Great Suspender Chrome extension puts tabs to sleep to speed up your computer

Google’s Chrome browser has been criticised for slowing down computers by eating up memory, but new extension fixes that

Andrew Griffin
Tuesday 19 May 2015 10:11 BST
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A man walks past a poster for Google's Chrome browser in an underground station in central London January 25, 2010. 
REUTERS/Luke MacGregor
A man walks past a poster for Google's Chrome browser in an underground station in central London January 25, 2010. REUTERS/Luke MacGregor

A new Chrome browser promises to speed up computers, by freezing tabs stopping the browser stealing processor time.

Unused Chrome tabs can chug away in the background of the browser, eating up memory and processor time and slowing down your whole PC. But Great Suspender will automatically freeze those tabs, so they won’t take up the computer’s valuable attention until you go back to them.

After installing the extension from the Chrome Web Store, a little button will appear in the top right hand corner of the screen. Clicking that button allows for options to freeze tabs.

The extension gives a series of settings to decide which tabs will be suspended, when and how. Users can choose whether tabs should be automatically suspended after a pre-set period of time, for instance, or whitelist certain sites so that they’ll never get frozen.

While Chrome has a number of features that mark it out from main competitors Firefox and Safari — mostly notably complete syncing with your Google account, so that you can get your bookmarks and history anywhere, and integration with Google’s search — it has often been criticised for putting too much load on processors and computers. Those behind the browser say that it can be used to provide an extra speed boost to computers, as seen in their task manager.

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