Reduce Chrome’s CPU Usage With ‘The Great Suspender’ Extension

Chrome is the preferred browser for many out there, including myself. But working with so many tabs open all the time definitely puts a lot of load on your computer’s CPU. We’ve covered in the past such extensions as OneTab and we shared with you guides on how to efficiently manage your Chrome tabs and how to speed up your browser.  Now, we’re going to talk about The Great Suspender, another highly useful Chrome extension meant to help you reduce the memory footprint.

The Great Suspender is not a new extension of its kind, but it is definitely amongst the best and that’s why we’re covering it. This Chrome extension lets you manually suspend tabs but keeps them available in the tab bar without draining your CPU usage. Ever tab that you load in your Chrome browsers takes up memory, and even if you don’t use it, it becomes inactive but still slows down your brows and the entire system.

Reduce Chrome’s memory footprint with The Great Suspender

What The Great Suspender Chrome extension is this – it keeps active only the tabs that you are actually using, freeing up the memory used by inactive tabs. With this extension you can choose to suspend only a single tab or all the tabs open across a window. You can set an inactivity period after which a certain tab will be unloaded. For some users of this extension, Chrome’s CPU usage has dropped from an average of 35%-45% CPU to 4%-7%. I can confirm myself that my laptop is running  smoother after installing and using The Great Suspender for a few days, so I recommend it to everybody.
After you install The Great Suspender, you will see its button next to the URL bar where most extension usually “land”. Once you click on it you will see four vertical buttons. The first one lets you unload the current tab, the second one unloads all tabs in the current window, the third one lets you reload all tabs in the window, while the last one lets you access the settings. In the settings tab you can set a whitelist, inactivity time period for tabs and view a history of the suspended tabs.
However, be careful when using The Great Suspender as some have reported that progress on certain pages with dynamic content get lost after you try to reload them. Therefore, I suggest you to define like 30 minutes for inactive tabs and also make sure you never leave tabs with work in progress unsaved. After you will install the extension you will be greeted with this message that you should pay close attention to:

When tabs get suspended they become bound to the extension process. This means that if you ever uninstall the extension, you will also lose any suspended tabs you have open at the time. So please BE CAREFUL BEFORE UNINSTALLING. The safe way to uninstall is to unsuspend all your tabs first (there is a button in the dropdown for this). I would even recommend disabling the extension first as opposed to uninstalling, as you can then always re-enable if something is amiss.
Secondly, if you are really serious about reducing your memory foot-print, I would recommed turning the image preview option OFF. This can make quite a large impact on the amount of memory chrome uses.

Also Read: 22 Most Popular Google Chrome Extensions

Let us know in the comments section how has The Great Suspender helped you reduce your Chrome’s memory usage. If not, you can always contact the developer at the following email address –  deanoemcke (at) gmail (dot) com.