Sloth

👥 1K+ users

📦 v0.6

💾 11.93KiB

📅 2025-10-17

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Overview

An open-source and light-weight chrome / chromium extension which ensures that tabs are lazily loaded.

Source code: https://github.com/hrj/sloth

Requires Chrome 54+.

## How it works

This plugin uses the discard API available since Chrome 54. All tabs except new tabs or "special" tabs are discarded. Discarded tabs are visible in the tab bar, but not loaded from the network nor kept in memory.

If a window doesn't have a new tab, it is created and activated. This prevents any tab from loading during startup, unless you explicitly select it.

Special tabs are those with chrome:// URLs, for example.

Note: Where there are hundreds of tabs open in the session, a couple of them sneak through and become active. This limitation is due to the design of the browser. See https://github.com/hrj/sloth/issues/1.

## History / Credits

I found an extension called Native Lazy Tabs here. It was distributed under the GPL license. I adapted it and added the "new tab" feature.

The icon is by Jaime Serra, distributed under the CC license.