Sloth

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

What is Sloth?

Sloth is an open-source Chrome extension that ensures tabs are lazily loaded at startup. This tool discards all tabs before they load, thereby minimizing the usage of memory and unnecessary bandwidth. It operates using the discard API of Chrome 54. All tabs, excluding new or 'special' tabs, are discarded but remain visible in the tab bar. Any active window without a new tab is provided with one to prevent unwanted loading at startup. There is a known limitation within the tool in relation to the browser design that when hundreds of tabs are open, some become active.

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Extension stats

By: HRJ

View on Chrome Web Store

Users: 2,000+

Rating: 4.36 (25)

Version: 0.5 (Last updated: 2019-08-27)

Creation date: 2019-08-27

Risk impact: Moderate risk impact

Risk likelihood: Very low risk likelihood

Manifest version: 2

Permissions:

tabs

Size: 25.85K

Ranking

# 19097 ▲ 3

Other rankings

#7633 in Workflow & Planning ▼ 9

Other platforms

Not available on Firefox

Not available on Edge

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Extension summary

Analyze keywords

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

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

Requires Chrome 54+.

How it works

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

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

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

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

User reviews

These summaries are automatically generated weekly using AI based on recent user reviews. Chrome Web Store does not verify user reviews, so some user reviews may be inaccurate, spammy, or outdated.

Pros

Reduces memory usage by keeping tabs unloaded until accessed
Helps manage a large number of tabs efficiently
Works as described and fulfills its main promise
Users report improvement in CPU and memory availability
Positive user experiences noted with phrases like 'Simply perfect' and 'Works well'

Cons

Causes browser slowdowns by opening numerous empty tabs in the background
Issues with certain features like new tab functionality not working correctly
Problems with loading bookmarks all at once, contrary to expectations
May cause URLs of pinned tabs to be forgotten, leading to an empty state
Lack of options for managing startup pages or special tabs

Most mentioned

Works as described
Issues with loading tabs
High memory usage due to background tabs
Great for managing many tabs
Notable impact on CPU and memory availability

Recent reviews

thiennguyen, 2024-05-11

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