Yes, I’m aware Chromium already includes a form of tab discarding; discard being a key word here. It doesn’t make the tabs “sleep” but just closes them, when you try to get back, they load from 0% like you just opened it, it really takes some time every time.
Tab sleeping on other hand is similar to discarding in RAM savings, but the page does NOT need to load again after you come back to it. There are basically no downsizes to a tab being put to sleep.
I usually don’t like comparisons as everyone is unique, but the browser that actually has this feature correctly implemented, is Edge. Why do I know? With the coming of the final ManifestV2 rollout, Edge and several other browsers will not be able to use MV2 extensions, so a lot of people is looking to move out to alternatives like Brave, and I love it, it works really well, but this small key feature is really, really game changing; and its implementation in Brave would help consolidate it as a high performance browser!
It seems that, when a tab gets put to sleep, it starts unloading from memory everything that is not actually needed for the “memory state” the page is turned into. I’m not actually aware of how the system truly works, and Edge is closed source, I understand that.
Edge vs Brave (5 tabs, 1 open, 4 discarded for Brave, 4 sleeping for Edge)
You can see here that Brave and Edge RAM usage differences are not that big, yet Edge has NOT no reload the pages when you come back to them. They’re just there and work immediately, these are huge time savings. You can then save memory and save time without compromises.
A small look at the Edge tab sleeping settings:
Discarding does give you more free RAM, right…? Then just give an option to decide between Discarding and Sleeping!
I limit my petition to Desktop as I see no logic for tab sleeping in mobile, but it might be useful too there.