With Google Chrome every loaded tab occupies memory therefore, when you open multiple sites together in different tabs, Chrome starts to get heavier and heavier . Not only that, a card that remains open for a long time naturally tends to occupy more and more memory.
To get evidence of this you can open the Windows task manager or the Chrome internal task manager, by pressing the combination of Shift-Esc keys.
Especially with the Chrome task manager you can see how the memory occupied by open sites grows every second .
Some extensions have therefore been developed that allow you to automatically manage the open tabs, so that those that are not looked at after a certain period of time are closed or disabled.
The purpose of these extensions is to free the memory used by inactive tabs and prevent slowdowns in the browser and system.
Among these extensions there are 4 of different types .
UPDATE: From 2016 Chrome cancels tabs in the background to reduce memory consumption so these extensions are no longer fundamental as before, although they still remain useful to improve the situation on PCs with RAM less than 8 GB.
1) The Great Suspender keeps Chrome light and fast, useful to suspend a card automatically with timer or whenever you want, without having to wait for a timer.
It is possible to deactivate a single tab or all the open tabs in a Chrome window, without however closing them and with the possibility to reload them whenever you want.
2) Tab Wrangler is a simple and few options extension that automatically closes tabs that remain inactive for a certain period of time.
Closing means that they are really made to disappear, inactive instead means that they are not looked at.
In Tab Wrangler, however, the tabs that are closed can be retrieved and reloaded by pressing the extension button at the top right, which shows the number of closed tabs.
The Tab Wrangler box is made up of three separate tabs, one with recently closed tabs that can be restored.
The second with the list of open tabs and the timer before it is closed automatically.
In this section, if you put the cross next to the address of one of the open sites, you can prevent it from being closed.
In the Tab Wrangler options, on the other hand, you can define the time within which an inactive tab must be closed.
In the options it is also indicated that if there are only 5 tabs open (this number can be changed), none of them must be closed.
3) OneTab to free up the memory occupied by Chrome when working with many open tabs.
4) TabMemFree uses the same approach, has fewer options, but does not close inactive tabs, only suspends them.
When you click again on the card that had been parked and had been deactivated, it reloads from scratch updating itself.
The approach is a bit different and there is no way to create exceptions, but Chrome remains always light and snappy even on older computers with little available memory.
5) Tabs Limiter with queue is a tab limiter, which works by turning off excess tab sites.
In practice, only 10 tabs are kept active on Chrome (the number can be changed), while the others, those unused for a long time, are deactivated and downloaded from memory, without however being closed.
In another article, other extensions to improve productivity in Google Chrome
