it will be there in a year, and be confident that they can refer to it again with a simple search of any of the key words that occur to them. [3] [1] Because one can never know what will happen to content online (changes, broken links, takedowns, etc) and doing a federated search across thousands of bookmarked sites looking for 'jquery dropdown' is going to be a nightmare. [2] Room here for a great feature of non-trivial difficulty: change-detection and display of diffs (if any) rendered in-line. [3] Or even searching by meta-data such as date-of-bookmark, location or source-device. "That thing I was reading on my phone last spring, when I was stuck in Chicago on business..." can be surprisingly useful when searching.
btown 14y ago
I wouldn't be too quick to blame Chrome. What if each open background tab is running a computation/upload that requires the DOM? What if you're listening to music in the background? Point is, Chrome can't just arbitrarily decide to pause execution and free up memory for background tabs. Me, I'm a documentation-holic. I need to have all the references for whatever project I'm working on a single click away. Sometimes that will be working with a very specific library, so there's no point in replacing my entire bookmarks bar with all the documentation links for that. I'd normally just leave everything in tabs, and when I run out of memory when I need to launch a memory-heavy app, I'd go to Chrome's Task Manager and kill those tabs. So this is a godsend for me.
- DennisP 14y ago
  There are very few cases where I actually want tabs running in the background, and I'd be happy to add those cases to a whitelist in exchange for Chrome not eating my computer. But as long as no browser does that, OP's option looks like a huge timesaver for me.
  - joshmlewis 14y ago
    But you're a power user, most users wouldn't want the hassle of adding sites to a whitelist.
    - Sunlis 14y ago
      If something like that was implemented, I would hope that it would be turned off by default and hidden away under the "here be dragons" section of Chrome's settings.
    - DennisP 14y ago
      Depends on the interface. An item in the wrench menu saying "run page in background" would be easy enough for anyone.
Zarel 14y ago
It should be noted that Chrome has a built-in "Bookmark All Tabs" button which will bookmark all tabs in the window into a folder... This extension doesn't seem to add any functionality on top of that.
- srgseg 14y ago
  I used to do that sometimes, but it suffered from the "out of sight, out of mind" problem.
  - Schlaefer 14y ago
    I sorely miss a "save all open tabs into one bookmark file". End of the day: save it to your project folder where all other project files live. Later when you work on the project again: double click to reopen all your tabs. "Bookmark All Tabs" is nearly there, but I also tend to forget about it if I don't see it.
- danneu 14y ago
  This extension just adds a new workflow option. For instance, your workflow doesn't work for me because "bookmark" in my life pretty much means "lose this page in my junk drawer of pages that I'll probably never read again, but I might if I'm ever stranded on an island with nothing but my cached bookmarks." So I have a completely different workflow that you'd probably find equally extraneous, but it works for me.
cevaris 14y ago
Agreed. There is no bonus here. Now if you can hot switch between tabs, or rather use some key shortcuts to better manage the switching, that would bee good.
- nwenzel 14y ago
  On a Mac, cmd-1 or cmd-2 or cmd-3 or cmd-n jumps to the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, nth tab.
naner 14y ago
Compromise on functionality? Too many tabs is a usability problem in Chrome. This just provides additional functionality.

This is the equivalent of closing all tabs, with the added bonus of having a list of what you just closed. I refuse to compromise on functionality because Chrome can't get its memory deal together.

IgorPartola 14y ago

Firefox seems to be no better: http://www.arewesmallyet.com/ http://www.arewesmallyet.com/

revelation 14y ago
Thats alright. A single chrome tab is regularly >150MiB, and thats for plain sites! (edit: this seems to measure the size of the installer binary. I think you wanted to link https://areweslimyet.com/ https://areweslimyet.com/ which shows Firefox using <512MiB with 30 tabs for popular websites open)
- IgorPartola 14y ago
  Yes, you are right. That's the one I was aiming for. Need more coffee...
jlongster 14y ago
You just link to a graph showing the sizes of the Firefox binary on various platforms across different versions. It has nothing to do with RAM. Firefox definitely wins out in memory with more tabs because Chrome's process-per-tab model accumulates overhead for every process, while Firefox's tabs are more lean.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

waxjar 14y ago

Chrome actually already has this built in, too. If you close your window, you'll get a browsable "x tabs" entry in your browsing history. An additional 20-30 MB of memory could be saved by not installing this extension.

