Sloth

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

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Sloth is a lightweight, open-source Chrome extension designed to optimize your browsing experience by automatically discarding all tabs at startup before they load. By leveraging Chrome's discard API (available since Chrome 54), Sloth ensures that tabs remain visible but are not loaded into memory or fetched from the network until selected. This approach reduces memory footprint and unnecessary bandwidth consumption.

Sloth works by discarding all tabs except new tabs or special tabs (like "chrome://" URLs). If no new tab exists in a window, it will create and activate one to prevent any tab from loading at startup unless explicitly chosen by the user. While very effective, the extension may have minor limitations with very large numbers of open tabs, due to browser design. Fully open-source, Sloth's code is available on GitHub, making it a transparent and customizable tool for users seeking increased browser efficiency.

By:: HRJ
Users:: 1,000+
Rating:: 4.36
(25)
Version:: 0.5 (Last updated: 2019-08-27)
Creation date:: 2019-08-27
Risk:: Moderate risk impact Low risk likelihood
Permissions:: tabs
Size:: 25.85K
Full description:: See detailed description
Source:: Chrome Web Store
Updated:: 17 hours ago

Ranking

# 22,868 ▲ 167

Other rankings

#7186 in Workflow & Planning ▲ 4 #178 in license keyword 3 ▼ 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.

Recent 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.

Risk likelihood

Sloth has earned a fairly good reputation and likely 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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