Using Phantom Tabs in Chrome
Posted on 27. Jan, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey in Tips
One of the best developments in browsing technology has been tabs. Now that Google has their hands firmly on a piece of the browser market, they continue to innovate this feature. One element that they have brought that will be integral to using their browser eventually as a full-fledged OS is pinned tabs. This allows a user to put tabs in a small “pinned” state on the far upper left of Chrome. Now, with phantom tabs, Google takes the pinned tab concept to another level.
Although commonly known, it’s worth mentioning that a tab in Chrome represents it’s own process within an operating system. You can open several tabs and find the corresponding amount of Chrome processes running in your task/process manager. Because of this, Chrome can take up a lot of resources, especially if you use a lot of tabs. This will become even more problematic in the future when more applications are developed and run in the browser environment.
Phantom tabs is a way to pin a tab and then shut down the process but still be able to easily bring it back to life. Take a look at this short video created by DownloadSquad:
Interested in trying it out? Just add a command line switch. It’s pretty easy. just go to your Chrome icon on your desktop or programs menu, right click properties, and in the target area just add –enable-phantom-tabs after chrome.exe. Now when you open Chrome you will be able to use phantom tabs.
The Chrome operating system will be navigated largely within tabs. That’s why I’m pretty sure this is going to be a useful feature in Chrome OS, especially if web applications continue to become resource-heavy. That allows the ability to free up resources on the system as needed and prevent it from getting bogged down.