srgseg 14y ago
True, but this extension will help you distinguish between the tabs you want to close forever and the tabs you want to return to later.
- redhatter 14y ago
  I like it. Was actually looking for something like this.
- roc 14y ago
  So do bookmarks. And this overlap becomes obvious as people inevitably ask for Chrome or OneTab to allow them to cluster tabs by topic/project -- because a linear scan is never going to 'work' for people who leave enough tabs open that it becomes a 'problem'. The underlying problem here is workflow. People are leaving tabs open as a reminder of things to which they intend to return. (Regardless of whether they will or not; that's another discussion.) And they're not bookmarking, because bookmarking begs organizational overhead, which leads to its own mess. (neither tags nor folders are great or sufficient) And who knows if a bookmark will still point to the content you intended, when you finally get back to it? So the problem is ultimately that bookmarking is broken, both for quick reference and longer-term storage. So why not fix that? Why not a system where bookmarking a site saves a copy to a (cloud-stored) cache. [1] And then searches can be done on the content in that cache. And hits can be served both from the cache, and a simultaneously downloaded 'live' result, available with a toggle. [2] So that one can bookmark a brag-post about a neat jquery-enabled dropdown list and not have to worry about categorizing it, nor whether or not it will be there in a year, and be confident that they can refer to it again with a simple search of any of the key words that occur to them. [3] [1] Because one can never know what will happen to content online (changes, broken links, takedowns, etc) and doing a federated search across thousands of bookmarked sites looking for 'jquery dropdown' is going to be a nightmare. [2] Room here for a great feature of non-trivial difficulty: change-detection and display of diffs (if any) rendered in-line. [3] Or even searching by meta-data such as date-of-bookmark, location or source-device. "That thing I was reading on my phone last spring, when I was stuck in Chicago on business..." can be surprisingly useful when searching.

btown 14y ago

I wouldn't be too quick to blame Chrome. What if each open background tab is running a computation/upload that requires the DOM? What if you're listening to music in the background? Point is, Chrome can't just arbitrarily decide to pause execution and free up memory for background tabs. Me, I'm a documentation-holic. I need to have all the references for whatever project I'm working on a single click away. Sometimes that will be working with a very specific library, so there's no point in replacing my entire bookmarks bar with all the documentation links for that. I'd normally just leave everything in tabs, and when I run out of memory when I need to launch a memory-heavy app, I'd go to Chrome's Task Manager and kill those tabs. So this is a godsend for me.

DennisP 14y ago
There are very few cases where I actually want tabs running in the background, and I'd be happy to add those cases to a whitelist in exchange for Chrome not eating my computer. But as long as no browser does that, OP's option looks like a huge timesaver for me.
- joshmlewis 14y ago
  But you're a power user, most users wouldn't want the hassle of adding sites to a whitelist.
  - Sunlis 14y ago
    If something like that was implemented, I would hope that it would be turned off by default and hidden away under the "here be dragons" section of Chrome's settings.
  - DennisP 14y ago
    Depends on the interface. An item in the wrench menu saying "run page in background" would be easy enough for anyone.

Zarel 14y ago

It should be noted that Chrome has a built-in "Bookmark All Tabs" button which will bookmark all tabs in the window into a folder... This extension doesn't seem to add any functionality on top of that.

srgseg 14y ago
I used to do that sometimes, but it suffered from the "out of sight, out of mind" problem.
- Schlaefer 14y ago
  I sorely miss a "save all open tabs into one bookmark file". End of the day: save it to your project folder where all other project files live. Later when you work on the project again: double click to reopen all your tabs. "Bookmark All Tabs" is nearly there, but I also tend to forget about it if I don't see it.
danneu 14y ago
This extension just adds a new workflow option. For instance, your workflow doesn't work for me because "bookmark" in my life pretty much means "lose this page in my junk drawer of pages that I'll probably never read again, but I might if I'm ever stranded on an island with nothing but my cached bookmarks." So I have a completely different workflow that you'd probably find equally extraneous, but it works for me.

cevaris 14y ago

Agreed. There is no bonus here. Now if you can hot switch between tabs, or rather use some key shortcuts to better manage the switching, that would bee good.

nwenzel 14y ago
On a Mac, cmd-1 or cmd-2 or cmd-3 or cmd-n jumps to the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, nth tab.

naner 14y ago

Compromise on functionality? Too many tabs is a usability problem in Chrome. This just provides additional functionality.