How to hibernate tabs in Chrome to free memory

What's the difference between suspending and hibernating a tab?

Both free memory. They differ in where the tab goes.

	Suspended	Hibernated
Tab strip	Stays, greyed out	Gone, listed in Takt's Hibernate pane
How	Chrome's own tab discard	Tab closed, state saved by Takt
Coming back	Click the tab; the page reloads	Click Wake; the tab reopens where it was
Manual	Discard advisor (Premium dashboard)	Free, up to 5 tabs
Automatic	Free	Premium

How do I hibernate a tab by hand?

1. Install Takt from the Chrome Web Store.
2. On the tab you want to put away, open the Takt popup and click Hibernate Tab. Or right-click the page and choose Hibernate this tab.
3. The tab closes, and Chrome shows a short "tab hibernated" notification.
4. To bring it back, open the popup's Hibernate pane and click Wake.

Takt saves the URL, title, favicon, group name and color, window, position in the window, pin state, scroll position and the time you hibernated it. Wake reopens the tab in its window, at its old position, back in its group, scrolled to where you were.

If the same URL is already open, Takt asks before waking, so you don't end up with a duplicate.

The "~100MB saved" figure is a flat estimate: Takt counts 50 MB per hibernated tab. It doesn't measure the tabs it closes.

How do I unload idle tabs automatically?

Auto-suspend is free and on by default. Every 5 minutes, Takt unloads tabs that have been idle longer than your threshold: 15 minutes, 30 minutes (the default), 1, 2 or 4 hours. Set it in Options → Settings → Tab Lifecycle.

Idle means time since the tab was last active or last finished loading. Takt never suspends:

• the active tab, or a tab that is still loading;
• tabs playing audio;
• pinned tabs;
• tabs that match your Never suspend these tabs list.

The never-suspend list takes one pattern per line, with * as a wildcard. *://mail.google.com/* keeps Gmail loaded. The list also protects tabs from every automatic hibernation trigger below.

Can Chrome hibernate tabs automatically? Premium

With Premium, Takt has three triggers:

• Idle time. A tab that is already suspended and idle beyond your delay is hibernated. Choose from 5 minutes to 7 days; the default is 2 days.
• Tab limit. When a window goes over your limit (15 to 100 tabs, default 30), Takt hibernates its least recently used tabs until it's back at the limit. Close a tab and the most recently hibernated one comes back into that window. Each window is counted on its own.
• Schedule end. A profile schedule can hibernate all eligible tabs when its hours end. Turn on Hibernate tabs when schedule ends in Profiles.

For the idle and tab-limit triggers, Chrome shows a notification with an Undo button for 10 seconds. After that, the tab still waits in the Hibernate pane.

Is this another Great Suspender?

Fair question. In 2021 Google removed The Great Suspender after malicious code was found in a version released after it was sold. Many people stopped trusting tab suspenders after that.

Here is what Takt does differently, and what you can check:

• Suspended tabs keep their real URL. Takt calls Chrome's own discard function. It doesn't swap your page for an extension page, so uninstalling Takt leaves your tabs as they are.
• Hibernated tabs stay on your device. The records live in Chrome's local storage. They only leave your machine if you set up Drive or folder sync yourself.
• No account, no analytics, no telemetry. Extra permissions are optional and requested only when a feature needs them. See how Takt keeps data local.

You still have to trust whoever ships updates to any extension you install. Read the permissions it asks for.

Is Chrome's Memory Saver enough?

Often, yes. If all you want is for background tabs to stop using memory, Chrome's built-in Memory Saver costs nothing and needs no extension.

Two complaints come up again and again: tabs reload when you return to them, and some inactive tabs never go to sleep. Takt's suspend step has the first trade-off too. A suspended tab reloads when you click it, because it is the same kind of discard.

What Takt adds is control. You pick the idle threshold, you list the sites it must never touch, and hibernation takes tabs out of the tab strip completely while keeping a way back.

What are the limits?

	Free	Premium
Auto-suspend and never-suspend list	Yes	Yes
Manual hibernation	Yes	Yes
Hibernated tabs at a time	5	200
Auto-hibernate by idle time, tab limit or schedule	No	Yes

Pinned tabs and tabs playing audio can't be hibernated. When you reach your limit, Takt refuses to hibernate more until you wake or clear some.

FAQ

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