Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

by srgseg • 13 years ago

314 292 13 years ago

barredo• 13 years ago

Installed. This is pretty nice for the people who uses dozens of tabs as temp bookmarks.

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.

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.

Anyway, thanks

srgseg14• 13 years ago

Thanks, it's on the to-do :)

boundlessdreamz• 13 years ago

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

srgseg14• 13 years ago

Thanks for the feedback. At the moment, one way to achieve this is to "pin" the gmail tab. OneTab will not close any pinned tabs.

Serow225• 13 years ago

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 :)

mvzink• 13 years ago

Yeah, I was wondering about this. Honestly feels like a design flaw. When I hit "restore all" I expected the tabs to replace the OneTab... tab. Other than that, and knowing that it's all in HTML5 localStorage, this will be replacing PanicButton!

bdcravens• 13 years ago

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

wilfra• 13 years ago

The open source and free software community is dominated by programmers. There aren't a lot of designers and there are even fewer sales and marketing people. And it shows in what they release. I found it refreshing to see an exception.

nailer• 13 years ago

I quite like the change - a clear rationale for installing something should be part of more Open Source projects.

prakashk• 13 years ago

Chrome is not my primary browser, so I won't be installing this any time soon, but I thought the copy was really short and sweet, with no fluff. If this was "salesy", I wish more FOSS products were like this one.

pizza• 13 years ago

I agree. It was the How do you make money? that made the whole page feel a bit.. off.. for me. I think taking it out would make it less confusing.

kirubakaran• 13 years ago

Not for me. It answered exactly the question I had in mind. I love the effort they put into the "salesy" page. I don't see why "salesy" is inherently bad. It sells well, even if it is free.

ontheinternets• 13 years ago

Might want to add a more prominent link to the installation

Newky2• 13 years ago

From what I understand, this calls out to their servers and they display a page?

Would it not be more secure and safer to render this on some sort of local page?

Don't really see the need for this information to go to a third party server.

darkstar999• 13 years ago

Read the Privacy section:

> Your tab URLs are never transmitted or disclosed to either the OneTab developers or any other party, and icons for tab URL domains are generated by Google. The only exception to this is if you intentionally click on our 'share as a web page' feature that allows you to upload your list of tabs into a web page in order to share them with others. Tabs are never shared unless you specifically use the 'share as a web page' button.

srgseg14• 13 years ago

(OneTab developer here): None of your tabs are sent to a third party server. It's all stored in HTML5 local storage.

The only way the one-tab servers know about your tabs is if you click to 'share as a web page', which transmits your tabs to our servers to create a web page you can share with others.

Newky2• 13 years ago

Thanks for the clarification, I should read more carefully.

Apologies.

nodata• 13 years ago

Your website talks about which information is not sent to OneTab.

Which information is sent to OneTab?

srgseg14• 13 years ago

OneTab developer here: thanks for all your suggestions, I'll be working on them :)

A few FAQs:

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'.

andybak3• 13 years ago

In what scenarios can I lose my list?

What happens if I click it, close it's list tab, open some new tabs and click it again? Does the old list get overwritten? Is there any way to get it back?

dkl• 13 years ago

It's a pushdown stack of consolidated tabs.

srgseg14• 13 years ago

You will never lose your list. If you store multiple sets of tabs, they will appear as "tab groups" in OneTab.

If you accidentally close your OneTab tab, it will reappear when you click the blue extension icon or when you restart your web browser.

emhart• 13 years ago

Love it. Just used it to conveniently share a web page of 76+ freely available newspaper archives with fellow researchers who are helping me with a project. This is solving an immediate problem for me. I love it. Thanks!

adaml_623• 13 years ago

Does it only store the GET information or will it store a POST search request as well?

srgseg14• 13 years ago

It stores the URLs of your open tabs, including any GET requests. It does not store POST data.

pests2• 13 years ago

Thanks a lot for this! Just wanted to point out something and maybe make a suggestion:

I had six windows open each with some tabs related to a specific task. Used OneTab on one window and then tried to use it on another and it looks like the window just closed. Took me a minute to release the OneTab tab was on another window and another to find the right window. Not sure if this needs to be fixed or anything but maybe allowing a OneTab tab on each open window would be less confusing.

As for the suggestion, it would be nice to be able to give each tab group a name instead of just showing the number of tabs. Could be useful on the shared web page as well.

Thanks again!

pests2• 13 years ago

Just found a bug.

Opening a new tab by holding Control instead of right click->new tab opens the page, decreases the tab count in that group, but leaves the entry on the page. Fixed with a refresh.

exterm• 13 years ago

Edit: This is not meant to sound discouraging to the developer; I just suspect he solved the wrong problem.

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.

If memory consumption is what bugs you, maybe you should use a browser that consumes less memory per open tab.

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.

"one-tab" looks like some sort of read-it-later list that is labeled as a memory saver. Fascinating.

angryasian• 13 years ago

I use a tool like session buddy for example. I primarily use it when I want to organize/links and make the group quickly accessible.. something most bookmarking programs that don't do right. My immediate use case is, OneTab helps reduce the day to day clutter. I'll have my same browser open for weeks at a time, and just makes it easier to manage from day to day.

myared• 13 years ago

You can make the same argument. OneTab is a partial solution whereas using another browser which consumes less memory per open tab isn't a solution at all if you want to use Chrome's features.

