Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

Memory use seems like a really pointless thing for users to care about. There's a widespread intuition that using RAM is inherently bad and low memory usage is a worthwhile goal, but it doesn't really make sense. The key performance goal is minimising latency, which is best served by using as much RAM as possible without having to swap out.<p>RAM is now fantastically cheap. 16GB of DDR3 costs less than $120 in either DIMM or SODIMM format, so there's little reason not to load out your machine with far more memory than you'd practically need.<p>I'd like software to use <i>more</i> memory, not less - for the vast majority of the time, most of my RAM is unused and my disk is idle, so why not use an aggressive strategy of pre-emptive caching?

This is the equivalent of closing all tabs, with the added bonus of having a list of what you just closed.<p>I refuse to compromise on functionality because Chrome can't get its memory deal together.

OneTab developer here: thanks for all your suggestions, I'll be working on them :)<p>A few FAQs:<p>1. The OneTab tab persists even if you close your web browser. 2. If you ever close your OneTab tab, this doesn't lose your tabs. You can always get it back by clicking the blue extension icon. 3. Your tabs are never sent to our servers unless you press the button to 'share as a web page'.

Installed. This is pretty nice for the people who uses dozens of tabs as temp bookmarks.<p>A bit of feedback: I was just typing this comment and hit the button, obviously the comment was lost and had to type it again. Would be great if if checked for focused inputs or textareas or something before closing that tab, or that it restores the tabs them with the content.<p>Another idea I can think of is to "close" all the tabs that are NOT the one you currently are in, or "close" all the tabs on the right of the current one.<p>Anyway, thanks

For a free product, the copy on their site feels a bit more "salesy" than I'm used to for a free product

I think that this 95% number is wrong. Likely doesn't take good old shared memory into consideration...<p><a href="http://blog.chromium.org/2008/09/google-chrome-memory-usage-good-and-bad.html" rel="nofollow">http://blog.chromium.org/2008/09/google-chrome-memory-usage-...</a><p>"Measuring memory<p>If you're measuring memory in a multi-process application like Google Chrome, don't forget to take into account shared memory. If you add the size of each process via the Windows XP task manager, you'll be double counting the shared memory for each process. If there are a large number of processes, double-counting can account for 30-40% extra memory size."

Edit: This is not meant to sound discouraging to the developer; I just suspect he solved the wrong problem.<p>I find it very strange that a tool exists to reduce chrome's memory footprint by closing tabs. This does not seem to be the right solution to any problem I can think of.<p>If memory consumption is what bugs you, maybe you should use a browser that consumes less memory per open tab.<p>If the number of open tabs is what bugs you, then you are probably using tabs as temporary bookmarks. There should be tools especially for this job. Some sort of "read-it-later" list comes to mind.<p>"one-tab" looks like some sort of read-it-later list that is labeled as a memory saver. Fascinating.

Oh hey! I built something similar a while ago, for somewhat similar reasons: "Pause Tabs" (<a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pause-tabs/gldljdhnehlgmkncfenmgfjblmmcjgce" rel="nofollow">https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pause-tabs/gldljdh...</a>).<p>The use-case is <i>slightly</i> different, though--instead of being an en-masse "dump these things out of my sight" button, I basically wanted a single-page "bookmark" that works more like the real kind you use in books, where the two fundamental operations are:<p>&#62; "Open, remove the bookmark, and restore reading to previous position, atomically"; and<p>&#62; "Save position, create bookmark, and put away for later, atomically".<p>If you want, though, it can still give you the same effect of "hammer the button to 'put away' a window's worth of tabs."<p>On the other hand, the bookmarks Pause Tabs creates [despite just being regular bookmarks] preserve of your vertical-scroll position on the page, which is kind of nice for long documents. I wonder why that isn't a "built-in thing bookmarks are just expected to do", actually.

