OneTab for Chrome 1.3

If you’ve ever tried running Chrome on a low-memory system – and by low-memory we mean anything under 4GB – then you’ll have probably noticed how it’s not wise to have too many tabs open at once. That’s because each tab effectively runs as its own process, consuming hundreds of megabytes at once.

Now the obvious solution to this problem is to simply minimise the number of tabs you have open, but that might not be practical for all kinds of reasons. This is where OneTab comes in, offering you a quick and convenient way to manage all those tabs from a single window, reducing your memory usage by up to 95 per cent and helping to speed up your PC or Mac in the process.

It’s incredibly simple to use: start browsing and as you open more and more tabs, just click the One Tab button on your taskbar and the tabs are rolled into one single tab, reducing your memory consumption in the process. Users have also reported CPU consumption is cut when tabs containing running scripts are minimised too – a win-win for all concerned.

You can then restore individual tabs by clicking them in the list, or opt to restore or delete all the tabs from One Tab’s history. Unless you opt to delete the tabs completely, they’ll always remain in the list – even after shutting down and restarting Chrome. You can even opt to share your tab collection as a web page for others to access, or export the URLs for importing on to another computer.

The concept is breathtakingly simple, the execution brilliant and it’s frankly an essential add-on for any Chrome user, particularly if you’re running an older, under-powered Mac or PC. A Firefox version is also in development.