Chrome: The Great Suspender is an extension I recommend to anyone who ever uses Google’s Chrome browser, because it’s an excellent way to keep the browser’s memory use as low as possible. While it’s a delicious meal all on its own, I also recommend pairing The Great Suspender with the Chrome extension Cluster.
Like a fine wine, Cluster will enhance the tab-suspended joy you already experience by giving you a simple dashboard to see and manage all of your open tabs. Best of all, it shows you the actual URLs of suspended sites, not the funky chrome-extension:// URL you’d otherwise see in your address bar.
On its own, Cluster is a great way to organise the tabs that are filling up your active browsing session. Its dashboard lists the title of every single tab in your browser — making your websites a lot easier to find — and you can save your active browsing session to revisit later. This is especially useful if you don’t want a ton of tabs cluttering up your browser, but you don’t have the time to bookmark them all right away. (You can also export all of your open tabs as a CSV or JSON file.)
Cluster’s dashboard also comes with two little icons you can use to immediately suspend or unsuspend your entire browser window’s worth of tabs. You can do that via The Great Suspender’s icon, too, but I like having it as a feature directly within the tab-management interface.
While Cluster makes it easy to move tabs between different browser windows, I find it’s sorting tools even more useful. While they won’t rearrange your tabs in your browser window, you can at least organise your tabs within the Cluster dashboard alphabetically or by their domains.
Cluster can also synchronise its settings across your various desktops and/or laptops, which is great for when you want to pull up sites from saved windows on another browser. Yes, you could just synchronise your bookmarks, but a folder full of links is a little less elegant—and harder to sort without adding another extension — than Cluster’s pretty dashboard.
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