I <i>absolutely</i> fail to see the point here. Why should I use this? Is this again one of these instances where, magically, free RAM is good?<p>30 tabs opened simultaneously (with AdBlock, Ghostery and Disconnect), alongside Thunderbird, Emacs (+daemon) and a full DE run up to 1.8GiB of RAM used on my machine, which is everything but fast, new, or fancy. Consequently, I still have 2GB of RAM remaining that are not directly needed (and hence used for caching by the OS).<p>I'm writing all this from a Core2Duo laptop, so really, when exactly does any computer bought at the same time (or since) have <i>actual</i> problems of running out of memory? I have not experienced such problems in <i>years</i> on anything other than a Raspberry Pi. Is this a problem that really needs solving?<p>Feel free to point me to use cases where this is essential or useful, for I cannot see any.

Allow a way to whitelist domains that should not be closed (like gmail)

From what I understand, this calls out to their servers and they display a page?<p>Would it not be more secure and safer to render this on some sort of local page?<p>Don't really see the need for this information to go to a third party server.

Isn't 95% reduction claim a bit too bold? It is widely known that standard measurement of Google Chrome's memory consumption with task manager is wrong because it doesn't take data sharing between processes into consideration. How was the 95% figure produced?

Neat. Could you add some sort of way for the user to choose whether they want to restore into the current window, instead of a new window? Cheers :)

I've only just realised this is built into chrome natively:<p>Right click on any tab in a window and choose "Bookmark all tabs..." from the bottom of the menu. Or press CTRL+SHIFT+D.<p>This has the following advantages over OneTab:<p>1. You can add new bookmarks to the list at any time.<p>2. Bookmarks can be synced with google sync.<p>3. You can name the folder so you know what the list is.<p>4. Bookmarks are searchable in the omnibar.<p>5. You can open a single bookmark without it being removed from the list. If you don't want to keep it, just click the star in the address bar and then the remove link.<p>6. When right-clicking a folder there's an option to open all bookmarks in an incognito window.<p>I can't believe I've overlooked it for so long! I don't need any session management extensions now.

I really like the functionality of OneTab, as I'm someone who frequently has 3 concurrent Chrome windows, each with dozens of running tabs.<p>The one thing that's going to prevent me from using this regularly, though, is that once you reopen a tab, there's no back state. I find that some of the most valuable information that I can get from a webpage isn't necessarily the page itself, it's the process leading up to the page.<p>That being said, this is an absolutely beautiful Chrome extension and I commend the developers on what they've accomplished.

Maybe Im not a "power user" or something, because I rarely have more than 3-5 tabs open at any given moment, and 2 of those are my email accounts. We have searchable browser history, and it seems like that would be a horrible workflow to have anymore than say 10 tabs open at any given time. They get so small you cant see them and how would you find what you want? ctrl + tab? Im genuinely curious as to how someone works this way.

There are better extensions out there solving this problem. One I use is <a href="https://github.com/deanoemcke/thegreatsuspender/" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/deanoemcke/thegreatsuspender/</a><p>It frees memory by taking a snapshot of the page and loading the image (instead of the DOM). This frees up a great amount of memory. It also persists the tab position, title, favicon (which are essential to me in remembering information about the tab). Clicking (or pressing Enter, F5 ..) on the image preview loads the page.<p>You can set tabs to be automatically suspended after a predefined amount of time. You can set tabs to be restored automatically on focus (unfortunately no time delay option here). You can white-list domains from auto-suspension.<p>For Chrome v25 users: The extension is having some stability issues which causes Chrome to crash (<a href="https://github.com/deanoemcke/thegreatsuspender/issues/30" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/deanoemcke/thegreatsuspender/issues/30</a>). But if you are using any version before that, it should work fine. It had become an indispensable tool for a tab hoarder like me. Waiting for the dev to fix the current issue with Chrome v25.

Looks great and I would definitely put it to use, but on Ubuntu with Chrome 22.0.1229.94, I get "Installation failed either due to cancelling the dialog box or because you already have the extension installed" when installing from your web page. When I try to do it from the web store, I get "There was a problem adding the item to Chrome. Please refresh the page and try again".

