Phantom tabs have been designed to help Internet users reduce the amount of computer memory the Google Chrome browser uses at any given time. Many Internet users keep some websites and services open all the time in their web browser even though they might be accessed only sporadically by them. These tabs occupy the same amount of memory no matter if they are used or not.
That’s where phantom tabs come into play to help the user reduce the memory used by the web browser. They basically kill the process of the tab so that the computer memory is freed but leave an indicator in the form of the web page’s favicon behind so that the website can be opened again when needed.
Phantom Tabs in Google Chrome have been implemented in the latest developer builds of the web browser. They need to be enabled with the switch –enable-phantom-tabs.
Closing a pinned tab in the Google Chrome browser will close the process of that tab thus freeing memory that the tab occupied. The tab background appears transparent now which indicates to the user that it is a phantom tab.
A left-click on any phantom tab will display the closed tab so that the website can be accessed by the Chrome user again.
Lee Mathews over at Download Squad has created a short video demonstrating the new phantom tabs feature:
Phantom Tabs are a useful feature for Chrome users who make use of the pinned tab feature of the browser to permanently place some websites in the tabbar of the web browser.
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This is really interesting. One of my complaints with Chrome was that it becomes slow when a lot of tabs are open, besides having a huge memory footprint. This remedies the issue.
I love this feature, along with the Pin’d tabs it makes those most popular tabs that I always have open much less of a pest… Pin them to the left so they take up just 10% of the space of a full tab then make them phantom so that they are always there but taking NO memory love it.