T-hawk2• 13 years ago

That's exactly what it is, a read-it-later list. Browsers don't have a good mechanism for that. Not open tabs, which continually consume memory and CPU resources until you get around to them. And not bookmarks either, which are meant for permanent storage, subject to the clunkiness of navigating a folder structure and explicitly performing every add and delete operation.

So in a sense, One-Tab is indeed a memory saver. Not by really reducing Chrome's memory usage, but by plugging the workflow gap that induces users to use Chrome in a way that consumes enormous amounts of memory. (And the selling tactic sure worked, seeing as there's 200 posts on it here in two hours.)

jchung• 13 years ago

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.

Tyr42• 13 years ago

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

przemoc• 13 years ago

This and lost input in text-boxes is what it lacks to become useful. Also localStorage is limited and this limit cannot be raised, so someone with enormous amount of memory could prove that OneTab is not reliable, contrary to how it is advertised. To fix that it has to use indexedDB and require unlimitedStorage. (Well, we still require enough free space on disk, but it's the same with localStorage.)

Anyone willing to record screencast how OneTab fails at handling million tabs? :)

dullroar• 13 years ago

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?

srgseg14• 13 years ago

The install button has to call the chrome.webstore.install API for instant installation, so if it were a hovered link it would not show anything particularly descriptive.

rufugee• 13 years ago

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".

estebank• 13 years ago

Same error happening here along with a Butter bar stating "Manifest file is invalid." in Mac OS X 10.8.2 and Chrome 25.0.1364.160.

srgseg14• 13 years ago

We've been looking at this, apparently this happens when an extension has just been released and is "propagating between servers".

If the extension install is not working for you, it should start working later today once Google's webstore servers have updated

billpaydici• 13 years ago

How about just use Chrome?

1. bookmark all tabs ⇧⌘D

2. in the file dialog create a new folder e.g. "foo"

3. (later) with Bookmarks > foo menu open, select "Open All Bookmarks in New Window"

Voilà

joshdotsmith• 13 years ago

Nice idea, but for me these are usually temporary bookmarks, and doesn't handle the garbage collection for me nearly as simply.

Thanks for sharing, though!

Multiplayer• 13 years ago

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

dtf• 13 years ago

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?

MartinodF• 13 years ago

I use "Merge Windows"! https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/merge-windows/adja...

polskibus• 13 years ago

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?

mullr• 13 years ago

This is the same question I have. Memory usage is notoriously tricky to measure because of shared libraries and the like. So a simple figure like 95% doesn't end up meaning much at the end of the day. chrome://memory may be a good place to start.

Ninja edit: note the disclaimer at the bottom of chrome://memory:

    (Note: Due to memory sharing between processes, 
    summing memory usage does not give total memory usage.)

kenkam• 13 years ago

He has 21 tabs opened, by reducing it to 1 tab, he has saved 20/21 lots of memory, ~~ 95% saved.

Assumptions: each tab uses same memory; no shared memory (or shared memory equally divided between all tabs), every user has around 20 tabs open given the first 2 assumptions hold true.

To me, the 95% is a magic number.

FromStoneage• 13 years ago

chrome://memory-redirect/

maaaats• 13 years ago

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.

shadowfox• 13 years ago

Perhaps this is aimed at the multitudes that don't have 16GB+ of memory?

xxpor• 13 years ago

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.

ktt• 13 years ago

Very similar to this extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-focused/mhdlja... (except the permissions)

revelation2• 13 years ago

This is the equivalent of closing all tabs, with the added bonus of having a list of what you just closed.

I refuse to compromise on functionality because Chrome can't get its memory deal together.

IgorPartola2• 13 years ago

Firefox seems to be no better: http://www.arewesmallyet.com/

revelation2• 13 years ago

Thats alright. A single chrome tab is regularly >150MiB, and thats for plain sites!

(edit: this seems to measure the size of the installer binary. I think you wanted to link https://areweslimyet.com/ which shows Firefox using <512MiB with 30 tabs for popular websites open)

jlongster• 13 years ago

You just link to a graph showing the sizes of the Firefox binary on various platforms across different versions. It has nothing to do with RAM.

Firefox definitely wins out in memory with more tabs because Chrome's process-per-tab model accumulates overhead for every process, while Firefox's tabs are more lean.

waxjar• 13 years ago

Chrome actually already has this built in, too. If you close your window, you'll get a browsable "x tabs" entry in your browsing history. An additional 20-30 MB of memory could be saved by not installing this extension.

srgseg14• 13 years ago

True, but this extension will help you distinguish between the tabs you want to close forever and the tabs you want to return to later.

mrcharles• 13 years ago

Yes but if you forget to open them all up, Chrome will lose that grouping in short order. Which has bitten me more times than I can count.

btown• 13 years ago

I wouldn't be too quick to blame Chrome. What if each open background tab is running a computation/upload that requires the DOM? What if you're listening to music in the background? Point is, Chrome can't just arbitrarily decide to pause execution and free up memory for background tabs.