As someone that lives with 40 tabs open in any 1 window at a time, with at least 2 windows open....THANK YOU.<p>I love this. I don't get why people are being so negative on this thread. Also that discussion about the cost of RAM, is pointless. Who cares how much RAM/Diskspace costs. That doesn't mean we should be inefficient with our resources, because we can simply buy more for cheap. That's an excuse that lazy developers use.<p>That being said, I would love to know a few things about this extension (if the creators are here):<p>- Where is this list stored? On my HDD? In my Gmail Account?<p>- I would love to backup the list, so it doesn't get lost. I am accustomed to using Chrome's history, but that gets wonky from time to time and I have been in many situations where I expect the full history to be there, but it isn't for one reason or another.<p>- Will my One Tab list be there if I reset my machine? I assume so, but what if I close my `One Tab` tab?<p>Other than that...THANK YOU...for this WONDERFUL extension. This will easily be my most used extension - hands down.

If this appeals to you, I have 2 words: Tab Wrangler.<p>As a compulsive tab hoarder, I've been using Tab Wrangler for this same purpose for over a year and I believe its approach is far superior: it just closes tabs that you ahven't visited for a period of time. If you haven't been to a tab in ~20 minutes, likely you don't need it on hand. I can't know when I'm done with a tab until I've moved onto my next task, which means I'm no longer thinking about that tab.<p>Also, you can lock tabs, have a minimum number of tabs (I set mine to 5) and easily list any auto-closed tabs so you don't lose anything, though I find myself only needing to look through that list once or twice a week.<p>Anyway, Tab Wrangler absolutely changed my life.<p>Not my project, just think it's awesome: <a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-wrangler/egnjhciaieeiiohknchakcodbpgjnchh?hl=en" rel="nofollow">https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-wrangler/egnjh...</a>

I don't care so much about the memory, but this reminds me of how chrome doesn't have a way of vertically showing the tabs. know that firefox when I use it supports that.<p>I saw support for vertical tabs in Chrome that can be turned on, but I think that is experimental. The people that suffer from the memory problems are the people who really just need better tab management features. Maybe this is something for power-users that just needs to be handled with extensions.<p>Also being able to suspend and resume sessions better is a good idea, and this may help with. When coding on a particular thing, I'll have most of the tabs open that I need. When I get back into it it's just a storm of CMND-T and searching for the references I was using. Sounds like this could help with that.

Super useful, thanks! I was afraid that this would close my pinned tabs, but seems like you paid good attention to this detail. A request: it would be nice to be able to right click and open the one-tab interface/tab without actually having to save all tabs.

Aww, history goes away. That might be a problem...

My big problem with Chrome tabs is that over time, they start consuming all of my <i>CPU</i> resources and I have to go in and kill a bunch of 'Chrome Renderer' processes to get the load back down to a reasonable level.<p>This also happens if Chrome crashes / I quit or force-quit out of Chrome and then restart. I don't really want it to open however many tabs I had open, I just want to be able to see what tabs were open. I would be happy with it creating the tabs with the title at the top but not loading it. Short of that, One-Tab is a decent way to help with this issue.

Save 99% memory in google chrome by bookmarking all tabs and closing Chrome!

Interesting extension. I think you need to address a couple of things:<p>1. Try to maintain state for all the content in the controls. For instance, if I'm on JSONlint.com with some complex JSON in there, I'd like for that to be there when I re-open the tab. So, simply storing historic reference and reloading the pages doesn't add so much value for my use-case.<p>2. Can you do the same with other extensions? I have a ton of things running and it would be nice to disable all on-demand via one-click. My memory consumption was still over a GB with all the running extensions.<p>Thanks &#38; Good luck!!

Would be nice if this would be semi-integrated natively into Chrome, almost like the implementation on older Apple devices that can't have as many concurrent web pages open. On my iPad mini for example... if I am reading a few pages and switch back to another one I was looking at 30 minutes ago, it re-loads itself.<p>So if a tab is dormant for a while, Chrome will throw it away. Then when you recall it, the next day or whatnot, it will re-load it.<p>For someone who typically has a hundred tabs open at any given moment, that would be a pretty cool feature.

