Discard Tab

An extension in just 14 lines of code. Built in a spare moment between tasks, with the least effort that could possibly work. Discard Tab adds a single item to the tab strip context menu: "Discard Tab". Right-click any background tab, click it, and Chrome discards the tab — freeing the memory it was using. The tab stays in your tab strip with its title and favicon intact, and reloads automatically the moment you click it again. That's the whole extension. UPDATES: - Multiple tabs: select tabs with Ctrl/Shift-click, right-click one of them, and every selected tab is discarded at once. (In split view, only the tab you right-clicked is discarded, not its partner.) WHY Chrome discards tabs on its own, but only when it decides memory is tight. If you want to free up a heavy tab right now — a bloated web app, a page with a dozen embedded videos — there is no built-in way to do it. So this was written between other work, in one sitting, and deliberately left at that. No options page, no dashboard, no memory graphs, no background timers, no telemetry. One menu item that calls one API. Nothing was added that wasn't needed to make that work. HOW IT WORKS - Right-click a tab in the tab strip (or one of several selected tabs) - Click "Discard Tab" - The tab is discarded, and its memory is released NOTES - Discarding a tab reloads the page when you return to it. Unsaved form input on that page will be lost. - The active tab can't be discarded. If it's part of your selection, it's skipped. - Requires Chrome 150 or later (tab strip context menus were added in Chrome 150).