Sloth

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

Sloth: Reduce Memory Use with Lazy-Loading Chrome Extension

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

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

# 20,337 ▲ 83

Other rankings

#7675 in Workflow & Planning ▲ 13

Other platforms

Sloth Goonies (v1.0)

4.15

(80) 27,950+

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 Chrome Web Store does not verify user reviews, so some user reviews may be inaccurate, spammy, or outdated.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

It helps in managing tabs efficiently by keeping them unloaded until needed.
It reduces memory usage by not loading all tabs at once.
Users appreciate that it stops all tabs from loading simultaneously.

Cons

It can cause issues with the browser forgetting URLs of pinned tabs, resulting in blank pages.
The 'new tab' option doesn't work as expected, causing delays.
The feature to open all bookmarks in a folder does not work properly, with tabs loading at the same time.

Most mentioned

User experience differs greatly based on the number of tabs.
It has both strong positive and negative impacts on browser performance.
The extension claims to reduce memory usage but can lead to unexpected behavior.

User 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.