Me, I'm a documentation-holic. I need to have all the references for whatever project I'm working on a single click away. Sometimes that will be working with a very specific library, so there's no point in replacing my entire bookmarks bar with all the documentation links for that. I'd normally just leave everything in tabs, and when I run out of memory when I need to launch a memory-heavy app, I'd go to Chrome's Task Manager and kill those tabs. So this is a godsend for me.

DennisP2• 13 years ago

There are very few cases where I actually want tabs running in the background, and I'd be happy to add those cases to a whitelist in exchange for Chrome not eating my computer.

But as long as no browser does that, OP's option looks like a huge timesaver for me.

Zarel• 13 years ago

It should be noted that Chrome has a built-in "Bookmark All Tabs" button which will bookmark all tabs in the window into a folder... This extension doesn't seem to add any functionality on top of that.

srgseg14• 13 years ago

I used to do that sometimes, but it suffered from the "out of sight, out of mind" problem.

danneu3• 13 years ago

This extension just adds a new workflow option.

For instance, your workflow doesn't work for me because "bookmark" in my life pretty much means "lose this page in my junk drawer of pages that I'll probably never read again, but I might if I'm ever stranded on an island with nothing but my cached bookmarks."

So I have a completely different workflow that you'd probably find equally extraneous, but it works for me.

cevaris• 13 years ago

Agreed. There is no bonus here. Now if you can hot switch between tabs, or rather use some key shortcuts to better manage the switching, that would bee good.

nwenzel• 13 years ago

On a Mac, cmd-1 or cmd-2 or cmd-3 or cmd-n jumps to the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, nth tab.

naner• 13 years ago

Compromise on functionality? Too many tabs is a usability problem in Chrome. This just provides additional functionality.

fowlerje• 13 years ago

This is a great start.

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.

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.

porter• 13 years ago

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).

jsvine• 13 years ago

Nice. I built a similar Chrome extension recently: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-bankrupter/pnd...

Open-sourced here: https://github.com/jsvine/tab-bankrupter

As the name suggests, it's aimed more at the mental — rather than computational — weight of tabs.

serialx• 13 years ago

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

revorad• 13 years ago

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

ernestipark• 13 years ago

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.

niggler3• 13 years ago

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

lttlrck• 13 years ago

where did the 1% go?

niggler3• 13 years ago

Some long-running hidden chromium process that doesn't seem to die when you quit or force-quit chrome on mountain lion. You have to go into activity monitor to kill it. This never happened in Snow Leopard.

NelsonMinar• 13 years ago

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?

srgseg14• 13 years ago

That's probably Chrome obeying the HTTP cache headers for the web site in question.

aranw• 13 years ago

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

josso• 13 years ago

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

Deezul2• 13 years ago

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.

xemoka• 13 years ago

You're looking for "Session Buddy"[0] available on the Chrome store. This is a more complex OneTab, I've been using it for quite some time as I'm a tab abuser (60+ open tabs). It's great for storing and managing sets of tabs.

[0] www.sessionbuddy.com

Deezul2• 13 years ago

Wow, thanks for making my day.

srgseg14• 13 years ago

You can Ctrl or Cmd click a set of tabs, and it will restore them without removing them from the OneTab list. Thus you will be able to use OneTab to open sets of frequently accessed tabs.

mkolodny• 13 years ago

The current implementation doesn't differ much from just closing all of your tabs and reopening them using 'Recently Closed'.

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.

Edit: Here's a mockup: http://imgur.com/pfYO7xY. You could have the title show up next to a tab on hover.

twapi• 13 years ago

stupid marketing.

rmk23• 13 years ago

I absolutely fail to see the point here. Why should I use this? Is this again one of these instances where, magically, free RAM is good?

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).

I'm writing all this from a Core2Duo laptop, so really, when exactly does any computer bought at the same time (or since) have actual problems of running out of memory? I have not experienced such problems in years on anything other than a Raspberry Pi. Is this a problem that really needs solving?

Feel free to point me to use cases where this is essential or useful, for I cannot see any.

martinced• 13 years ago

"...when exactly does any computer bought at the same time (or since) have actual problems of running out of memory?"

Ah yes, I remember the days being a dev that didn't use VMs. It kinda sucked as a development environment that said: no easy way to test software on different OSes locally, no easy way to try other software which you don't necessarily trust in a confined environment (to see if it may be worth using, in which case you'd look into the trust issue more closely), etc.

If you're a dev and have "enough RAM" you're probably not trying hard enough ; )

VMs tend to use quite a lot of memory and tend to be very useful for knowledgable devs.

You asked and seemed so cocksure so these were my 2 cents...

rmk23• 13 years ago

So, in that case, when you are developing, you are actively using multiple VMs and 30++ tabs? Maybe I am just bad at multitasking, but while I do see the point of the VMs, I don't see how they fundamentally change the overall picture.

