Extension Watch: The Great Suspender for Chrome and Chromium

Productivity Sauce

If you have a nagging feeling that the Chrome or Chromium browser has an unhealthy appetite for system resources, you have every right to be concerned. Since the browser runs each tab as a separate process, the more tabs you keep opened, the more resources the browser consumes and the less stable it becomes. The Great Suspender extension provides a not very elegant but workable solution to the problem. Once installed, the extension suspends any tab that has been inactive for a specific period of time, thus freeing up unused RAM and resources.

The extension also adds a button to the main toolbar that lets you suspend the current tab immediately, pause the suspension as well as suspend and unsuspend all tabs in one go. The extension's Settings section lets you specify the period of inactivity before suspending tabs, enable the option to automatically unsuspend a tab when it's in focus, and whitelist specific sites from being suspended. Obviously, it would have been better if Chrome and Chromium could manage resources more efficiently on their own, but for lack of better options, The Great Suspender is probably the next best thing.