How in the Tech

Keep your Firefox tabs on tap and under control with BarTab

By Adam Myers ⋅ June 9, 2010 ⋅ Tags: Firefox

Think back – can you remember what web browsing was like before the advent of tabs? It’s hard to imagine life without the tab-based interface tweak popularized by Firefox many years ago. Tabs weren’t anything new, at least in the user interface of other applications yet when the style made the jump to the browser it was thought of as revolutionary.

How many tabs do you have open in your browser currently? If you are like most, it’s probably pushing a dozen or so! We rely and depend upon them after all. However, each tab consumes resources such as memory or CPU cycles. Open too many and your browser starts to crawl, or worse – crash. The situation turns to dire as relaunching the browser typically finds the configuration set to restore all the previously opened tabs. If the browser survives the reload it typically takes awhile to get it back into a responsive state as it’s forced to load and process each of the opened tabs, whether you are ready to use them or not.

BarTab is a Firefox extension that can assist you in reigning in your use of tabs and their effects on your system resources. BarTab prevents tabs from sucking down resources when they aren’t the activate tab. When the tapped tab is accessed, only then is the content of the site loaded. The behavior can be tweaked independently for tabs opened in the background during an existing session, or tabs that are opened upon a browser relaunch – such as after a crash. Tabs that have been put on tab are greyed out until they are clicked upon. Additionally, BarTab can unload previously loaded tabs from memory, either automatically or manually.

BarTab is an essential add-on for any Firefox user that requires and uses the tab system – which, quite frankly, is most of us!

Download BarTab