Sloth
Automatically discards all tabs at startup, before they load, reducing memory footprint and unnecessary bandwidth usage.
What is Sloth?
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Other platforms
Summary
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
User reviews summary
Pros
- Reduces memory and CPU usage
- Tabs remain unloaded until switched to
- Stops all tabs from loading at once
- Works as described
Cons
- Doesn't handle large number of idle tabs (500+) effectively
- "New tab" function seems to have delay
- Doesn't load all bookmarks from a folder, all tabs start loading at once
- Issues with keeping pinned tab URLs in memory
Most mentioned
- Efficient memory and CPU usage
- issues with new tab function
- loading of all bookmarks from folder simultaneously
- note on handling large number of tabs
Recent reviews
Safety
Risk impact
Sloth may not be safe to use and it requires some risky permissions. Exercise caution when installing this extension. Review carefully before installing.
Risk likelihood
Sloth has earned a good reputation and can be trusted.
Screenshots
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