FooTab makes Chrome to Load Tabs on demand on Startup

Do you want Google Chrome to load tabs on demand like Firefox does?, you can get that behavior on startup with an extension. Firefox won’t load tabs from previous session on startup unless and until you select them but last visited pages will be loaded automatically, this makes browser to became more responsive and improves startup time. Google Chrome doesn’t offers this feature natively but you can add this to it with an extension called FooTab.

Stop Google Chrome from loading tabs on startup until you select them

Inspired from BarTab add-on for Firefox the developer has created FooTab extension. Extension developer says “It works for 10 secs on Chrome/Iron start, blocking tabs that are not active from any web requests. After those 10 seconds the web traffic is not blocked anymore and the extension only monitors the tabs that were previously blocked to reload them when they are activated.”

After installing Footab extension you don’t need to configure anything on your end. You need to have some pages/tabs opened to test this extension, if you’ve restart the browser otherwise visit some sites before restarting Chrome.

You need to click on any tab for it to load. When you click on unloaded tab, Chrome shows “ the webpage was blocked by an extension” which automatically reloads the page after few seconds.

But the  extension it self is not hosted on chrome web store, so you need to manually right click on file and select “save link as” to download extension onto your computer and then drag and drop it onto chrome://extensions page for install. After that you need to sign into your Google account to get that extension.

We’ve uploaded and tested this extension in VirusTotal and it yielded zero virus results.

Download Footab.

Have you liked this extension? don’t you feel Chrome should offer this feature by default? share with us in comments.

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Venkat Eswarlu

Venkat is an independent technology journalist and the founder of Techdows. He has been covering web browsers, Windows, and software news since 2009. His exclusive scoops on Chrome, Firefox, and Edge features have been cited by Forbes, TechCrunch, Wired, CNET, and other major publications.

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