I wasn’t going to post about this add-on at first, because if I posted about every firefox add-on I find, we’d be here for a very long time. However, I found out how useful it is last night when I spent a few hours browsing the web and relaxing, so I think it deserves to be posted.
Side note: FF 4 has a built in feature similar to this, though BarTab has more options for customization, so it might be worth using if there’s an update.
The basic idea of BarTab is that you don’t really need to keep a tab in memory when you aren’t actively looking at it. So the main draw is the feature to “unload” a tab after a user-specified period of time - if you don’t look at it for a minute, or ten minutes, or 30 seconds, then it will be unloaded from your RAM or however firefox keeps track of your tabs. When you go back to the tab, it refreshes the page.
You’ll notice a huge performance boost when you’ve got dozens of tabs open with BarTab and without it - while the tabs are still there and available for you as soon as you want them, you’ll be running just as fast as if you had only one or two tabs open. Because that’s exactly what’s happening. It’s actually really, really nice in action, even if you don’t typically open a lot of tabs. The one time you do, it’s pretty great.
Though I’ll have to set some blacklists so it doesn’t reload my tumblr in the middle of a great post I’ve gotten distracted during, this is a great addon. I’ll read demi’s huge post on the guy who posts like me and Demi but about stuff we don’t post about. Look, I’m just tired of forming coherent sentences, okay?