Sloth

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

Sloth Chrome Extension

Sloth is an open-source, lightweight Chrome extension designed to optimize your browsing experience by lazily loading your tabs. It automatically discards all tabs at startup, ensuring only new or special tabs like those with chrome:// URLs are active, effectively reducing the memory footprint and unnecessary bandwidth usage.

By utilizing the discard API introduced in Chrome 54, Sloth keeps your tab bar clean and responsive without loading any content until you explicitly select a tab. This is especially useful when you have a multitude of tabs open, allowing you to save system resources. With Sloth, browsing becomes faster and more efficient. Get started today and enjoy a streamlined experience!

Source code: GitHub - Sloth

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By: HRJ

Users: 1,000+

-1,000

Rating: 4.36

(25)

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

Creation date: 2019-08-27

Risk:

Permissions:

tabs

Size: 25.85K

Full description: See detailed description

Source: Chrome Web Store

Updated: 18 hours ago

Ranking

# 23,858 ▼ 4,163

Other rankings

#7143 in Workflow & Planning ▼ 19

User reviews

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.

These summaries are automatically generated weekly using AI based on recent user reviews. User reviews may be inaccurate, spammy, or outdated.

User reviews

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.

Xalomon, 2023-09-29

Simply perfect.

Online ReD Settings, 2022-04-27

working awesome !

Ashish Bisht, 2019-12-13

View all user reviews

Extension safety

Risk impact

Sloth requires a few sensitive permissions. Exercise caution before installing.

Risk impact analysis details

Critical Grants access to browser tabs, which can be used to track user browsing habits and history, presenting a privacy concern.
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Risk likelihood

Sloth has earned a good reputation and can be trusted.

Risk likelihood analysis details

High This extension has low user count. Unpopular extensions may not be stable or safe.
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