I don't doubt that you can manage to fill an arbitrary amount of RAM running multiple browsers, VMs and other programs, however, I do fail to see how that in turn enhances (or constricts) productivity. Multiple VMs? Sure. Multiple browsers? Sure. Multiple VMs and browsers? Sure. Multiple VMs, browsers and multiple dozen tabs? I don't see a use case here.

If you have multiple multi-gigabyte VMs running, chances are its not your brower's RAM usage that is hamstringing you by using all available RAM.

edit: I'm not saying I don't see a use case were theoretically there are tangible limits on RAM which become a problem, but to me, it remains exactly that: theoretical.

colomon• 13 years ago

Well, yay for you. As I posted in the Firefox thread, when I checked this morning I had 16 tabs open using 2.6GiB of memory, and that without the using websites like Facebook and Twitter that I've found to be memory pigs in the past. I use AdBlock, maybe Ghostery and Disconnect are magic?

In general, my machine has 8GiB of RAM and low-memory thrashing / out-of-memory errors are pretty much a daily occurrence. They're certainly not all Chrome's fault, but I don't think it is helping matters any.

rmk23• 13 years ago

My post was in no way meant to be boasting, quite the contrary, it assumes that my computer is on the lower end of what will be widely used, especially here on HN.

> In general, my machine has 8GiB of RAM and low-memory thrashing / out-of-memory errors are pretty much a daily occurrence. They're certainly not all Chrome's fault, but I don't think it is helping matters any.

I suppose the choice of operating systems has to do with this as well, since a browser can only do so much if the underlying OS handles memory allocation in a less than ideal way. This at least sounds like it might a problem that is situated on a much lower level than your browser dealing with multiple tabs.

Flenser3• 13 years ago

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

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-split/imjbfepo...

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

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/session-buddy/edac...

as it allows:

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.

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.

Also, if I closed the OneTab tab there didn't appear to be a way to bring it back without creating a new list.

Some features that I'd like to see in a session saving chrome extension:

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...

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."

3. Integration with omnibar searching.

1 and 3 Could be done by saving sessions as bookmarks, which is what FreshStart does

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/freshstart-cross-b...

but I don't use that extension because of it's confusing UI.

After Edit:

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

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/extensions-manager...

and then kill every tab process 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.

derefr• 13 years ago

Oh hey! I built something similar a while ago, for somewhat similar reasons: "Pause Tabs" (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pause-tabs/gldljdh...).

The use-case is slightly 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:

> "Open, remove the bookmark, and restore reading to previous position, atomically"; and

> "Save position, create bookmark, and put away for later, atomically".

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."

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.

dchichkov• 13 years ago

I think that this 95% number is wrong. Likely doesn't take good old shared memory into consideration...

http://blog.chromium.org/2008/09/google-chrome-memory-usage-...

"Measuring memory

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."

jdietrich2• 13 years ago

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.

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.

I'd like software to use more 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?

reggplant• 13 years ago

Remember not everyone can afford the latest beast of a machine that can accommodate 16GB RAM, some people still have laptops that can hold a maximum of 4GB by design limitation; it's more likely to be those people worrying about Chrome's RAM usage.

FigBug• 13 years ago

And RAM uses power, whether it's being used or not. Having more RAM means shorter battery life.

srgseg14• 13 years ago

Not only does it save you memory, it also reduces CPU usage because Chrome would otherwise continue to run scripts in all of your open tabs.

Depending on the complexity of the web pages, having 100 open tabs can easily cripple a brand new laptop with 8GB ram.

rikkus• 13 years ago

Having 100 open tabs would be unmanageable from a UI perspective. I can't deal with more than about 8 open at once, per window. I just bookmark stuff to come back to later if I'm dealing with more.

So ... it's not a technical problem.

mgkimsal• 13 years ago

and buying a decent new machine to put that 16gb in costs some more. And migrating all your stuff over to that new machine takes time.

And then everyone will continue to write code without regards to memory usage, and we'll be complaining that Chrome 45 locks up 19g per tab, and people with your mindset will say it doesn't matter because 1TB ram chips are cheap enough at $400 to just upgrade.

Just having loads of stuff using RAM takes more time to manage. I would not have imagined in 2013 with 16G of RAM and a > 2ghz multi core processor that I would still get system hangs and beach balls in my OS, but I do.

mootothemax• 13 years ago

there's little reason not to load out your machine with far more memory than you'd practically need.

Unless you simply can't install more RAM without buying a whole new laptop. That's certainly the case for my laptop; its Intel i5 only can address 8GB max.

Memory is cheap, but buying a new laptop sadly isn't, especially when it's a decent development machine, and a step above standard consumer configurations.

kintamanimatt9• 13 years ago

Completely disagree. We've seen too much complacency in recent years when it comes to memory usage. Developers think it's ok for their applications to bloat out and have a huge memory footprint. I'd rather applications were developed in such a way that they were more memory efficient.

I've had a recent incident in which Chrome was consuming about 7GB of memory, just because I had about a hundred tabs open! It was really, really, insane. This reckless disregard for memory usage caused more problems in terms of performance, and it wasn't apparent what was happening until things started OOM'ing. (Swapping is really just as bad as an OOM - the computer's practically useless if it's trashing due to low memory.)

