Reviews & Comments of TabMemFree chrome extension

Simple and effective.

I LOST ALL MY TABS: I am a workona user. I don't know if it's attributable to this but I see all my tabs but when I click on them, or even click GO BACK, nothing happens. I have the feeling I lost all my tabs in this current Workona folder! I had the feeling they might be incompatible! BEWARE!

To the developers I say you did a great job! This app was extremely helpful to speed up my browsing experience. I would absolutely give it five stars except for one thing. The only way to make an exception to a tab is to pin it.  I would like to see another option such as right click so that you can cherry-pick which tabs you want to be exempt without having to pin it. I'm not a developer but this doesn't seem like so difficult. After that I think it deserves 5 stars!

This is a bit of a spyware as the so called "memory save" pings a google cloud server ( see https://github.com/glukki/TabMemFree/blob/master/background.js#L22 )

After installing it I get a "back" button that does nothing, and re-loading the tab after closing (to try again) results in a url sayin https://tabmemfree.appspot.com/blank.html#title= DON'T INSTALL THIS! I wish I never did.

Has a tendency to crap out and destroy all your tabs. Bad. Nice when it works, but when it takes hours to re-find information it has destroyed, it's not worth it.

No problem whatsoever, it parks unpinned tabs, uses minimal or no memory for them and it reloads them when you click. It made Chrome faster for me.

Really frustrating. Sometimes ALL of the parked tabs cannot be reloaded. The javascript that calls history seems to fail. HORRIBLE loss of weeks of work due to this instability. Not sure if this is an artifact of co-existence with Session Buddy, but even if it is, the result is unacceptable.

It's great, BUT, it changes the URL of the tab, which makes it incompatible with a lot of other extensions. Booo.

annoying

Could be JUST what chrome needs.. and the developer has heard over and over what changes need to be done.. so what's the problem exactly? Still helps out a lot though.

It worked well until last week,now all opened pages will turn to "404" after several minutes,I know it may not the extension's fault 'cause I'm in China...I have to disable it.

I'm so angry at this extension. I lost my long list of tabs and my history now shows only an obfuscated list of links to appspot. I cannot recommend this to anyone.

We should be able to choose the tab-idle-time ourselves. I dont see why devs take away simple decisions from users :/ Other than that, its not bad. 'The Great Suspender' is probably better i'd say

Simple and works great!

Some of the tabs never reopen and the url is lost so I don't know what the page was. Some of the tabs reopen just fine and then it's a good extension.

Awesome, saves a lot of memory and helps keep my pc fast

Nice, but a whitelist of sites it would be great! or update time when tabmemfree will begin.

I don't really see the point of this. It swallows tabs up into some hibernation state that takes a long time to reload when you click on the tab and obfuscates the url so you wait until it loads to see what it is. It doesn't save on memory usage at all. Right now, Chrome is using over 1GB of memory even though all my tabs are being 'managed' by this extension. I wanted to try OneTab to see how it works and it complains that I have to uninstall TabMemFree first. Grrrrrr! I uninstalled TMF and restarted and OneTab still complains that it it needs to be uninstalled. Interfering with another extension and not allowing itself to be fully uninstalled. This is the behavior of malware pure and simple. This should be banned. Update: It gets even worse. Upon restarting Chrome, all my tabs now have that obfuscated TMF url and they do not reload any more. I had to manually go back for each tab to get the original url. BTW, OneTab now works after doing this. With the click of a button, memory usage was reduced by half. Most of that is being used by extensions.

This is a great extension! My one feature request would be a domain/url based ignore list.

It's nice except it needs a rt-click menu on tab with choices: -> Unload this tab -> Unload other tabs and to be able to go down as low at 2 minutes. I'm resorting to a new task manager that has a built in Trim RAM feature for any or all processes so I can force Iron/Chrome tabs onto the swap file and it's amazing how many processes and RAM Chrome can hog up. Each extension gets a process also and so you can see a list of 35 or 200 Chrome processes running with no idea which one is which. Another feature would be to trim RAM for not currently being used extension processes.

在中国大陆用不了。

IT WORKS!

New to Chrome and parked tabs are so common with FF, I'm floored to see the Chrome community struggling. No idea what technical obstacle Chrome presents that forces developers to use this method but like many have mentioned, through no fault of your own, this method is too unreliable - especially considering stability diminishes as tabs increase. Too afraid to lose critical data; back to babysitting Chrome Manager.

Good, better than the alternatives, but not great. The ability to set the timer below the present 15-minute minimum would be much-appreciated.

it's good but not bug free. In fact it has a serious bug which resulted in me losing so many tabs. Today I disabled it after using it for a while because often it does not load page. Page remains blank and will go back (history) link. So I lost many tabs and eventually decided to uninstall it. Would love to use it again if the bug is fixed.

