Speed up Google Chrome With This Shrink Tabs Extension
I now have about 70 tabs open on my computer, give or take a few. I treat Chrome tabs as temporary bookmarks. For example, some of my open tabs are for stories I want to read later, and a few others are for SF Beer Week events I’m currently planning. This is not the most efficient way to work, but I chose it. Unfortunately, it’s also a waste of energy.
My habit of tabbing has become a problem on my MacBook more than once simply because keeping all those tabs open, especially when using Google Chrome, consumes a ton of computer memory.
One Tab is a Chrome extension that allows you to essentially keep all of these tabs open without leaving them open. It’s also available for Firefox .
When you use it, it will convert all your open tabs to a list. When you need to return to them again, you can restore the desired individual tab or all of your tabs at once. The extension’s creators say that using it can save up to 95% of your computer’s memory. This, of course, depends on how many tabs you keep open on a regular basis, but there should be some small memory savings anyway.
This list of tabs can also be converted to a web page for you to share with your friends. This means that the dozen or so beer events I’ve opened so far can be sent to friends by simply creating a web page with links if I want to. Or I could just send this research to myself and close all those tabs for good.
While the sharing feature is cool, the real bonus is in the memory savings. If you regularly leave open as much as I do, that could potentially mean the difference between having a working computer and constantly watching the wheel of death spinning.