Filed under: Google, Open Source, Browsers
Pinned tabs are a great way to save room on your tab strip in Google Chrome. But suppose you want to free up the resources something you've pinned is using -- say the 50+ MB of memory used by Seesmic Web or another similar web apps?
In the latest Chromium nightly builds, a new feature has been added called phantom tabs. When enabled, you can right-click and close a pinned tab and its favicon will stay behind -- Chromium simply unloads the renderer process for that tab, freeing up the processor and memory resources it was using.
Click on the phantom tab's icon, and Chromium fires up a new instance your pinned page. Right-click and close a phantom tab, and it disappears from the tab strip completely.
And what if the only tab in your current window is pinned and you close it? Chromium stay open -- instead of closing the browser down completely as it normally would. Clicking the pinned icon won't rejuvenate it, at least not right now. You'll have to create a new tab first and then click back to it.
Like many other additions, you have to enable phantom tabs via a command line switch: --enable-phantom-tabs. Not sure how to add switches to Chrome or Chromium? Check out our brief how-to post!
If you've never downloaded one before, here's a link to the Chromium buildbot snapshots.
Chromium nightly build adds memory-saving 'phantom tab' support originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 22 Jan 2010 09:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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