Phantom Tabs In Google Chrome
by Martin
Phantom tabs have been designed to help Internet users reduce the amount of computer memory the Google Chrome browser uses at any given time. Many Internet users keep some websites and services open all the time in their web browser even though they might be accessed only sporadically by them. These tabs occupy the same amount of memory no matter if they are used or not.

That’s where phantom tabs come into play to help the user reduce the memory used by the web browser. They basically kill the process of the tab so that the computer memory is freed but leave an indicator in the form of the web page’s favicon behind so that the website can be opened again when needed.

Phantom Tabs in Google Chrome have been implemented in the latest developer builds of the web browser. They need to be enabled with the switch –enable-phantom-tabs.

Closing a pinned tab in the Google Chrome browser will close the process of that tab thus freeing memory that the tab occupied. The tab background appears transparent now which indicates to the user that it is a phantom tab.

A left-click on any phantom tab will display the closed tab so that the website can be accessed by the Chrome user again.

Lee Mathews over at Download Squad has created a short video demonstrating the new phantom tabs feature:

http://www.ghacks.net/2010/01/22/pha...google-chrome/

would be better if it stored the content of the tabs locally, instead of reloading (saved it on the hdisk), Thus allowing you to keep form data, ect...
not to mention with no inherit risk, chrome could automatically phantomize any tab that hasnt been viewed in a certain amount of time..... (5 minutes?)

Originally Posted by Bloody_Turds

would be better if it stored the content of the tabs locally, instead of reloading (saved it on the hdisk), Thus allowing you to keep form data, ect...
not to mention with no inherit risk, chrome could automatically phantomize any tab that hasnt been viewed in a certain amount of time..... (5 minutes?)

I agree, but I'd like it even better if any tab not accessed within 2 minutes were phantomized (not just "pinned" tabs).That would keep my memory/cpu free for the tab that's active, when I have six or eight of them open. Dreams and wishes aside, this is a nice step in the right direction. My favorite browser just keeps getting better at a surprisingly quick pace.

yea thats what i meant to XD, i dont even like pin tabs, id much prefer a "highlight tab" that just changes the bg color of the tab (without moving it)
I would still suggest it wait about 5 minutes, as it can take a fair amount of time to reload a tab (compared to the amount it takes), I would actually think about excluding the pinned tabs from fantomness though ^^.

btw I daily get over 20 tabs open , I regularly get over 200 tabs actually ^^, sometimes even higher, so this would save so much memory....

Another idea would be DialupBrowsing, where it wouldnt load any images, or flash files, minimizing the amount of memory the pages need in the first place