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Chromium nightly build adds memory-saving 'phantom tab' support
Pinned tabs are a great way to save room on your tab strip in Google Chrome. But suppose you want to free up the resources something you've pinned is using -- say the 50+ MB of memory used by Seesmic Web or another similar web apps?
In the latest Chromium nightly builds, a new feature has been added called phantom tabs. When enabled, you can right-click and close a pinned tab and its favicon will stay behind -- Chromium simply unloads the renderer process for that tab, freeing up the processor and memory resources it was using.
Click on the phantom tab's icon, and Chromium fires up a new instance your pinned page. Right-click and close a phantom tab, and it disappears from the tab strip completely.
And what if the only tab in your current window is pinned and you close it? Chromium stay open -- instead of closing the browser down completely as it normally would. Clicking the pinned icon won't rejuvenate it, at least not right now. You'll have to create a new tab first and then click back to it.
Like many other additions, you have to enable phantom tabs via a command line switch: --enable-phantom-tabs. Not sure how to add switches to Chrome or Chromium? Check out our brief how-to post!
If you've never downloaded one before, here's a link to the Chromium buildbot snapshots.
Comments
8
Subscribe to commentscybercapitalistJan 22nd 2010 9:22AM
Great idea! This is the kind of stuff Firefox needs to be working on.
laeroJan 22nd 2010 2:20PM
Have you tried this addon? Lets you pin and faviconize tabs in firefox.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/47734
ProlornJan 22nd 2010 9:34AM
Sounds perfect for all the seldom-clicked tabs I keep open for some reason or another.
Drew GreenJan 22nd 2010 9:52AM
Cool idea. I'd be more likely to use it to stop CPU eating Flash pages from slowing my system to a crawl than to save memory. With memory being the price it is, and most people seeming to have a ton these days, what's 50mb?
MxxConJan 22nd 2010 2:06PM
i could never understand why some people have 20-40 tabs open.
they have those tabs for weeks at a time..they don't even remember why they have them open.
if you are not actively using a specific tab, but you want to remember it, either bookmark it or use something like "read it later" addon...what's the point of hoarding those tabs.
MrGreencastleJan 22nd 2010 10:09PM
So... A bookmark that's in your tab bar?
RED_404Jan 23rd 2010 3:40PM
"Clicking the pinned icon won't rejuvenate it, at least not right now. You'll have to create a new tab first and then click back to it."
That bug is fixed now.
angrykeyboarderFeb 6th 2010 1:19AM
How do you pin a tab to begin with?