The Great Suspender: Tame Your Terrible Tabs!

The estimated reading time for this post is 5 minutes

There are two types of people in the world: those who keep a lot of tabs open on their computer and those who survive on a single tab. You can tell which one you are by looking up above this page to the top of your browser.

If you see oodles of tabs open then you should know about The Great Suspender.

You may want to keep your tabs open to research a project, check on social media, listen to music in the background, monitor your stocks/sports teams/analytics, and multi-task in creative ways.

Having merely a single tab open may seem as foreign to you as having one channel available on your TV — it just doesn’t work.

When you have lots of tabs open those tabs can eat up memory, making your computer work harder, run slower and maybe even crash. You’re putting a strain on your system by having multiple tabs open, causing each tab to run less efficiently.

See, Lifehacker, Why You Should Never Have More Than Nine Browser Tabs Open

The good news is that there’s an efficient way to manage your open tabs to reduce your computer’s workload. The Great Suspender is an extension for Google Chrome that works in the background to suspend your open tabs so they are paused but readily available when you need them. When a page is suspended the tab and its favicon will appear just as if the page weren’t suspended so you can re-open the page easily.

To unsuspend a tab you just click on it and the page will reload.

The Great Suspender has many features that make the service efficient and easy to use. You can easily customize it to control:

• when tabs are suspended,
• which tabs are suspended
• which tabs are never suspended
• how tabs are unsuspended

You can set how long a tab is inactive before it’s suspended, from 20 seconds up to 3 days. You can tell the Great Suspender to put pages on a White List so they’re never suspended.

You can set your tabs to suspend only when you’re connected to the Internet so you can keep tabs available if you need to access them when you’re away from Wi-Fi.

You can also suspend and unsuspend tabs instantly to override your settings.

The Great Suspender gives you plenty of control over how and when it suspends your tabs.

Setting Up The Great Suspender

Setting up The Great Suspender takes just a few minutes. First, download the extension free from the Chrome Web Store: The Great Suspender.

You’ll see The Great Suspender icon appear on your tool bar after it has been downloaded.

Click on the icon to adjust your settings. In General Settings you can customize how you want your tabs to be suspended:

[tip]Be sure to check the box “Do not suspend tabs that contain unsaved form inputs.” That way you won’t lose any of your unsaved work if you switch tabs while you’re in the middle of creating a masterpiece (such as adding your comment to The Wonder of Tech!).[/tip]

If you check “Add The Great Suspender to right-click context menu” then you can access The Great Suspender immediately with a right-click anywhere on a page and choosing options:

White List

You may visit websites you never want suspended. Perhaps you want to chat on Facebook, follow your Twitter stream, keep track of stock prices, monitor your analytics, or listen to music in the background.

You can add any website to your White List so those pages never get suspended. To add a website to your White List you can:

• Right-click on the page and choose “Never suspend this page”
• Click on The Great Suspender icon in your Chrome toolbar and type in the name of the website in Settings
• Click on the “Add to White List” link on a suspended page

Using The Great Suspender

Using The Great Suspender is easy because it does the work for you. Your tabs get suspended automatically, according to the amount of time you choose in Settings, or you can suspend them manually by using the right-click option. You may even forget it’s working for you until you arrive at a suspended tab.

You can click on a suspended tab to unsuspend it, ignore it to leave it suspended, or add it to the White List so it won’t ever be suspended again.

Your computer should run more smoothly and efficiently while you keep your suspended tabs easily accessible.

Your Thoughts

Are you someone who keeps a lot of tabs open? Have you noticed that your computer struggles if you have a lot of tabs open? Do you like the idea of keeping tabs open while letting your computer run better? Let us know your thoughts in the Comments section below!

* Flickr Tabs image (edited) courtesy of Eric Allix Rogers via Flickr and Creative Commons

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Tech News

Periscope for Android Now Available

Android users can rejoice! Periscope has arrived on Android so now you can join the fun with iPhone users in streaming your activities and following others’ live streams on Periscope. You can download the Periscope app for Android free at Google Play.

See, Periscope — Watch What’s Going On in the World! for my review of Periscope.

Pennsylvania Conference for Women 2015 Registration Open

The 2015 Pennsylvania Conference for Women will be at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia on Thursday, November 19. Early bird tickets are now on sale, and the price is discounted at $160 until June 19. This year’s conference will include over 100 speakers such as:

• Dorie Clark, author of Reinventing You: Define Your Brand, Reimagine Your Future;
• Jessica Jackley, co-founder of Kiva and ProFounder;
• Mary Spio, CEO of Next Galaxy Media and author of It’s Not Rocket Science: 7 Game-Changing Traits for Uncommon Success

To purchase tickets, visit the PA Conference for Women registration page. For more information on the Conference, please visit www.paconferenceforwomen.org.