Your ideal situation of having more memory used will, in many cases, lead to degraded performance.

asafh2• 13 years ago

I agree with you, but 7GB for 100 tabs sounds likes something unusual happened. I usually have around 200-350 tabs open (Yes, I'm hoarding, I'm aware of it). I usually terminate their processes and respawn them when I need them (their state is not lost) but IIRC, when I don't I get around 3GB for 200 Tabs

theorique• 13 years ago

just because I had about a hundred tabs open

That is a lot of tabs, though.

alexchamberlain• 13 years ago

Totally agree. My PC, which needs replacing, only has 2GB of memory, because that's what the motherboard supports.

k3n5• 13 years ago

There's no way you could effectively work with 100 tabs open, and that is surely a smell for inefficiency. For any given task, 5 tabs is probably reaching the upper limit on what's actually _required_, with around 10 being the upper limit.

Granted, you could have multiple tasks ongoing in parallel, but are you really working in parallel at that point? If not, save the tabs and return to them later. I really doubt you are visiting all 100 tabs on a regular basis so as to merit they stay open at all times.

I've seen way too many people use their browser as a sort of todo app, by virtue of "I'll open a tab for this so I don't forget to do it later" -- hell, I do this too -- but that's not at all the intended usage of a browser, and so naturally, it sucks at it.

ibrahima3• 13 years ago

I don't see how it's a developers' fault that you opened 100 tabs in Chrome. 70MB per tab is really not that much, I don't think browser memory usage has actually gone up by much compared to other applications. I think the fact that it was usable up to that point is a testament to its design, though I personally think Firefox handles large numbers of tabs better overall (UI wise).

pavanky• 13 years ago

It is not about money, it is about sloppy programming. Sure you can use more memory, but not at the cost of disrupting everything else on the system. For example most of the netbooks / ultrabooks or whatever you call them (including macbook air) used to come with 4GB at most. Upgrading them is a pain, and having a memory hog is definitely an issue in those cases.

Fargren• 13 years ago

Memory is cheap in the the first world. I live in Argentina, which is not a particularly poor or undeveloped country, and my 8GB of RAM are almost impressive. I know of no one who has 16 GB, and a few of my friends have 8. Most people I know of have between 1GB and 4GB, with 2GB being by far the most common configuration.

UnfalseDesign• 13 years ago

I live in 'the first world' and I can't afford more RAM. $50 is far too much for me to spend at the moment. (A need for more RAM is trumped by my powerful urge to eat.) Not to mention working at a corporate job where the computers are older than my children and every ounce of saved RAM is a blessing.

bsimpson2• 13 years ago

Most people in the States have whatever their computer came with. Even computers with user-serviceable RAM can usually only address twice as much RAM as the machine came with. So, if last generation's hardware comes with nMB RAM, and this generation's comes with 2nMB RAM, owners of last generation's hardware can usually only upgrade their RAM once.

It's a bit silly, because RAM and storage seem to be the only things most people need more of on a daily basis. I suspect 5 year old CPUs would meet most people's needs just fine.

ronalddriver• 13 years ago

i agree.

this is the logic of someone willing to adapt to the environment around him. While the best solution would be more efficient programming, consumers are best served to max out their RAM and work with what they're given.

danneu3• 13 years ago

    > this is the logic of someone willing to adapt to the environment around him.

How is this true? OP is saying devs should dump their app into memory and that devs need to adapt to OP's limitless RAM.

ElectricBongo• 13 years ago

That leads to a bad approach when building applications. Not everyone has or wants oodles of RAM.I don't use much RAM on my laptop just because it uses too much power.

paganel• 13 years ago

I have a recently purchased Mac Mini which came with 4GB of RAM and whenever I happen to access a certain Flash-heavy page (http://www.lequipe.fr/direct_foot.html for the curious) Firefox just instantly eats up all the available memory, everything freezes and I have to manually restart the machine (I know the article is actually about Chrome, but I'm trying to also make a point that memory usage counts).

bsg75• 13 years ago

When your primary workstation is a laptop, which won't accept more than 8GB of RAM, and you have to use certain Java based desktop apps, everywhere you can save memory is useful.

I agree it should not be an issue, but when the usual short-sighted budget issues are the primary problem, one has to use other tricks:

"You mean the 3 year old machine you work on for 12 hours a day is no longer good enough? Sorry, that does not fit the depreciation model. Also, we spent all the budget on new MacBook Airs for Sales, because they really needed new web browsers."

grok2• 13 years ago

Software should be optimized for the most common use-case -- not the outliers. Most people usually buy computers in standard configurations (which typically means 4GB to 8GB of memory) or use company provided equipment and they aren't going to be happy with being told "just buy another 8GB of memory -- it's only $120" as a solution to the slowness of their browsing!

danneu3• 13 years ago

And not everyone is browsing the internet from their disposable income suburbia with their extensible upgradable tower computer.

But then again the HN bubble also thinks my mother knows "Twitter Bootstrap" by name.

SomeCallMeTim5• 13 years ago

I have 8gb. There was a time when 1gb was more than enough. Now you're saying I should have 16gb -- and you're right!

