I browse a lot, and I’m not going to lie: I don’t close many tabs in Chrome after I’m done browsing, so I can access them later.
Whether I’m shopping for a new T-shirt or baby supplies, I always leave a tab open when something else comes up.
But after a while, those tabs pile up and cause my phone to stutter when I need it most.
I always dread closing these tabs manually each time I fire up Chrome, until I found a setting that removed this task.
Having many tabs open in Chrome was hampering my experience
Putting a stop to my bad habit
I will be the first to admit I have a bad habit of leaving multiple tabs open in Chrome and not closing them.
Procrastination is real, and I often don’t want to deal with it.
I even enabled Chrome’s preload pages setting until I realized it was eating quite a bit of my phone’s battery. This was the first setting I turned off, since it’s known for hogging memory and draining the battery.
I recommend turning this feature off, as it lets Chrome predict web pages you may or may not click on for instant loading.
It’s not a crucial setting to turn on unless you prefer instant page loads in Chrome.
To turn off the Preload pages setting in Chrome, tap the three-dot menu, go to Settings > Privacy and security > Preload pages, and select No preloading.
Before I turned off the Preload pages setting, my phone’s battery backup dropped below 25% by mid-afternoon. I had to charge my phone often, which would, in turn, affect my phone’s battery health over time.
After I turned off this setting, I extended my phone’s battery backup by at least 1.5 hours.
But having too many tabs open also hurts my phone’s battery life, especially since I’m still using an old phone.
When I leave tabs open for weeks or months and keep adding more tabs over time, Chrome starts to hog resources, which in turn heats my phone.
This drains the phone’s battery faster and sometimes slows it down. As these tabs hog memory, I start to experience sluggish browsing, abrupt page reloads, and poor multitasking.
When the experience became unbearable, I had to close tabs manually. But with over 40 tabs open in Chrome, I had to close tabs I might need later, which became a chore.
After looking for a solution that let me keep tabs open without worrying about battery life, I found a Chrome setting that lets me freeze inactive tabs.
Closing many Chrome tabs manually started to get annoying
My habit needed an automated solution
After digging through Chrome’s settings, I found a setting for inactive tabs that saves me from closing them manually and still keeps them available later.
In Chrome’s tabs settings, I found an option to move inactive tabs after a certain period.
This setting solves my problem of having to close tabs manually. I can have tabs close every 7 days, 14 days, 21 days, or never.
I selected the seven-day option because of my chronic habit, but you can choose longer periods if you’re better at closing tabs.
To adjust this setting in Chrome, you can follow the steps below:
- Open Settings from the three-dot menu.
- Scroll down to the Advanced section and tap Tabs and tab groups.
- Tap the Move to inactive section option.
- Select the period you want.
After enabling this setting, inactive tabs are suspended until you open those pages again from the Inactive Tabs section. This improves browser performance, conserves battery life, and frees up RAM for better multitasking.
Turning on this setting alongside turning off the Preload pages option, I noticed about two to 2.5 hours of extra battery life daily.
I also noticed my phone wasn’t heating up as much, which I’m certain contributed to better battery life.
I also no longer worry about old open tabs hogging my phone’s memory. I can also access those tabs later, though they will need a fresh reload.
It was a win-win situation: I didn’t lose the tabs I meant to visit later, and my active browsing experience didn’t suffer.
If you have a phone with 8GB or less of RAM, tweaking these two settings could be a lifesaver.
Budget-friendly Android phones often have less RAM than their flagship counterparts, so it’s best to save every ounce of memory when possible, and tweaking these settings is one way to do it.
Freeing up browser memory changed everything
If I hadn’t tweaked Chrome’s Preload pages and inactive tabs settings, I would still be experiencing performance issues.
Since I keep forgetting to close unimportant tabs, changing these two Chrome settings was crucial to improving my browsing experience and the phone’s performance.
If you also have many tabs running in the background and forget to close them, tweak these settings to see if you notice a difference.
In my case, it made a massive impact.
