Overview
Automatically discards all tabs at startup, before they load, reducing memory footprint and unnecessary bandwidth usage.
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. ## History / Credits I found an extension called Native Lazy Tabs here. It was distributed under the GPL license. I adapted it and added the "new tab" feature. The icon is by Jaime Serra, distributed under the CC license.
Details
- Version0.6
- UpdatedOctober 17, 2025
- Offered byHRJ
- Size11.93KiB
- LanguagesEnglish (United Kingdom)
- Developer
Email
harshad.rj@gmail.com - Non-traderThis developer has not identified itself as a trader. For consumers in the European Union, please note that consumer rights do not apply to contracts between you and this developer.
Privacy
This developer declares that your data is
- Not being sold to third parties, outside of the approved use cases
- Not being used or transferred for purposes that are unrelated to the item's core functionality
- Not being used or transferred to determine creditworthiness or for lending purposes
Support
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