OneTab might just be the Chrome extension that boosts the productivity of PC Pro. Sat next to me all day is Nicole Kobie, PC Pro news editor and rapacious harvester of browser tabs. Every time she sees a news story she might like to follow up on, she leaves it open in a browser tab, opens a new one and continues her hunt. By the end of the day her browser window looks something like this:

That’s the point where she starts thumping her desk in frustration and uttering profanities in that charming Canadian drawl of hers, because the 37 open tabs have brought her bedraggled PC to its knees. What’s more, she hasn’t got the first clue what’s hiding beneath all those tabs because all she can see is the favicon.

I’m certain Nicole isn’t the only one with a tab problem; I suspect we’ve all been there — which is why I’m indebted to my Dennis colleague Alex Watson for pointing me in the direction of OneTab this morning.

This extension is the very definition of a one-tricky pony. Hit OneTab’s lightbulb icon in the Chrome extensions bar and it collates all those open tabs into a list which is contained within a single tab. From there, you can get a full listing of each tab’s page title, and re-open each tab individually, or close and re-open the full list.

OneTab’s makers claim this can offer a 95% memory reduction. To put that to the test, I opened eight tabs in Chrome and took a snapshot of the Task Manager (there are more processes running than tabs opened because of background processes such as bookmark sync and Gmail checkers running in my browser):

And then applied OneTab and took another screenshot:

As you can see, those “closed” tabs are still consuming memory, but not nearly as much as they were previously. They’re also demanding fewer CPU cycles. Overall physical memory usage on the PC (fitted with 4GB of RAM) dropped from 60% to 44%, and although I didn’t hit the claimed 95% browser memory saving in this instance, you can see how the memory savings would be substantial with twice or three times as many tabs open.

Memory savings aside, it also makes all those open tabs much more accessible, which is a definite win-win. With extra features, such as the ability to share a list of open tabs as a web page and export a list of the the tab URLs, it’s a new must-have for Chrome. And did I mention that it was free?