IF you’ve ever opened the Task Manager and watched in horror as Chrome casually eats through gigabytes of RAM like it’s an all-you-can-eat buffet, you’re not alone. And honestly? Google isn’t really planning to fix this anytime soon. From their perspective, Chrome isn’t broken—it’s the most popular browser in the world after all.
But I don’t trust Chrome anymore, and Google’s repeated failure to address the browser’s memory consumption is part of the reason. That said, if you want to continue using Chrome, there are extensions that can fix Chrome’s memory hogging problem.
OneTab
Collapse dozens of tabs into a single, memory-friendly list
OneTab is probably the most straightforward solution if you’re drowning in tabs. As soon as you click the extension, all your tabs get converted into a single list on one page—freeing up most of your memory.
The beauty of OneTab is its simplicity. You’re not dealing with timers or complicated settings. When you need those tabs back, just click to restore them individually or all at once. You can even export your tab lists or share them as URLs, which is handy for switching between devices.
The only downside is that it’s a manual process. You have to remember to click that button when things get out of hand and Chrome starts choking your PC.
Auto Tab Discard
Automatically unload idle tabs without breaking your workflow
If you want extremely granular control over your tabs, Auto Tab Discard is your best friend. Chrome was much faster on my laptop after I installed Auto Tab Discard as it uses Chrome’s native tab discarding method. It also means that if you remove the extension later, your tabs remain safe and functional.
What really makes Auto Tab Discard special is its customization. You can set it to discard tabs based on whether you’re on battery power, whether tabs contain media elements, or even whether you have an internet connection. Suspended tabs also don’t consume CPU or run background scripts.
The interface can show you exactly what tabs are discarded, and you can whitelist specific sites that should never be suspended. For people who regularly work with dozens of tabs, this extension can significantly reduce memory usage.
The Marvelous Suspender
Fine-grained rules for suspending tabs exactly how you want
The Marvelous Suspender is a privacy-focused fork of The Great Suspender. It does everything the original did, minus the tracking and malware concerns.
The Marvelous Suspender automatically suspends tabs after a period of inactivity, which you can set anywhere between five minutes to 12 hours. Suspended tabs stay open but don’t consume resources. You can click any suspended tab to reload them instantly.
As with Auto Tab Discard, you can whitelist domains that should never be suspended. The extension also lets you save groups of tabs as sessions, making it easy to switch between different projects or close everything before shutting down for the day.
The extension has been updated to work with Chrome’s Manifest V3 requirements. It should continue working even as Chrome phases out older extensions.
Tab Suspender
No dashboards, no fluff—just fewer tabs eating RAM
Tab Suspender is a more aggressive implementation of the same idea that Auto Tab Discard and The Marvelous Suspender follow. It catches inactive, idle, or forgotten tabs and suspends them automatically, with the option to restore them when needed.
The extension also includes native discard support, meaning suspended tabs that haven’t been used for a long time can be discarded entirely, saving even more memory.
For extreme multitaskers, Tab Suspender even offers an auto-close function that will close unused tabs entirely and keep your total tab count at a manageable level. The extension constantly keeps tidying your browser rather aggressively to keep it from hogging up all the memory it can.
Session Buddy
Save, restore, and manage tab sessions without Chrome melting down
If you’re someone who works on multiple projects and needs to switch between different sets of tabs regularly, Session Buddy is worth checking out. Unlike the other extensions that focus primarily on memory reduction, Session Buddy is all about saving and restoring entire browsing sessions.
Here’s how it works: You’ve got three windows open with different tabs for different projects—say one for work, one for research, and one for personal sessions. Session Buddy saves all these windows and tabs together as a single session, then lets you close everything to free up memory. When you’re ready to work on a specific project again, you can restore the entire session with one click.
Session Buddy also functions as a crash recovery tool, automatically saving your sessions so you can restore your work if Chrome crashes out of the blue. The extension also stores everything locally and lets you search through saved sessions, making it easy to find a specific set of tabs you used three weeks ago. It’s perfect for anyone working on multiple projects or assignments at once.
Google won’t fix Chrome, but you can
Chrome’s memory hunger isn’t going away. Google has chosen speed, stability, and a tad bit of security over lightweight performance and that’s apparently the hill they’re willing to die on. The Memory Saver feature is a step in the right direction, but it’s nowhere near aggressive enough for power users who routinely keep dozens of tabs open.
Thankfully, the extension ecosystem has your back. Whether you want the one-click simplicity on OneTab, the precision of Auto Tab Discard, the set-it-and-forget-it convenience of The Marvelous Suspender, the aggressive cleanup of Tab Suspender, or the project-based organization of Session Buddy, there’s a solution that fits your workflow. You might not be able to fix Chrome’s fundamental architecture, but you can definitely tame its appetite for RAM.
