As a person who also has way too manu tabs open at all times, I've had success with the great suspender [0]. It "suspends" pages after a timeout so they use less memory.

[0]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspende...

The current version also has a bug where it will create so many cookies on google-owned domains that it will exceed the header limit and cause a 500 response. The dev refuses to fix it until he implements a feature to make suspended tabs persist across updates, which is apparently slow going.

Well, it is opensource so anyone can fix it for fun or profit: https://github.com/deanoemcke/thegreatsuspender

Seconded. I reliably have a few hundred tabs open, and GS keeps them all manageable.

It’s not always happy if Chrome crashes or I have to do a cold reboot, but mostly it keeps Chrome’s gluttony under control.

At this point why not just use something like OneTab? It also syncs the tabs across many computers.

Well chrome will "suspend" tabs when it sees your system is running low on memory, and will resume them when you switch to them.

But it's a much harder problem to solve than many think. For example, if they start "suspending" my slack tab, or my email tab, and I begin missing messages I'm going to be quite upset...

That doesn't sound like a reason for it to be hard - just provide a way to mark tabs as "don't suspend". I have only a couple I would put in that category, and I really wish Chrome would stop burning up all my resources and battery on the rest (often it's not a specific tab, just the "Browser" process, so I can't do it manually).

I'm pretty sure the amount of users that actually like this opt-out behaviour (everything gets suspended by default) is a minority.

Instead what they choose to do is not worry about memory until it you actually run out of it. I don't mind my applications taking up 90% of my memory if that keeps everything fast and I don't have to worry about keeping track and thinking about what I actually want to suspend and what I dont't.

If you really do mind, just run any of the plugins that implements your exact required behaviour (like the great suspender).

Next step: Limit the amount of memory available to Chrome so it thinks your system is running low on memory earlier.

> I'm going to be quite upset...

You'll get over it, I promise.

I'd just end up using another browser that doesn't purposely slow itself down or make me miss notifications or stop background activity unnecessarily.

Why the extreme majority would want that from their browser all the time baffles me. Just to see a lower number in a resource monitor window?

Firefox keeps alive pinned tabs, don't know about chrome

If one tab uses about 100MB of memory then does two hundred tabs use 20GB of RAM?

You say you sometimes have "hundreds" of tabs open, I've done this too, but my laptop doesn't have 20GB of RAM, but it just seems to work anyway.

What I ended up doing was: just stop looking at resource monitors.

I don't know but it eventually bogs down the computer. Fan starts running hard and everything's slow until I close down a bunch of tabs.

> I'm perfectly willing to wait a second

I'm not. I open dozens of pages simultaneously routinely. 1 second here, one second there, it adds up.

Sure, it's not the end of the world, but those differences were why Chrome was better than Firefox.

You cut off the "if I haven't touched the tab in an hour" part.

How many times does that pretty-narrow situation happen to you in a day?

If you had such a memory-saving mechanism, boosted by prefetching the tabs adjacent to my current tab, it would barely cost me any seconds in an average week. Running low on memory is a big hassle taking a lot of seconds to deal with.

That one second makes me want to smash my device to pieces.

And stop being quite so snarky to users who may not know about these hidden settings.