I'm quite surprised of the feedback so far with this. It works well for what's offered. I find myself looking through dribbble or hunting down a problem and need to have a few reference tabs open on occasion but I don't necessarily want them open but I'd like a reference if I needed it again. I would suggest being able to make lists inside the OneTab page and saving those lists as presets if you can't already. That way I can label certain groups "Design inspiration for XYZ" and have those tabs directly related.

OneTab doesn't seem to preserve individual tab browsing history. So if I understand it correctly it really just converts the unpinned tabs to bookmarks and them close the tabs. Am I correct?<p>In Chrome, you can right-click any tag and choose "Bookmark All Tabs". Occasionally, I do that to save open the tabs if I don't have enough time to read them all. Admittedly, OneTab has a simpler interface and conveniently closes the tabs for you.<p>See <a href="http://screencast.com/t/biqAF65Fdd" rel="nofollow">http://screencast.com/t/biqAF65Fdd</a>

Nice idea, but a heads up for anyone trying it out: installing and clicking on the icon closes all your open tabs <i>immediately without warning</i>. Quite a jarring first user experience.

The current implementation doesn't differ much from just closing all of your tabs and reopening them using 'Recently Closed'.<p>One way you could keep the one-click-to-open functionality of tabs is to keep the tabs in a persistent vertical list of favicons along the side of the screen. One tab could remain open, and clicking another tab, or favicon, could replace the current tab.<p>Edit: Here's a mockup: <a href="http://imgur.com/pfYO7xY" rel="nofollow">http://imgur.com/pfYO7xY</a>. You could have the title show up next to a tab on hover.

I love the simplicity. At the risk of adding complexity, there's this Chrome extension I used to love and use all the time called JoinTabs, that unfortunately started shipping with some nasty malware. It did this very simple thing of collecting all the tabs in all your open windows and putting them in one window. Since OneTab only seems to work on the tabs in a single window, is there any way to combine these useful features?

Nice. I built a similar Chrome extension recently: <a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-bankrupter/pndipmgldhbejkehopnbbpjgidkbiimh/" rel="nofollow">https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-bankrupter/pnd...</a><p>Open-sourced here: <a href="https://github.com/jsvine/tab-bankrupter" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/jsvine/tab-bankrupter</a><p>As the name suggests, it's aimed more at the mental — rather than computational — weight of tabs.

Dossier[1] has been doing this for years now. It's not as pretty, but it can manage lists and has a bunch of neat features.<p>I'm no affiliated with whoever makes it (except as a user, I guess) -- but I did want to bring pre-existing alternatives into the discussion.<p>[1] <a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dossier/hohaaljbjhjodnncjbeeilfdloeinfbh?hl=en-US" rel="nofollow">https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dossier/hohaaljbjh...</a>

Just yesterday, I was thinking about something similar for Opera. Opera supports tab stacks (which are great), but many often go unused for days, so I thought about implementing a way to convert a tab stack to a simple tab with an overview of the sites that were open in it.<p>My main problem with this is that you can't order your tabs into groups - the extension may not even make a distinction between regular tabs and pinned tabs.

This is a great start.<p>I wouldn't mind having a side tray or list of temporary bookmarks that I could easily add to, restore from, or remove. Then I would have 3 or 4 active tabs and about 15 inactive tabs and could swap between them easily.<p>I know it is possible with shift + cmd + D, as one commenter pointed out, to bookmark all tabs temporarily but that would get cumbersome if you were constantly changing out tabs.

Install isn't a link but a span, so you can't tell what it's doing/where it's going by hovering. Hmmm...Feels REALLY spammy, or is it just me?

