How to Make Chrome Not Load Tabs Until They are Selected? (10 Solutions!!)
Channel: Roel Van de Paar
Date: 2020-08-19

How to Make Chrome Not Load Tabs Until They are Selected?


The Question: I have over 20 tabs opened in Chrome and need to restart browser from time to
time. This browser does not have option similar to Firefox's "Do not load tabs
until selected" loading tabs only after selecting them. I have tried a few
Chrome extensions but none do what I am looking for.

Solutions: Please watch the whole video to see all solutions, in order of how many people found them helpful

== This solution helped 28 people ==
At the time of this writing, Chrome does not support this functionality
natively. I've been using https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-
suspender/klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg, an extension that adds similar
functionality to Chrome.
You can verify the memory and CPU savings you gain while using this extension
by opening the Chrome Task Manager: Menu ＞ More
tools ＞ Task manager

== This solution helped 2 people ==
There is also https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-suspender/
fiabciakcmgepblmdkmemdbbkilneeeh/related that has been updated lastly as of 03.
January 2015.

== This solution helped 10 people ==
As of version 44 (currently dev branch), after a restart Chrome only loads tabs
when they are first selected. It doesn't even start a process for the tabs
until they are loaded, so that means less memory/CPU usage for us.

== This solution helped 2 people ==
The extension FooTab gives this functionality: https://chrome.google.com/
webstore/detail/footab/anbodogikfbehidmmjdokehphginagbb

FooTab for Google Chrome
After about a week of use, this extension has saved me some precious cellular
data, by suspending multiple tab load on start-up. Except for the favicons, it
blocks the page until the tab/s are selected.
Download links and description here

Had this same problem with Chrome mobile, where all of the tabs would cycle
whenever I opened Chrome. After setting tab throttling to forced Enable in
chrome://flags ...it seems to have solved the issue.
http://www.askvg.com/how-to-enable-disable-background-tabs-throttling-feature-
in-google-chrome-and-opera-web-browsers/

== This solution helped 18 people ==
Since Chrome 54 (Oct 2016) this feature is supported in Chrome natively, so
previous bloated extensions are not that needed. A GNU GPLv3 licensed extension
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/native-lazy-tabs/
ianooggapgmmmfojacmhnfaheidgpbki extension works and it is very small: 33 KiB.
Citing extension description:
 Automatically discards all tabs at startup, before they load,
 reducing memory footprint and unnecessary bandwidth usage.
 Native Lazy Tabs is a light extension for users that don't want to
 load all tabs when Chrome is started. It's native because it uses the
 native tab discarding method from the Google API (introduced in
 version 54). Also, because of that, it doesn't have the shortcomings
 of older implementations that could cause bugs like the pages
 reloading itself even after suspended.
 Moreover, this extension doesn't use any memory because there's no
 need for a background page: it loads and unloads itself after Chrome
 is started.

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