1. Open up Window->Task Manager
2. Sort by CPU
3. Tap back and forth between tab clusters with single digit+ CPU usage and the "End Process" button as they bubble to the top of the list
4. Try not to kill extensions
5. When I'm not seeing too many >1% processes, sort by memory usage
6. Kill everything over 99mb
7. Continue enjoying Chrome
Every time I do this little dance, I think: this would be much more fun as a little Space Invaders style video game. Wave 1 of enemies would be processes that bubble above 1%. Extensions would be friendlies. Wave 2 is high memory processes. It'd be fun to get a little score every time.
Of course, Chrome should just have a "use less resources" button that did all of that for you.
killall "Google Chrome Helper"
Secondly, check out this extension for Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspende... . It auto-suspends tabs that haven't been opened for a given time period (I think the default is 60 minutes). Can also whitelist domains, etc. I've been using it with great success for a long time now.
So in practice, what you're saying isn't relevant to majority of *nix users today.
I'd like to see a command line interface to manage my open tabs, so that I can see which tabs are going to be "expired" soon (unloaded into a stale tab, or converted into bookmarks as long-term cold storage) so that I can manage which groups of tabs I would prefer to continue to be running, and do bulk maintenance on what's "very cached" and "mostly cached" and such. I would imagine something like buku/jotmuch that has HTTPS API access to some extension in my browser. (I mean, the right way to do this is DCOM/RPC but see lkcl's eternally ignored pleas...)
One alternative I tried for a while was xmonad + a plugin to label individual windows. Instead of using browser tabs, each page would be loaded in a new window, and each window would be given a list of tags by me when leaving the window first time. With a keyboard shortcut, I was pulling up a list of possible browser windows that matched a search query about tags. I don't really care about tabs/window distinction as long as the interface gets out of my way.
Have you considered doing a quick extension to monitor your tab usage stats? At minimum you could track details like: Open/close rate, tab revisit/reload rate (longer than a second), tab lifetime, groups of tabs (such as tab creation relationships) and their lifetimes. Once you have this information, you could probably tweak your browser's build configuration to more closely match your habits.
It's not like you're actively monitoring every tab at once, you just have the knowledge ready to go and at a finger's whim. You use extensions like Tab Hunter to jump directly to the tab you care about.
Yeah, you could do the same with using a bunch of profiles and bookmarks... but then you need to copy your login cookies and such and it just becomes a mess. I've tried many, many other solutions over the years and simply having a huge number of tabs is the one that continues to Just Work.
No, it's similar to saying "Surely there's a better solution than having 1000 radio/tv channels tuned on at once, waiting for you to decide which one is relevant"
Like why not open what you need when you need it rather than squirreling all those "maybes"?
I know I'm a power user, but I miss how effective old Chrome was at this.
For instance with HN, tabs provide quick navigatable references back to discussions that are relevant to my interest, and that might contain lead-off liks/references after they have fallen off the front-page.
I don't think the person you're replying to was referring so much to implementation details, but rather more to function for the user. What if the browser had better support for finding items that are open in tabs?
I don't know about other people, but I find it really useful to research a project and then leave it alone for a month or two before working on it. When I do this I often have a better perspective on the project than if I were to just jump in. With my setup, when I return to it my session is just as I left it; making it very easy to get up to speed.
Average webpage size has ballooned in the past 10 or so years.
/me smh
Also by 200 the GUI of chrome starts to annoy me so much that it forces me to close some stuff. I've tried a few extensions to deal with this but I've chosen to keep it clean and below this threshold instead.
Would a plugin like The Great Suspender fix your problem? I really liked that you could collapse a page of tabs into a collection of bookmarks and open a new page of those tabs just as easily.
Nowadays Chrome keels over at around 150, like you say. It also leaks memory like a sieve, so if your hard drive is anywhere close to full you'll end up with a lovely OS X popup saying all your running programs have been frozen and that your system is out of memory (since it can't page to disk because it's full).