Google’s Chrome web browser is fast, doesn’t have a lot of clunky menus to wade through, and is designed to make web surfing easy on a Windows, Mac, Linux, or Chrome OS device. But it can also be a bit of a resource hog — especially if you’ve got a large number of browser tabs open at once.

OneTab is a Chrome plugin that frees up memory and other resources by saving a list of all your currently open tabs… and then closing them. Bear with me a minute… it actually makes sense.

OneTab

If you’re like me, you probably only actually need one or two browser tabs open at a time. But you end up opening a bunch of tabs as you go about your business online because you keep finding links to pages you want to read once you’re done with the page you’re currently on.

You start reading an article at your favorite news site, and there are links to half a dozen other interesting articles or websites, so you open them in background tabs. You start watching a video on YouTube and find links in the sidebar to a few other related videos you totally want to watch… so you open those in additional tabs. And so on.

Each of those tabs is now eating system resources and before you know it your web browser is using most of your laptop’s memory — mostly for pages you’re not actually ready to look at yet.

So OneTab lets you hit a button in your browser toolbar to close every single page that’s open, thus saving an awful lot of memory. Now all you see is a single tab with a list of pages that were open before. You can restore them all by tapping the Restore all button. Or you can just tap links one by one to open them as you need them.

You can also export the list of tabs so you can access it later.

Note that OneTab works on every tab in a current Chrome window — so if you have two or more windows open, OneTab will only close the pages of the window that you tapped the OneTab icon for.

If you never find yourself running out of memory, OneTab might not actually be all that useful. But if you’re running Chrome on an older computer or one that just doesn’t have a lot of RAM, this free plugin could come in handy. It could also free up CPU resources if you’re visiting websites that are running a lot of scripts.

via Waxy

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5 replies on “OneTab for Chrome frees up resources by closing tabs, restoring them when needed”

  1. Nice. But Chrome has the much more functional work in this category.

    TabsOutliner

    a screenshot:
    https://i.imgur.com/o8ZvIDH.jpg

    a link
    https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabs-outliner/eggkanocgddhmamlbiijnphhppkpkmkl

    It is also save the tabs in case of crash. Does not declare the access rights for all the user data. Has much more rich organizing capabilities. And can export links in GoogleDoc where its possible to actually control with whom they will be shared.

  2. this will save me from when I close chrome and this old as the hills computer idles for 10 minutes before it is usable.

  3. Firefox used to kill me on this, but they have improved considerably. At this moment I have nine tabs opened with 450MB of Ram utilized. I used to get up over 2gig of ram regularly, and closing tabs didn´t release that memory.

  4. This defeats my whole purpose of using multiple tabs, which is to keep the tabs open for rapid access, or pre-load some tabs in the background while viewing others, in order to save time when you have a low bandwidth internet connection. And how is this any different from just using the browsing history list?

    By closing the tabs, that means I would need to re-load each tab (into RAM) each time I need access to them. I suppose running out of RAM isn’t my problem, but slow internet is.

    1. Well, this is specifically for those who have low memory issues. Plus it’s a little more automated than the history list. Clearly, it’s not for you.

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