Having a multitude of tabs open while using Google Chrome is a dizzying, confusing and highly power-consuming practise. Memory-intensive tabs can really slow down your computer and put a lot of strain on your machine. Also, it just feels so satisfying when you finally get to close a bunch of tabs and see all that space free up. I mean REALLY satisfying. But alas, we seldom have that option, as there’s always a couple of pages we can’t afford to close, in case we need to get back to them later.
There is, however, a trick to save on your laptop’s performance and battery life and still keep your tabs open. Follow these steps –
1. Click on the settings button (the 3 lines on the top right corner)
2. Go down to the ‘More Tools’ option
3. On the new menu that pops up, click on ‘Task Manager’. You’ll get a list of all the tabs your browser is running
4. Click on the ‘Memory’ button on the top. This will sort the tabs according to the ones using the most memory
5. Choose the tabs you want to kill temporarily and press the ‘End Process’ button
This will result in the tab showing an ‘Aw, snap!’ error message and will free up the tab’s memory. You can easily go back to it later by just refreshing the page.
While this isn’t the most practical and effective method, it is one of the only options available in a situation where your tabs are too important to close, but too heavy to keep running constantly. If you don’t want to bother with all of this, you could also install the ‘Great Suspender‘ Chrome extension, which temporarily suspends tabs you’re not using and puts them to sleep to save memory. It’s completely customisable, and pretty nifty too!