This is Not A Good Thing. This is people throwing every last feature -- even if it has a pile of 800kb of DLLs/SOs attached -- into every app, with no regard for memory.

I find my system thrashing almost daily at this point. I need to upgrade. Two years ago, running predominantly the same software, 4Gb was just barely not enough, and I upgraded to 8Gb. And two years before that, cut the memory requirements in half again. And again, and again, until you get back to the 1Mb of RAM I had in 1990.

There has been a trend to do exactly what you say you want for 30+ years. And you know, some of that extra memory has been used to great effect -- we can do a ton more now than we could in 1990. But a lot of it is wasted, just Because It's Easy.

And that wasted RAM means pointless upgrades every two years; 99% of the bloat at this point is for something I don't need or want. The ONLY valid reasons to need 16Gb+ are if you're actually using that much data in one place -- a server that needs to scale, for instance, or editing video, or maybe a game that uses crazy amounts of data and/or video.

That the same apps are bloating 2x every two years -- and as a result get slower, since hard drive and memory speeds certainly aren't doubling every two years -- is really unacceptable laziness on the parts of companies and developers in general. It's pretty much the opposite of a Good Thing.

robotresearcher• 13 years ago

| a pile of 800kb of DLLs/SOs attached

Shared Objects are not too bad, since they are shared between all processes that use (the same version of) them. In fact, the apparently worst case of linking them "into every app" is only slightly worse than having them appear in one app each. Assuming they are not all in the working set of every app at once, the overhead is small. Great OS technology!

I think the main technical problem with code/feature bloat is the increased likelihood of bugs with every additional line of code.

tomkarlo5• 13 years ago

8GB of RAM is about $50 right now. If you have to replace that every $2 years, are you really complaining about the cost of $25 per year on your $1,000 computer system? It's a rounding error.

Chrome, in particular, is generally be used for far more tabs (I have like 30 open right now on a MacBook Air) and increasingly complex web sites every year. It's easy to look at memory usage and complain, but the fact is that our usage and the size of the pages we're loading is also rising rapidly. If you loaded Chrome from two years ago and used it how you work today, you might not find the memory footprint that much better than the current version.

ibrahima3• 13 years ago

This specific case is not bloat at all though, it's actually you as a user having too much content that you care about. So I don't see why this is relevant at all.

jdietrich2• 13 years ago

Python and Ruby are on average about 40x slower than C. Fifteen years ago, this relegated them to the status of "scripting languages" that were unsuitable for Real Work. Today, there are still plenty of important applications where every clock cycle matters, but many more where that performance difference is absolutely irrelevant.

We have come to understand that developer time is vastly more valuable than computing resources in the overwhelming majority of applications - the only real disagreement is how many orders of magnitude of inefficiency we consider tolerable. Even the most resource-constrained applications are using higher-level languages and computationally inefficient designs, because it's much easier to spec a faster chip than a smarter dev team.

Most applications aren't getting significantly slower. Web browsers are a perfect example of this; Almost every aspect of their performance has improved vastly over the past few years, but as a result we're building much more sophisticated web apps and doing things in the browser that were once purely the domain of highly optimised native apps. It's a near-perfect example of Jevons Paradox. Improving the efficiency of a process reduces the cost of the output, which leads to increased demand for the inputs to that process.

My current computer has 700,000x more RAM than my first computer. If 99% of that memory is wasted, I'm still doing pretty well.

gcr2• 13 years ago

This is precisely the motivation behind the renaissance of the "simple / command-line-driven software movement" that you see sprouting up from the corners of the Arch Linux users, Slackware, and elsewhere.

I used to carry around a laptop with 128MB RAM. In 2010-2012, I had 1GB and was happy with it, but I had to adapt:

- Try a tiling window manager. You'd be surprised how many resources it takes to draw those window decorations, which not only saves RAM but also helps you focus better.

- Try a lightweight browser like LuaKit, dwm, surf, etc. Most of them are Webkit-based anyway, so there's not many problems. Plus, a keyboard-driven web browser is a hoot

- Try using emacs/vim instead of Word or OpenOffice. Thanks to LaTeX, I haven't touched a huge office suite in ages.

- Instead of having lots of programs open in the background, why not try some command-line equivalents? If you're not on windows, you have access to a world of utilities: music players, todo lists, file managers, etc.

Now I'm on an 8GB machine, and even under heavy load, I don't think I've ever come close to reaching that limit in the six months I've owned this box. (I don't have any swap space either)

rapind• 13 years ago

You work for Adobe right?

verytrivial• 13 years ago

> RAM is now fantastically cheap.

Sure, but IMO it is the height of hubris to assume that your application's space-time-trade off to gain a few ms here or there is vastly more important that every OTHER application I am trying to run.

Play nice.

shardling• 13 years ago

https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2012/02/08/the-benefits...

acc00• 13 years ago

I think you might be missing the point here.

You are right that using RAM is preferable to using disk; however, nobody is talking about disks here.

Using a lot of RAM is bad because it makes you slow: pretty much everything, from paging to hash table lookups, works faster the lesser data there is to process.

