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Better Tab Unload

Better Tab Unload

Chrome’s Memory Saver silently discards background tabs to free RAM. The tab strip still shows the tab, but the page behind it is gone. When you click back to it, you get a blank white page while Chrome re-fetches and re-renders everything — often for a second or more.

Better Tab Unload fills that gap. It keeps a recent screenshot of each tab you visit and paints it back into the tab while the real page reloads, so switching to a discarded tab looks instant instead of looking broken.

What it does

Section titled “What it does”
  • Captures a JPEG screenshot of the active tab shortly after it finishes loading, using chrome.tabs.captureVisibleTab.
  • Stores screenshots in IndexedDB, keyed both by normalized URL and by tab ID.
  • Detects when a discarded tab is being reactivated, via chrome.tabs.onActivated and chrome.tabs.onUpdated.
  • Shows the cached screenshot immediately through a short-lived interstitial page (restore.html), then navigates to the real URL.
  • Falls back to a content-script overlay drawn on top of the loading page, for the cases where the interstitial cannot be used.
  • Removes the placeholder as soon as the real document reaches readyState complete, with a short fade so the swap is not jarring.
  • Cleans up automatically: screenshots older than 7 days are deleted, duplicates are collapsed, and per-tab entries are dropped when the tab closes.

What it deliberately does not do

Section titled “What it deliberately does not do”
  • It does not discard or unload tabs itself. Chrome decides that; this extension only improves what you see when a discarded tab comes back.
  • It does not send anything anywhere. There is no server, no analytics, and no network code at all — see Privacy.
  • It does not capture chrome://, chrome-extension://, about:, devtools://, view-source:, or file:// pages. Those URLs are skipped everywhere in the codebase.

Status

Section titled “Status”

This is an unpacked developer-mode extension (Manifest V3, version 1.0.1). It is not published on the Chrome Web Store. Install it by loading the folder yourself — see Installation.

Restoring a discarded tab depends on timing behaviour that differs between Chrome versions and between “switch to a discarded tab” and “restore a whole session after a browser restart”. The code carries explicit guards for the session-restore case, but expect the occasional miss where the placeholder does not appear and you simply get Chrome’s normal blank reload.