How many tabs do you have open right now? I'm currently writing and researching this article, writing and researching another, longer article, listening to SoundCloud, and monitoring Ars chat, TweetDeck, and Parsely—so I've got 71 tabs open across my six monitors taking up 10GB of RAM. (I admit that I'm probably on the upper end of things.) I'm not using all of those tabs right now, but I do need them open—open tabs are my to-do list. The problem is that Chrome keeps all of these tabs up and running at 100% whether I'm using them or not. This is bad for memory usage and—if you're running on a laptop—power usage.

A new feature being tested in the nightly "Canary" version of Chrome seems like a boon for heavy tab users like me: it will "discard" tabs that aren't being used when it encounters a low-memory situation. "Discarding" a tab doesn't mean forcibly closing a tab, just suspending it and unloading it from memory. The tab itself would still be visible in the tab bar, but unloading it would save your computer the work of keeping it running. The feature has existed in Chrome OS for some time, but now it's moving over to Windows and Mac OS, with a Linux implementation coming soon.

Chrome has a tab ranking system, and it would automatically suspend your "least interesting" tabs when it hits a low-memory situation. A Chromium.org page lists the ranking system for tabs:

Internal pages like new tab page, bookmarks, etc. Tabs selected a long time ago Tabs selected recently Tabs playing audio Apps running in a window Pinned tabs The selected tab

Besides the list above, we've also found that you can't discard a visible tab. So if you've got multiple monitors, tabs with a foreground spot will always stay open, even if it's something that you haven't explicitly clicked on in a while.

For right now, the system is in very early testing in the nightly build channel, and users can opt-in to the experiment by enabling the flag under "chrome://flags/#enable-tab-discarding." You can also see the current tab ranking and manually discard a tab by typing "chrome://discards" into the address bar.

Tabs that get discarded are reloaded when the user clicks on the tab, much like initially loading a Web page. In our testing, discarded tabs saved their scroll positions along with any text the user had entered, making it a pretty seamless experience. If you want to try the feature yourself, take Chrome Canary for a spin here.