While I've switched to a box with ample RAM so that this isn't really a concern any more, my old habit was to open up the Chrome task manager, and just kill any tab that I was just holding in place to read later. All the RAM gets freed up, but the tab is still held in place if I close the window. A simple refresh when I actually want to look at the tab would bring it back up.

I want the opposite for Firefox on android - some way to instruct the browser NOT to unload background tabs because I might have been partway through entering data in those and just gone off to another tab to check something I was writing about.<p>I have 1GB of RAM in my Note and rarely run more than one thing at a time. FF for android seems to have a really aggressive unload policy.

Feature Request: The ability to save and re-load tabs as a labeled set. An array of open tabs is often the result of an intentional workspace. If I could label a saved OneTab as "iOS Development" and have it launch iOS Dev Center, JIRA, bitbucket, and various API/documentation, it would make switching from casual browsing to work mode a breeze.

How about just use Chrome?<p>1. bookmark all tabs ⇧⌘D<p>2. in the file dialog create a new folder e.g. "foo"<p>3. (later) with Bookmarks &#62; foo menu open, select "Open All Bookmarks in New Window"<p>Voilà

I was going to say this was pretty neat but within 30 seconds of actually using it, it managed to lose a window full of tabs which I'd had open for a couple days and I can't recall what was in it now so a bit frustrated. I collapsed up 3 windows into one tab, then did expand all on all 3 and one of the windows re-opened with only 1 tab.

I'd rather waste memory than waste network traffic, re-authenticating and hitting servers to check for updated data and restarting audio/video streams.<p>It makes sense if you are using a machine with limited memory or you want to leave one page open whilst doing something memory intensive, but it by no means is a 'useful' way to casually browse.

I really like this. It's fast, simple and easier to re-view the pages than bookmark all tabs. Thanks!

Very similar to this extension: <a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-focused/mhdljapdjjfoeafbcldiajggppjomeno" rel="nofollow">https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-focused/mhdlja...</a> (except the permissions)

Suggestion: could you make the list flow upwards when the user clicks the X to close a tab? This way the user doesn't have to move the mouse to close multiple tabs quickly. Basically it's the same behavior as Chrome, just vertical.

Nicely presented. I've only tested this a little, but in some cases it appears that restoring a tab doesn't issue any new HTTP requests to the page server, maybe subject to cache headers. That's a nice trick, how does it work?

It could be an extension that froze a tab: for example right click on a tab, save the data on disk and saves ram. When you go back it will take a lot of time.<p>This extension opens the page again, loading it which leads to bigger time load.

I always try to keep myself using less than 4 tabs in Chromium. Used to work with several browser windows, tens of tabs each, but found out that this is just noise, and is detrimental to productivity.<p>Got the addon.Thanks and good luck!

Noticed that when I use CRTL+click to open tabs from the list the tab counter still decrements even though the number of tabs in the list does not decrease. Now I'm looking at a list of tabs with -3 tabs at the top.

Not sure why I can't figure this out, but how can I just place one tab into the list? When I click on the icon everything gets collapsed and then I have to open each individual page (or all of them at once).

I got 16GB+ RAM for a reason: To use it. Nice extension, but I'd rather have the stuff in memory instead of reading it from disk on need. Haven't happened in years that I felt the need to free RAM.

Just noticed the "Bring tabs into OneTab" will bring in a detached developer tools window, which then doesn't work when reactivated as it's loaded as its own tab, detached from the original page.

Google Chrome should automatically shut down unused tabs and restore them as needed. Pretty much what this plugin does, but in an automatic way. Nobody need 50+ fully activated tabs all the time.

eisbaw@leno:~$ type chrome_free chrome_free is a function chrome_free () { kill $(ps -C chrome -o pid,args | grep --color=never 'type=renderer' | grep -v 'extension' | awk '{print $1}') }

Might want to add a more prominent link to the installation

problem: tab syncing also stop working.<p>one reason for me keeping chrome is the tab syncing works. Firefox offers nothing on iOS. safari only works whenever it feels like it.

No idea how this is better than Chrome's built in "Bookmark all tabs..." feature (Shift + CMD + D) and then just closing whatever you don't need open.

