I have this bad habit of opening several tabs and forgetting about them. A lot of people do this too, so please cut me some slack.

Now, it wouldn’t be a problem if the browser used by over 65% of people wasn’t such a memory hog. According to StatCounter GlobalStats, Google Chrome holds about 68% of the global browser market as of July 2026. I use a 16GB RAM laptop, and depending on how many tabs I have open, usually 15 to 25, Chrome alone can use anywhere from 3.5GB to 5GB of RAM.

Now imagine if I had just 8GB of RAM. My laptop would be totally unusable at that point. Even with 16GB of RAM, I could feel the toll all those tabs took on my laptop, so I opted to use a tab manager called OneTab.

OneTab gives me a place to put all my tabs

It’s a free Chrome extension that turns open tabs into a simple list

OneTab is a free browser extension you can find on the Chrome Web Store or its equivalent on other browsers. Instead of keeping all your tabs open, it converts them into a list you can return to whenever you need them. Once you install OneTab, you’ll see its icon in Chrome’s extension area. Whenever I realize I’ve gone a little overboard with my tabs, I click the OneTab icon, and it turns all my currently open tabs into a list.

The tabs disappear from Chrome’s tab bar, but the links aren’t gone. OneTab keeps them organized on its own page, where I can see the websites I had open and restore them whenever I need them. I can restore individual tabs by clicking them, or bring everything back at once if I want to continue where I left off.

This works well for me because a lot of the tabs I keep open aren’t things I’m actively using. They’re usually articles I want to read later, research pages I might need for an article I’m writing, or something I don’t want to forget about. So, instead of keeping all those pages open in Chrome just because I might need them later, I can put them away until I actually need them.

My RAM usage drops when I stop letting tabs just sit

Parking tabs in OneTab frees up memory without losing anything

While I was working on this piece, I had around 27 tabs open in Chrome, including my pinned tabs. That’s pretty normal for me, but Chrome was using about 4.9GB of RAM. I then clicked the OneTab icon, which moved my 20 unpinned tabs into a OneTab list while leaving my pinned tabs alone. After that, Chrome was using around 2.2GB of RAM. That’s a drop of roughly 55%, and I got it simply by moving those 20 tabs out of Chrome. Meanwhile, the pages sat in my OneTab list, ready to restore whenever I needed them.

The reason this makes such a difference is pretty simple. An open tab can have a lot going on behind it, from a webpage’s scripts and images to media and other content. When I keep 27 tabs open, I’m asking Chrome to manage all of that at once.

OneTab gives me a way to stop doing that. When I send a group of tabs to OneTab, Chrome closes those tabs, and OneTab saves their links. If I need one of those pages later, I can click it to reopen it.

My 55% reduction isn’t something everyone should expect. The amount of RAM Chrome uses depends heavily on what’s open. A simple article won’t consume the same amount of memory as a YouTube video or a web app like Google Docs. Still, the difference was large enough for me to notice.

I know Chrome already has a memory-saving feature

But I still choose OneTab

To be fair, Chrome already has a solid memory usage solution. Its Memory Saver feature automatically deactivates tabs I haven’t used for a while to free up memory. When I return to one of those tabs, Chrome reloads it.

That’s totally helpful, but the difference between Chrome’s Memory Saver and a tab manager like OneTab is how they handle those tabs. Chrome’s Memory Saver keeps tabs open until it decides they have been inactive “enough” to deactivate them and save memory. Meanwhile, OneTab lets me manually take a bunch of tabs out of Chrome and store them in a separate list.

Chrome’s Memory Saver also keeps the tabs visible on my tab bar. If I can still see those tabs, I might be tempted to click on one just to check it out again, even if I don’t actually need it. Once I do, Chrome reloads the page and starts using memory for it again.

But I am less tempted to click on a tab if they are all tucked away in a list somewhere, just like OneTab does. So, while I still have Chrome’s Memory Saver turned on, it barely does its job these days because OneTab often beats it to it.

OneTab made me rethink what an “open tab” actually needs to be

OneTab hasn’t stopped me from opening too many tabs. I’m probably never going to become the person who keeps three tabs open and closes everything else immediately.

What changed is what I do with those tabs. Instead of leaving 20 tabs open because I might need them later, I can put them into OneTab and bring back the ones I actually need. That small change keeps Chrome from carrying the full weight of my browsing backlog all day, cutting down my memory usage.