Minimizing RAM usage is a very worthwhile goal if you want to be faster.

nine_k• 13 years ago

Using as much RAM is possible is right for a task which is a primary task. If all you're doing is browsing, give your browser all the RAM you have.

Sometimes people run other heavy programs alongside a browser: games, IDEs, etc. These tools also assume that RAM is cheap and use lots of it.

At that situation an extension like OneTab becomes very handy.

scholia2• 13 years ago

Disagree. For most of us, memory is already full, so bloatware increases swapping, which makes your PC less responsive.

It's somewhat ironic than opening Gmail in Google Chrome seems to consume roughly the same resources as Microsoft Outlook....

SkyMarshal• 13 years ago

First world perspective. Any globally-oriented FOSS app like Chromium or Firefox should work to reduce hardware requirements as much as possible to provide best possible performance on devices like Raspberry Pie and MIT's $100 laptop [1].

And even in the first world there are a lot of miserly corporations that penny pinch on things like RAM.

If software that wants to target either of those markets can be made more hardware efficient, it should be.

[1] http://one.laptop.org/

tomkarlo5• 13 years ago

It's hard to both target the leading edge of the market and also serve minimal-spec hardware targets. Seems like it would make more sense to have a different branch for those targets, being done by someone with a strong business interest in making it work.

bnegreve• 13 years ago

I disagree: a larger memory footprint means that a smaller fraction of the data is cached.

Since caches are up to 100 times faster, it does impact the reactivity of your program, in fact quite a lot.

bherms• 13 years ago

I have a macbook air. Can't upgrade the memory. Using less memory is a definite positive for me. Because you're situation is different doesn't mean reducing memory usage is a bad thing for all.

runeks• 13 years ago

This is true, but it isn't relevant for embedded devices (my ARM Chromebook has only 2 GB RAM), and DDR2 RAM isn't as cheap as DDR3 RAM (my motherboard is from 2007/2008).

qu4z-22• 13 years ago

The thing is, unused RAM gets used as disk cache, which helps performance.

Also, good luck figuring out how much is "as much RAM as possible without having to swap out".

DharmaPolice• 13 years ago

The price of RAM is not the only (or main) barrier to getting more memory. My previous work desktop had 2GB of RAM. Getting it upgraded (from 1GB) took three months (after the upgrade had been approved by the budget holder).

I was fortunate to get a new work PC recently which has 4GB of RAM. Getting it upgraded (even if I bought the memory myself) would likely take another three months of requests and I suspect would be limited to a maximum of 8GB anyway.

theoutlander2• 13 years ago

I agree with you that everything should be in memory, but I wouldn't call saving memory pointless. The cost of RAM isn't the issue here... we all know RAM is cheap! However, the problem in my case is that my laptop caps at 16GB. I'm also using a RAM drive and no page file (for obvious reasons) and all temp/cache files are also in memory. I'm working on an app that does some heavy lifting on the browser. At times I have tons of reference material open, examples for third-partty controls, sites with flash or controls leaking memory, etc. Memory usage in Chrome was ~8GB.

I could certainly benefit from reduced memory usage while still being able to go back to all those tabs. My overall system usage was 15 GB and with any more stuff I risk losing everything (since I'm not using a page-file).

This might be a very specific use-case, but I do see a lot of value in the extension. (Now, only if I could further hack my machine to use 32 GB :>)

0stanislav• 13 years ago

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.

Got the addon.Thanks and good luck!

whalesalad• 13 years ago

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.

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.

For someone who typically has a hundred tabs open at any given moment, that would be a pretty cool feature.

lftl• 13 years ago

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.

jbarrow• 13 years ago

I really like the functionality of OneTab, as I'm someone who frequently has 3 concurrent Chrome windows, each with dozens of running tabs.

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.

That being said, this is an absolutely beautiful Chrome extension and I commend the developers on what they've accomplished.

bigwilley• 13 years ago

I recently found TabMemFree https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabmemfree/pdanboc...

It is similar to OneTab but keeps the tab open (with Flavicon and Name) but just "parks" it after a time period. It saves back states.

As a heavy open tab users (we have a support group I've heard) I like it. Working with 4 GB of Ram is made much easier!

If you have a tab that you don't want "parked" after 15 minutes (configurable) then you just pin it. So Gmail and Pandora get pinned. The rest park themselves and reload on when I select them.

mohanr2• 13 years ago

I did try this one for some time before The great suspender (https://github.com/deanoemcke/thegreatsuspender/).

IMO the great suspender is better at solving this problem for me because (recalling from memory my experience with tabmemfree couple of weeks back):

1. The great suspender retains a visual snapshot of the page (along with title, favicon etc) thus helping me jog my memory about what the tab is about.

2. It uses a internal chrome:// URL to park the suspended tabs instead of using an external URL (http://). I am not saying that the developer of tabmemfree could be spying on the URLs being parked. But I am just not comfortable with the idea of parking my tabs using an external http service.

3. An explicit text format white list rather than relying on pinned tabs (which makes me lose the tab position, title etc).

4. Explicit option to suspend a tab or group of tabs (and bring them out of suspension) - instead of just relying on time-outs to suspend a tab.

systematical• 13 years ago

One love, One tab...

