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Comment by kbos87 | Hacker News Reader

“The Great Suspender” is a chrome extension that solves this very gracefully. I came across it, showed a couple coworkers, and it spread like wildfire inside my workplace, where everyone I work with spends their day split across dozens of chrome tabs. I was wondering when this would become native to chrome.

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This extension requests the following permissions:

- "Read and change all your data on the websites you visit"

- "Read and change your browsing history"

That's a lot of power to grant to a third party, especially on a work machine where some of that data you're looking at may belong to your users.

I don't disagree, but I also don't know how you would build an extension like that without those permissions.

How many applications are running on your work machine outside the browser, with no warnings or significant[0] limitations?

[0]: https://xkcd.com/1200/

I just assume every piece of software I touch is collecting egregious amounts of data, whether chrome forces them to disclose it or not.

That and OneTab I can recommend. OneTab basically makes a "temporary bookmark" of all open tabs, and then closes them. After that, you can open the links from OneTab.

This has now been superseded by The Great Discarder, a new extension by the same author that utilizes Chrome's native tab discard API.

I wouldn't call it "superseeded", it just has a different set of trade-offs. From the description:

Advantages over The Great Suspender: - More memory savings - Compatible with chrome tab syncing - Super lightweight extension that uses no content scripts or persistent background scripts

Disadvantages over The Great Suspender: - No visibility on which tabs have been suspended - Unable to prevent a tab from reloading when it gains focus

I'd say those disadvantages (particularly the second one) outweigh any increase in memory savings.

I've been a fan and have passed it around to everyone with the same (hundreds of open tabs) problem that I have. I mean, I'm still seeing 450 megs of memory use from The Great Suspender, but it's better than the 10+ gigs from those pages otherwise :P

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