I love Google Chrome. I use it as my default web browser and it works great. Probably what I love most about it is how I can customize it with extensions. I can put on ad blockers and all kinds of things so that websites look and behave based on my personal preferences. Chrome has one drawback though – it tends to use a lot of the computer’s memory (RAM).

Here’s how you can see this for yourself. Open Google Chrome, then open a website in a new tab. Then open another web page in another new tab. And another. And keep doing that until you have a bunch of tabs open, each one on a different web page.

For this example, I opened 15 different tabs and each one is displaying a different product on Amazon. So the top of my Google Chrome browser looks like this:

Now, with those 15 tabs open, let’s see how much memory is being used by Chrome. To do this, we need to open Windows Task Manager. The quick way to open that is to hold down the CTRL and Shift keys, and tap the Escape key. When Task Manager opens, click on the “Processes” tab. If you look in that list of processes, you should see Chrome listed several times (once for each tab you have opened in Chrome). And each one will tell you how much memory is being used. Mine looks like this:

I didn’t add up all that, but you can see that it can pretty easily get into several gigabytes of memory. That will tend to slow things down. Of course, you might not typically have that many Chrome tabs open at the same time, but there are probably situations where you have quite a few open. I certainly do sometimes.

Thankfully, there’s a way to save the website or web page addresses for each of the tabs, but combine them all into just one single tab. It’s through a Chrome extension called OneTab. You can get it free at One-Tab.com. Just go to that website (using Chrome) and click to install it. You don’t even need to restart Chrome. When it’s running, you’ll see a little blue funnel at the top of the window:

When you click that funnel, it takes all of those individual web pages and puts them into a list of clickable links – on just one single tab. At that point, you can restore each one individually if you want, or you can restore all 15 tabs back to the way they were originally.

And the big benefit – the reason we did this in the first place – was to save on memory. Take a look at Task Manager now:

That’s a big difference! If your computer has lots of memory installed, like 8 gb or 16 gb, you might not notice a huge change in the speed of operation. But if  you’re working with 4 gb of memory (which is pretty common on most computers these days) but difference in speed might be very noticeable.

And by the way – OneTab is available for Firefox also.

Check it out and let me know what you think in the comments!