Sloth

Automatically discards all tabs at startup, before they load, reducing memory footprint and unnecessary bandwidth usage.

As of June 2026, Sloth has 1,000 users and a 4.42/5 rating from 31 reviews in the Workflow & Planning category.

HRJ Workflow & Planning★ Featured

Chrome Web Store ↗.crx

Users0%

1.0K

1,000

Rating+0.9%

4.42

31 reviews

Reviews+6.9%

Version

0.6

Manifest V3

History

2 snapshots

Tracking since Apr 19, 2026.

View as table

Date	Users	Rating	Reviews	Version
Apr 19, 2026	1.0K	4.38	29	0.6
May 25, 2026	1.0K	4.40	30	0.6
Now	1.0K	4.42	31	0.6

Permissions & access

Permissions: tabsstorage
Host access: None declared

Screenshots

About

An open-source and light-weight chrome / chromium extension which ensures that tabs are lazily loaded.

Source code: https://github.com/hrj/sloth

Requires Chrome 54+.

## How it works

This plugin uses the discard API available since Chrome 54. All tabs except new tabs or "special" tabs are discarded. Discarded tabs are visible in the tab bar, but not loaded from the network nor kept in memory.

If a window doesn't have a new tab, it is created and activated. This prevents any tab from loading during startup, unless you explicitly select it.

Special tabs are those with chrome:// URLs, for example.

Note: Where there are hundreds of tabs open in the session, a couple of them sneak through and become active. This limitation is due to the design of the browser. See https://github.com/hrj/sloth/issues/1.

## History / Credits

I found an extension called Native Lazy Tabs here. It was distributed under the GPL license. I adapted it and added the "new tab" feature.

The icon is by Jaime Serra, distributed under the CC license.