Automatically discards all tabs at startup, before they load, reducing memory footprint and unnecessary bandwidth usage.

Latest Version

Version
0.5
Update
August 27, 2019
Size
25.24KiB
Developer
Category
Users
2,000+
Rating
4.36 ★
Manifest Version
2
Web Store Status
Languages Support
English (UK)
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Permissions
Tabs
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Sloth Extension

An open-source and light-weight chrome / chromium extension which ensures that tabs are lazily loaded.

Source code: https://github.com/hrj/sloth

Requires Chrome 54+.

## How it works

This plugin uses the discard API available since Chrome 54. All tabs except new tabs or \"special\" tabs are discarded. Discarded tabs are visible in the tab bar, but not loaded from the network nor kept in memory.

If a window doesn't have a new tab, it is created and activated. This prevents any tab from loading during startup, unless you explicitly select it.

Special tabs are those with chrome:// URLs, for example.

Note: Where there are hundreds of tabs open in the session, a couple of them sneak through and become active. This limitation is due to the design of the browser. See https://github.com/hrj/sloth/issues/1.

## History / Credits

I found an extension called Native Lazy Tabs here. It was distributed under the GPL license. I adapted it and added the \"new tab\" feature.

The icon is by Jaime Serra, distributed under the CC license.
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Source Manifest.json

{"update_url": "https://clients2.google.com/service/update2/crx", "name": "Sloth", "short_name": "Sloth", "description": "Automatically discards all tabs at startup, before they load, reducing memory footprint and unnecessary bandwidth usage.", "version": "0.5", "permissions": [ "tabs" ], "background": { "scripts": ["js/eventPage.js"], "persistent": false }, "icons": { "16": "img/icon16.png", "48": "img/icon48.png", "128": "img/icon128.png" }, "browser_action": { "default_icon": { "16": "img/icon16.png", "48": "img/icon48.png", "128": "img/icon128.png" } }, "incognito": "not_allowed", "manifest_version": 2, "minimum_chrome_version": "54", "options_ui": { "page": "html/options.html", "chrome_style": true }}
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User reviews

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Xalomon (ID: 000000fce49f3da0) Voted 1 ★ - Updated 09/29/2023 I have 7 windows with more than 600 tabs opened total. The whole point of adding this extensions is to have a quick restart of the browser, and to have one with low memory usage as only the active tabs of those windows would be loaded. When looking at the task manager it seems this extension opens a gorillion of new tab pages in the background, each with their google.com subframe, even when told not to in options. Those are loaded instead of the pages I have opened, but this makes the browser slower to start up and those use 600MB memory which is more than the pages loaded from the background used. Completely the opposite of what one wants, and it's clear this wasn't tested with more than 500 idle tabs opened, which would be a reason to want an extension like this.

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Online ReD Settings (ID: 0000006e134e8301) Voted 5 ★ - Updated 04/27/2022 Simply perfect.

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Ashish Bisht (ID: 0000007549222641) Voted 5 ★ - Updated 12/13/2019 working awesome !

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(ID: ) Voted 5 ★ - Updated 03/03/2019 Funciona perfecto

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Taehl (ID: 000000ac37b17a34) Voted 4 ★ - Updated 02/05/2019 Finally, something that stops all of my tabs loading at the same time. However, your "new tab" option doesn't work - opening Chromium loads the last tab, waits a moment, THEN opens a new tab.