UPDATE: The Great Suspender has been sold by the original developer, and there are some concerns and issues about the new version of this extension. Hence it is recommended that you do not use it. Chrome browser takes some memory and the more the number of tabs, the more the performance degrade of this browser. You might be closing tabs one by one as a workaround to overcome this problem, and that is no more required. But The Great Suspender can help us avoid Chrome crashes.
The Great Suspender Chrome extension
This Chrome extension is very powerful and can bring back your computer’s valuable resources that were being consumed by opened tabs. You might leave a tab open when you plan to come back. It is more convenient then bookmarking and closing the tab because you need the link only for a short duration. The Great Suspender is meant for exactly these scenarios. It can automatically suspend some tabs that have not been used for a given amount of time. Suspended tabs are not closed completely but are in a state where they consume minimum resources. The extension itself is quite simple to use. Once installed, you can navigate to its options page and adjust a few settings. The first and the most important setting is the time period to suspend. If you quickly switch tabs, keeping a shorter period can help. Else you can go for something bigger such as one hour or so.
Automatically suspend tabs on Google Chrome
If a tab is not used for this much amount of time, it will automatically be suspended. Once the tab has been suspended, you can reload it or simply click on the large blue area. A simple refresh of the page can re-activate the tab and bring it back from the suspension state. The Great Suspended also supports the creation of whitelists. You can whitelist any number of websites so that tabs which have these websites opened are never suspended. This is very helpful for websites/web pages that require to be opened in the background. Read: Edge users fell prey to malicious browser extensions; Great Suspender has been mentioned.
Prevent Chrome browser crashes
The extension is intelligent enough that it will never dismiss or suspend tabs that have unsaved input. For example, you were filling up a form on the website, but then you wandered off to do something else. All inputs will be preserved, and the tab will never be suspended. Similarly, you can also enable a setting where the extension will not suspend any tab playing audio or media. So you can still listen to music in a background tab. If you have thin internet connectivity, then you would not like to suspend tabs at all. The Great Suspender also comes with an option which will never suspend tabs if the internet is not available. Other than that there is a similar option if you are running your device on battery.
The extension also gives you a few options in session management. Under the session management tab, you can see the active and suspended session. You can also export or save these suspended sessions, and they will show up under saved sessions later on. Keyboard shortcuts for most of the operations such as suspend and unsuspend can be configured as well. The program comes with one set of default shortcuts, but you can easily remap them to something else. The Great Suspender is one useful extension for Google Chrome. As soon as you start using it, you will notice a considerable decrease in system resources consumed by Google Chrome. This is a must-have extension for all Chrome users. It is customizable and can be configured to a good extent. Read next: Make Chrome browser use less memory.
