Google Chrome is widely considered the best web browser in the world, but tab management is often considered a problem area of Chrome because the more tabs you open, the smaller the tab at the top becomes until it reaches a point where the one you can’t see. as long as the first letter of the page title. Firefox takes care of this by restricting how small the size of the tab can be. Unfortunately, you have to click to see all of your tabs, and that can be inconvenient. Now one way to deal with this is to consciously manage tabs better so you don’t end up with clutter, but if you’ve tried and failed with this old self-control route, you can use an extension to help you manage browsing. . xTab is a Chrome extension that allows you to put a maximum limit on the number of open tabs and automatically starts closing them when you reach that number.
The general design of xTab is very simple and easy to use. When installed, it adds an icon on the Omnibar where you can access the extensions settings. Click on it and specify the maximum number of tabs you want to keep open from the dropdown menu. You can choose a number that is a multiple of 5 up to 50, or you can enter any number of your choice. This value means the limit after which xTab will automatically start destroying old tabs. This number can range from 10 to 20, depending on screen space. I found 20 to be the sweet spot on my 23” Full HD screen, though your mileage may vary.
You can set it to 15 so that when 15 tabs are open, xTab starts closing the least recently used tabs on its own. You can choose one of the available limits from the dropdown menu or click Other and specify a custom one. You can also change how tabs are removed, such as least recently used, least recently accessed, or oldest.
The extension is pretty good at automatically removing tabs from Chrome, but I wouldn’t mind more options via a future update, such as the ability to specify which side tabs should start closing from and/or the ability to include certain tabs in the white list so that they are never removed. Also, an option to open additional tabs that have crossed the threshold you’ve set in a new window would be helpful because we still need our tabs after all. You can argue that some people don’t care how many tabs are open in a browser window because it won’t affect your system resources, but sensible use of open tabs isn’t about how many you have open, it’s about how many you can actually see simultaneously in the tab bar.
All in all, if you are a tab addict, then xTab can help you get your problem under control. You can get it for free from the Chrome Web Store via the link below.
Install xTab from the Chrome Web Store
