I wasn’t going to post about this add-on at first, because if I posted about every firefox add-on I find, we’d be here for a very long time. However, I found out how useful it is last night when I spent a few hours browsing the web and relaxing, so I think it deserves to be posted.
Side note: FF 4 has a built in feature similar to this, though BarTab has more options for customization, so it might be worth using if there’s an update.
The basic idea of BarTab is that you don’t really need to keep a tab in memory when you aren’t actively looking at it. So the main draw is the feature to “unload” a tab after a user-specified period of time - if you don’t look at it for a minute, or ten minutes, or 30 seconds, then it will be unloaded from your RAM or however firefox keeps track of your tabs. When you go back to the tab, it refreshes the page.
You’ll notice a huge performance boost when you’ve got dozens of tabs open with BarTab and without it - while the tabs are still there and available for you as soon as you want them, you’ll be running just as fast as if you had only one or two tabs open. Because that’s exactly what’s happening. It’s actually really, really nice in action, even if you don’t typically open a lot of tabs. The one time you do, it’s pretty great.
That being said, you’ve got more options than just unloading tabs. You can tell firefox not to load a new tab until you focus on it - I found it slightly annoying because it literally doesn’t load the tab at all, so all you see is “lifehacker.com” or something and don’t know what the tab is supposed to be. I prefer to just set the unload time fairly low - I had it at five, but I’m thinking I might go lower and add exceptions.
Adding a domain (www.tumblr.com, www.facebook.com, etc.) to your exceptions list keeps tabs from that site from being unloaded. You can manually type them in the add-on options, or right click a tab and pick “keep pages from www.tumblr.com loaded”. So my thought is to lower the unload time to a minute or two and then add exceptions for sites I don’t want to lose. While I’m reading a feature or review on Destructoid, the others I opened will unload until I’m ready to read them. On the other hand, I won’t lose the posts I’m working on or the conversations I may be having on facebook.
Check it out, it’s quite neat. Even if you don’t think you’ll notice much of a difference, it really isn’t intrusive and it works quite well if you ever spend more than a few minutes in a single tab.