text: Dosboy's Bits and Bytes: Firefox High CPU Rogue Tabs
  Firefox High CPU Rogue Tabs
  Posted by Garth on Sunday, May 2, 2010
  Lately I've been using Firefox with a lot of tabs. Generally I'm actually using multiple windows with multiple tabs. One window for development/testing. One window for general surfing. One window for time tracking. And many tabs in each. Occasionally my machine gets sluggish, and when I check Activity Monitor it's inevitably Firefox chewing up CPU and RAM. Before today I would just sigh, go through my tabs to see if there is anything important that I still want open, then close all the other tabs, then close Firefox (telling it to open existing tabs when it opens), then re-open Firefox. Big PITA. But no more!
  Enter BarTab! I just discovered this little gem and after using it for 5 mins am already in love with it. It basically lets you manage whether tabs are active or passive. If they're active, they act like they normally do. If they're passive, the tab for a page remains visible, but the page isn't loaded until the tab is actually clicked. And you can set a timeout so that if a tab isn't accessed for x hours it'll unload itself. Very nice.