How to work with browser tabs even faster: 3 additional hacks

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Is your browser starting to lag a lot with a dozen tabs open? In this article, we will show you how to cure him of this disease, and also show you how not to get lost in a large number of tabs and quickly find the most necessary one among them.

We are already about how to make it convenient to work with a large number of tabs in the browser. In this article we will continue this topic and give three more additional tips.

Since I started writing for Lifehacker, I have to spend up to six hours a day at the computer. 90% of this time, I have an Internet browser open. I am constantly looking for interesting information, reading, analyzing, comparing, writing and communicating on the Web. All this forces me to open a large number of tabs at the same time.

But working with a lot of tabs has three consequences:

1. The computer starts to freeze, because each open tab eats up part of the RAM.
2. Cropped headings on tabs complicate navigation, because it is no longer visually clear what is behind which tab.
3. Tabs are lost and forgotten if pushed out of the visible area of the screen.

This is how it looks:

If you are like me and face the same problems, then in this article I will share a few solutions that help me deal with these unpleasant moments.

I'll make a reservation right away that my main browser is Firefox, and my backup is Chrome. Therefore, in this article, I only give recommendations for these browsers.

1. How to open many tabs and not overload the computer

We have already discussed above that each open tab eats up part of the memory. This means that the more tabs are open, the less free memory remains. And the less memory, the slower the computer responds to commands.

What can be done to avoid this? I installed a special browser extension that is able to unload inactive tabs from memory and save system resources. To restore a tab, I just click on it.

And here are the plugins that allow me to do this:

for Firefox

Once the plugin is installed, just right click on the tab and select Unload tab. This will keep the tab open in the browser but free up memory.

It is worth saying that there are extensions that unload inactive tabs automatically, and not at the click of a mouse, as BarTab Lite does. I tried several of these extensions, but ran into problems that forced me to remove them.

For example, an extension unloads a tab from memory as soon as it becomes inactive. I found this uncomfortable for myself. And the setting that allows you to specify after what period of time to unload the inactive tab, for some reason does not work for me (by the way, other people write about the same in the reviews).

Another extension - Suspend Tab - surprised me with the fact that it simply does not allow closing "suspended" tabs. To do this, you have to restart your computer, which is very inconvenient.

Therefore, I made my choice in favor of BarTab Lite.

for chrome

Lifehacker has information about this extension, so I will not consider it in detail.

So, if it is common for you to keep more than 10 tabs open, which makes your browser slower, I recommend trying my advice.

2. How easy it is to navigate in a large number of tabs

When there are too many tabs open, it is difficult to find the one you need among them, because the titles become unreadable. I solved this problem by arranging the tabs in a vertical menu.

Most monitors today are widescreen. This means that the area around the edges of the screen is often empty. If so, why not use it to display tabs?

Firstly, so many more tabs can be in the visible part of the screen (which means that we will not forget about them). Secondly, the extra space will keep the headings readable, which greatly simplifies navigation.

This is how it looks:

I set up a vertical tab bar for myself using a Firefox extension. But extensions with similar functionality for Chrome:,.

3. How not to lose a group of important tabs

Sometimes there are situations when you need to save all open tabs for future use. For example, you collect information about a certain brand of car, such as a Honda Civic. You have opened many tabs on this topic and want to save them in order to return in the future, and not search all over again.

Click "Save Current Session", set a friendly name for the Honda Civic - from now on you can return to these tabs at any time. Very comfortably.

For these purposes, I use an extension called Session Manager. This extension is available both as well as.

In addition to saving a group of tabs, Session Manager can save a list of all closed tabs. That is, if you accidentally close a tab, you can quickly restore it right from the control panel.

Do you have anything to add?

I do not presume to claim that the solutions I have proposed are the only ones. This is just what I use in my work. If you have anything to add to the article, write about it in the comments below.