Lazy Tabs

Faster Chrome startup and lower memory usage — discard inactive tabs automatically, with zero permissions and zero tracking.

Starting Chrome with a bunch of windows and tabs already open reloads every one of them right away, even tabs you won't touch for hours. Lazy Tabs discards all inactive tabs instead (pinned tabs are left alone) — either automatically at startup or whenever you click its icon. Tabs stay in your tab bar exactly where they were; they just won't load until you switch to them.

Why Lazy Tabs

• No permissions requested. Check source/manifest.json yourself — there isn't a permissions block.
• No tracking, no analytics, nothing phoned home.
• Open source. Read the entire extension in one file: source/background.js, under 50 lines.
• Does one thing. No settings screen, no upsell, no "pro" tier.

Before / after

Previous session, restored normally	With Lazy Tabs

Install

Add Lazy Tabs from the Chrome Web Store

How it works

On startup, on icon click, or when several tabs are recreated in a burst (e.g. a window restoring), Lazy Tabs walks every open window and discards any tab that is not pinned and not the active tab in a visible window. Discarded tabs keep their title, favicon, and position — Chrome simply hasn't loaded their page yet.

Found a bug?

Please open an issue — ideally with your Chrome version and whether tab groups or multiple windows were involved, since those are the trickiest cases to reproduce.

Release History

1.2.0

• Migrate to vite
• Fix regression introduced in 1.1.0. Fix #22
• Add multiple tabs creation detector. Fix #19

1.1.0

• Suspend tabs during window restoration. Fix #19

1.0.1

• Add types

1.0.0

• Update manifest to v3
• Replace npm with pnpm
• Replace babel with esbuild

0.5.3

• Remove tabs permission request

0.5.2 ( thanks to Mathieu Hofman )

• Discard active tabs if their window is minimized
• Transform the background page into an event page

0.5.1

• Update icon

0.5.0

• Add click event for discarding tabs

0.4.0

• Remove all code, switch to discard algorithm

0.3.0

• Move from Grunt to Webpack
• Switch to ES6

0.2.1

• Stop page loading