Automatically suspend inactive tabs

[rafaelhrborges]

Did you search for similar issues before submitting this one?
Yes

Would be good if brave could suspend inactive tabs to save memory.

With this feature, users like me, who can't let go some tabs, but want to visit them later and not consider them too important to save in bookmarks.

[cndouglas]

Duplicate of #800.

Edit: Actually, #800 is about manual tab unloading. This issue is for automatic tab unloading. I'll rename this to be clear.

[bradleyrichter]

@RafaelRibeiro Can you let me know when you think they should unload? We can have options as well.

• after 8 hours
• after 1 day
• after 5 days

[droplab]

I'm a heavy user of the great suspender chrome extension which works really well. Would it be possible to have a config setting to put the number of minutes in with like a default of 30? Thanks for all the work on a great browser. Once you guy gets the react dev tools extension functional I will fully make the jump over to brave from chrome.

[cndouglas]

@droplab FYI, you can track the progress of React Dev Tools here: #5429.

[srirambv]

+1 from communtiy https://community.brave.com/t/tab-suspension-priority-feature/2823

[fastf0rward]

+1, Great Suspender is a must have!

[amandaporto]

+1

[luzmcosta]

+1 for having a time span option defaulting to 30 minutes.

[jgarciabu]

+1 for great suspender or similar extension for Brave. If you can get this in place, I can wait for other features to be built in, but this one is critical given how resource hungry modern browsers are.

[eljuno]

+1 from community https://community.brave.com/t/the-great-suspender-extension-functionality/7693?u=eljuno

[Midnex]

+1 to this idea, since finding it for Chrome its a must have plug in. I been looking at hot to enable chrome extensions within Brave but a bit over my abilities at the moment, and time isn't permitting. But one way or another this would be amazing. for support of the great suspender.

[NumDeP]

+1 I also commented about this issue further here #10717

One other thing, who's the genius who thought of 'after 8 hours - after 1 day - after 5 days', I don't think those figures should at all be considered until Brave has '...restore session gracefully after a crash' implemented. #5512 but per your recommendation @bradleyrichter FF seems to have neat looking version - https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/snooze-tabs/

Perhaps this issue can be moved closer as it is currently expected in 1.0 and I'm sure there's enough up-votes to bring this closer.

Thanks.

[jdbener]

+1 this is the one feature that is tethering me to chrome. It appears that I am most likely not alone.

[bradleyrichter]

@NumDeP I'm the genius. ; )

I'm of the belief that this can be set in a way that just works without having to think about manually putting tabs to sleep as Firefox Snooze is suggesting. I have not personally seen the use case where I wanted to schedule a tab to sleep for x days and reopen at this specified time. (seems like they are mixing "remind me" with tab suspension. )

I tried The Great Suspender and removed it after 2 days. It was far too invasive for me.

Ideally we would be able to first suspend unused tabs, and then even close them into a tab-history place where you could find them again if needed.

I'd love to hear more of your thinking about how suspend tabs should work. Both as a default setting and advanced settings.

[NumDeP]

Update: That sounds good. I like the idea of a tab-history area, though I think it may be best to just retain it in the current history area (even if history is set to erase on exit) but indicate the closed tabs similarly to Tor tabs (FYI - I don't know how they fully look yet).
Like most people I like the energy-efficient aspect to most implementations and features, so if your ideal of being able

to first suspend unused tabs, and then even close them into a tab-history place where you could find them again if needed.

reduces memory consumption as the original issue contributor stipulates, excellent.

I don't want to create a separate issue in addition to this because it's sort of relevant depending on how you analyze the title but arguably 'Automatically suspend inactive tabs' could be every tab in the browser if the user has left his/her computer for a while, right? So I was wondering, seeing as its purpose is to save memory, do you reckon memory can be further reduced if the browser was in such an idle state that it also automatically refreshes the browser state but not the content (videos/pages - to save bandwidth)

I mention this because as you're probably aware, if you were to open 20 odd tabs in one go from bookmarks or gradually had 20 odd tabs open for a while and it gradually reduced to a couple of tabs, the memory in task manger would indicate something significantly higher in comparison to if those couple of tabs were to be open on a fresh browser start-up right? Which is why I suggested the above.

[m1nkeh]

in terms of memory usage, this is a must have... i have tons of tabs open in chrome and i really want to transition to brave for everything... my current workaround is to order more ram! 👍

[andupotorac]

I'm also using The Great Suspender to browse, which is very helpful on Chrome. Please add something like this to Brave!

[bsclifton]

Closing as wontfix since Brave Core supports extensions and folks can use Great Suspender or another extension

There already is some functionality in Chromium that will "discard" the tabs after a set amount of time. This is live in our current release.

[m1nkeh]

can you add some steps for the workaround please?

[bsclifton]

@m1nkeh you can see existing releases of Brave Core here:
https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/releases

I don't believe we've opened the extension store up yet, so you may not be able to install Great Suspender

If you wanted to manually discard tabs in the existing Muon browser, you can launch from the CLI with the following environment variable set:
BRAVE_ENABLE_DEBUG_MENU=true

This will enable a debug menu where you can pick Allow manual tab discarding. After picking this, you'll notice an extra option when right-clicking tabs. You can then pick this to manually discard the tab

I don't know the criteria used by Chromium offhand for when a tab is discarded... but I believe it will happen automatically after a few minutes of not being active