This extension is amazing, I'll leave some suggestions though. .tab timeout should be able to be less than 15 minutes .there should be an option to apply tabmemfree to any tab, like a right click menu item when on the tab bar or something .instead of the go back link that is displayed when a tab fails to reopen it should display the link itself and in a much bigger font centered or something because sometimes using chrome tab sync feature in android the links won´t open and when I bookmark all tabs in a window, if the tabs aren't loaded the bookmarks won't work these are my suggestion to help improve this already amazing extension, these extension made me use chrome, otherwise I would be using safari because my computer was running slow and the battery was draining with chrome before this extension

After 2 days of use, i lost all my tab, now when i open Chorme, i have only tabs with a unworking link "Go back".

I agree with having tabs open again once you reopen chrome. it only opens blank pages. Other than that it's great. the workaround the WHITELIST for now would be to simply "pin" the tabs you don't want affected and to be sure in options you have the checkbox for ignore pinned tabs selected. This does help conserve memory and flash resources!! Would be a 5 star except for the reloading of chrome :(

Great idea. Hopefully will help with memory management & increase responsiveness of browser & system.

As a tab hog, I'd REALLY like to LOVE-5-STARS this otherwise GREAT extension, but it has one fatal flaw preventing me from using it: Session managers such as Session Buddy will not save the TRUE url on closing Chrome, instead saving the blank page with the jump link. On opening Chrome and reopening a saved session, the reopened tabs open to the blank tabs, and the jump links are no longer associated with their original URLs. If there's a way to permanently hook the jump link to its original URL, this extension would be 10 STARS, not just 5.

Giving this 5 stars because even though it may be a tiny bit temperamental it's the only thing like this for Chrome while BarTab has been available for Firefox for years. Favicons have recently been sorted. It's a brilliantly simple implementation, very elegant (wish I'd thought of it myself!). So glad I've finally got the equivalent of BarTab for Chrome - now I can have several hundred tabs open no problem! Good work :-)

Parked tabs disappeared I left my computer desk and came back to windows with tabs that had vanished. The Chrome processes were still listed in Windows Task Manager. Unfortunately, I was not able to recover the tabs, and I use Chrome for productivity and research and had dozens of tabs. Now I'm stuck rebuilding everything from the browser history.

the latest update made the mininum time 15 minutes. I liked it before when it was 2 seconds was the minimum

would be nice of there's a whitelist to exclude domains you don't want to unload like youtube *edit* there is one big flaw to this extension; if you exit and save your session or if chrome crashed, you will not be able to restore tabs since "unloaded" tabs will basically be just blank tabs.

I massively agree with the idea of dimming favicons rather than replacing them too!!!

Very smart idea, although it would be really helpful if somehow the page title/favicon would stay in place so going back to find the tab that you want would be a lot easier!

Very early, but I'm using it and really looking forward to its development.

Do not use if you listen again to radio, it unloads the tab, and it stops playing. Also you can not tell which tab is which without clicking on it. I can not find a way to uninstall, having to use a different browser for my radio listening.

1) whitelist 2) keep tab's name nice work :)

Nice idea but unstable for now..

Wonderful extension! However, Its setting page is too simple for me to make a runtime configuration. Also, would it just replace the favicon of the FREEd pages, keep the original page title, to provide a better experience?

how kill GPU process ??

开了这个插件之后最大的缺陷是没有办法设置白名单，豆瓣FM没办法用，一分钟就给停止了。

Don't know why, but here (Linux64 and Chrome 19 and timeout == 1min) it doesn't unload any tab

It's great in theory, and I'll start using it properly when it's updated and has had some bugs removed. Biggest gripe for me at the moment is that sometimes when I switch back to a tab it doesn't reload. It stays blank and I have to manually revisit the page. Also, I massively agree with the idea of dimming favicons rather than replacing them! Will keep an eye out for updates.

This is a great idea and the extension works well but, as others have said, there really needs to be a way to list sites you never want to unload. Also, when a tab is unloaded the title and icon are replaced by a generic title and the TabMenFree icon. When you have a bunch of tabs that have been unloaded, this makes it impossible to know what is what when you want to re-load a tab.

Great idea, but a whitelist of sites which does not have to be unloaded is mandatory. An example? I left a youtube page buffering a long video, and when I looked back at it was unloaded by the extension ^.^' so annoying!

great but need some improvement like https connection compatible and ignore list.thx~

Neat concept, but unrefined. No DEV support.

I've been waiting for a BarTab-like extension for Chrome for awhile, so I'm excited about this extension, but it's not quite there yet. I guess the thing that I would most like to see is that the tab name and favicon don't change (or are just dimmed as has already been suggested) when the tab is un-loaded.

I'd give it a higher review if it had the option to add certain pages that could be overlooked. IE: Music stream sites Looks like this is pretty common with most of the people giving reviews.

the idea is really awesome for my navigation habits. but i would like to be able to have the option to set the sites that will not be unloaded.

It's pretty good but has a few little issues. When a tab is pinned and the icon changes when it's asleep you can't tell what site the pinned tab is for. Maybe for pinned tabs if you could just dim the icon or invert it or something. It would also be great to be able to right click a tab and manually unload it from memory. Thanks!

Good concept but the tab name when parked needs to identify what it is

It is good but it needs to give the option to let me chose some tabs to not be unloaded. It is promising. Keep up. I'm using RockMelt browser.