Nursie• 13 years ago

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.

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.

Splendor• 13 years ago

This is a big problem for me in ChromeOS too.

ttty• 13 years ago

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.

This extension opens the page again, loading it which leads to bigger time load.

ukapu• 13 years ago

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.

guidefreitas• 13 years ago

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.

daemon13• 13 years ago

Can we have the same for Firefox?

I have 2020 open tabs!

Mahn• 13 years ago

May I ask... why?

S_A_P• 13 years ago

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.

jahewson• 13 years ago

Multiple windows

xymostech• 13 years ago

I regularly get up to about 30-40 tabs. I'm a spacial thinker, so I can remember where the content that I want is relative to it's position in the tab bar (+- about 2 tabs usually), so having the icons disappear doesn't bother me. I just compulsively ctrl-click things to open them in new tabs, in case I want both the new content and the old content.

mohanr2• 13 years ago

There are better extensions out there solving this problem. One I use is https://github.com/deanoemcke/thegreatsuspender/

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.

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.

For Chrome v25 users: The extension is having some stability issues which causes Chrome to crash (https://github.com/deanoemcke/thegreatsuspender/issues/30). 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.

senthilnayagam• 13 years ago

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

axefrog• 13 years ago

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.

itamarb• 13 years ago

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

acomms• 13 years ago

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.

un1xl0ser• 13 years ago

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.

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.

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.

nessus42• 13 years ago

Excellent! I love it!

Now when is there going to be a version for Safari?

ceejayoz• 13 years ago

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

joshmlewis2• 13 years ago

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.

buremba• 13 years ago

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.

notdan• 13 years ago

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

ccameronmills• 13 years ago

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.

Centigonal• 13 years ago

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.

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.

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dossier/hohaaljbjh...

Flenser3• 13 years ago

I've only just realised this is built into chrome natively:

Right click on any tab in a window and choose "Bookmark all tabs..." from the bottom of the menu. Or press CTRL+SHIFT+D.

This has the following advantages over OneTab:

1. You can add new bookmarks to the list at any time.

2. Bookmarks can be synced with google sync.

3. You can name the folder so you know what the list is.

4. Bookmarks are searchable in the omnibar.

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.

6. When right-clicking a folder there's an option to open all bookmarks in an incognito window.

I can't believe I've overlooked it for so long! I don't need any session management extensions now.

dschiptsov• 13 years ago

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

ErikRogneby• 13 years ago

For the curious:

chrome://memory-redirect/

kmfrk• 13 years ago

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.

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.

galactus• 13 years ago

wow, amazingly simple/useful idea! Thanks!

secoif• 13 years ago

If this appeals to you, I have 2 words: Tab Wrangler.

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.

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.

Anyway, Tab Wrangler absolutely changed my life.

Not my project, just think it's awesome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-wrangler/egnjh...

bmurphy1976• 13 years ago

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

arrowgunz• 13 years ago

If this extension is not made to make money, why not Opensource it so that others can contribute to it.

Is it opensource already?

nu2ycombinator• 13 years ago

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

lorenzfx• 13 years ago

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.

soemarko• 13 years ago

problem: tab syncing also stop working.

one reason for me keeping chrome is the tab syncing works. Firefox offers nothing on iOS. safari only works whenever it feels like it.

anuragupadhaya• 13 years ago

Even being a marketing gimmick, it is a smart development. Minimal and useful. I <3 it.

eisbaw• 13 years ago

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}') }

marcamillion• 13 years ago

As someone that lives with 40 tabs open in any 1 window at a time, with at least 2 windows open....THANK YOU.

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.

That being said, I would love to know a few things about this extension (if the creators are here):

- Where is this list stored? On my HDD? In my Gmail Account?

- 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.

- Will my One Tab list be there if I reset my machine? I assume so, but what if I close my `One Tab` tab?

Other than that...THANK YOU...for this WONDERFUL extension. This will easily be my most used extension - hands down.

Flenser3• 13 years ago

It's stored on your PC in the window.localstorage for that extension. I used the Extension Gallery and Web Store Inspector to look at the code without installing the extension:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/extension-gallery-...

It might be easier just to save them as bookmarks. Right click on any tab in the tab bar and choose "Bookmark all tabs" or press CTRL+SHIFT+D. Use the Split Tabs extension to break them up into local groups first:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-split/imjbfepo...

I've talked more about the benefits of using just bookmarks here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5358109

chenster2• 13 years ago

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?

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.

See http://screencast.com/t/biqAF65Fdd

alexmr• 13 years ago

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.

est• 13 years ago

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

sturmeh• 13 years ago

I'd rather waste memory than waste network traffic, re-authenticating and hitting servers to check for updated data and restarting audio/video streams.

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.

sbronstein• 13 years ago

My big problem with Chrome tabs is that over time, they start consuming all of my CPU 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.

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.

omnray2• 13 years ago

Its fanny that nobody mention there the TabsOutliner

omnray2• 13 years ago

A screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/o8ZvIDH.jpg

theoutlander2• 13 years ago

Interesting extension. I think you need to address a couple of things:

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.

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.

Thanks & Good luck!!

Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

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