Thank you! As a heavy tab user this is fantastic feature that complements the way I want to be using my browser. Keep up the great work.

Very useful. It'd be nice to be able to exclude certain tabs from ever being closed (like gmail) that I want to keep open.

Hmmm It would be nice if it saved tab history as well, restored and ended up finding all my history had been lost :/

Do what I do: save them to Instapaper. Then go back and organize them once a month but never bother to read them.

If this extension is not made to make money, why not Opensource it so that others can contribute to it.<p>or<p>Is it opensource already?

Is this any different from opening the Chrome Task Manager and quitting every tab? (Memory-wise)

Chrome used to have an option called --single-process which reduce the RAM cost to few megs.

Even being a marketing gimmick, it is a smart development. Minimal and useful. I &#60;3 it.

I like the idea, but how is this any different than the "Bookmark all tabs" feature?

Please add a facebook share button. I would like to share this with my friends. :)

I'm going to make NoTab, which closes Chrome for a 100% reduction in RAM usage.

How about one-comment.com for reducing the clutter from HN comments thread?

what about the current session? think browsers as an os, not just a program. you spend most of your time in front of it. they deserve more resource than the other installed programs in your computer.

Excellent! I love it!<p>Now when is there going to be a version for Safari?

Its fanny that nobody mention there the TabsOutliner

I am worried, It knows all the data you are surfing.

so you are saving 95% memory by closing all tabs? I have an even better idea: let's save 100% memory by hitting that X.

will this or any other extension work on chrome in mobile or tablets, thats one place where you cant add memory

Nice way to build a data-set for mining.)

Can we have the same for Firefox?<p>I have 2020 open tabs!

Initially I thought this might be an easier way for me to save sessions than my current session saving solution which doesn't make saving a single window a one click operation. I could use in conjunction with the split tabs to new window extension<p><a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-split/imjbfeponcaggdpmoiadjbafihlojbco" rel="nofollow">https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-split/imjbfepo...</a><p>to get just the tabs I want to save, and then put them in a new list. However I think I'll stick with Session Buddy<p><a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/session-buddy/edacconmaakjimmfgnblocblbcdcpbko" rel="nofollow">https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/session-buddy/edac...</a><p>as it allows:<p>1. naming of saved sessions (of which I have many). It's list of saved sessions will be easier scan to find the one I'm interested in.<p>2. opening of saved urls without removing them from the saved session. This I would find infuriating due to the way I use saved sessions as a more powerful bookmark feature.<p>Also, if I closed the OneTab tab there didn't appear to be a way to bring it back without creating a new list.<p>Some features that I'd like to see in a session saving chrome extension:<p>1. Sync to my google account with chrome extension syncing. Sessions Buddy will hopefully have this in the next release but it's been in development for over a year...<p>2. Multiple saved session lists so I can separate sessions between e.g. work/private, or "things I want to get back to" and "archived things that might be useful in future."<p>3. Integration with omnibar searching.<p>1 and 3 Could be done by saving sessions as bookmarks, which is what FreshStart does<p><a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/freshstart-cross-browser/nmidkjogcjnnlfimjcedenagjfacpobb" rel="nofollow">https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/freshstart-cross-b...</a><p>but I don't use that extension because of it's confusing UI.<p>After Edit:<p>I should have mentioned. The easiest way I've found to limit chrome memory is to firstly only enable the extensions I use on a day to day basis, and enable/disable others as needed using Extension Manager<p><a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/extensions-manager-aka-sw/lpleipinonnoibneeejgjnoeekmbopbc" rel="nofollow">https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/extensions-manager...</a><p>and then <i>kill every tab process</i> in the chrome task manager after chrome starts up. I usually have 90-100 tabs and currently have 142 tabs open. My system would grind to a halt if I didn't do this.

For the curious:<p>chrome://memory-redirect/

One love, One tab...

wow, amazingly simple/useful idea! Thanks!

stupid marketing.