Most people with too many Chrome tabs don't keep them out of laziness. Each tab is a small promise: an article to finish, a form to come back to, a page you'll need for a project next week. Closing it feels like losing it, so the strip keeps growing until the Mac's fan comes on and every tab is a sliver showing only a favicon.
This guide is about getting that under control without losing anything, using features built into Chrome and macOS. Where a Chrome setting has moved or been renamed between versions, it says so.
Two Different Problems
"Too many tabs" usually means one of two things, and they have different fixes:
- The Mac is slow. Chrome is using a lot of memory, the fan spins up, switching apps stutters. This is a resource problem, and Chrome has settings that help a lot.
- You can't find anything. The Mac is fine, but the tab strip has become useless and you lose minutes hunting for the page you want. This is an organisation problem.
It is worth knowing which one you have before you start closing things, because closing tabs is not always the right fix for either.
Check Whether Tabs Are Actually the Problem
A Mac that feels slow with Chrome open is not always slow because of Chrome. Two quick checks tell you.
1. Look at memory pressure in Activity Monitor
- Open Activity Monitor (in Applications → Utilities, or search for it with Spotlight).
- Click the Memory tab.
- Look at the Memory Pressure graph at the bottom of the window.
Ignore the "Memory Used" figure: macOS deliberately keeps memory full of cached data, so a high number is normal. The graph is what matters. Green means your Mac has enough memory, even with all those tabs. Yellow means it is working harder to manage memory. Red means it is running short, and that is when things genuinely slow down. If the graph is green and the Mac still feels slow, look elsewhere first (the CPU tab will show what is busy).
In the process list, Chrome shows up as many separate entries called Google Chrome Helper (Renderer) and similar. That is normal: Chrome runs pages in separate processes so one crashing tab doesn't take the others down.
2. Find the heavy tabs with Chrome's Task Manager
Activity Monitor can't tell you which Chrome Helper is which tab. Chrome's own Task Manager can. Open it from the menu bar with Window → Task Manager, or from the three-dot menu → More tools → Task manager.
Click the Memory footprint column header to sort by memory. You'll usually find that a handful of tabs account for most of it: web apps like email, chat, design tools and video sites, plus any page that's been open for days running scripts. Ordinary articles and documentation pages tend to use far less. Extensions also appear in this list, and an extension you no longer use is often worth removing at chrome://extensions.
To deal with a heavy tab, select it and click End process. The tab stays in your strip but shows an error page; reloading it brings it back with fresh memory use. Often the simplest fix is to close the two or three heaviest tabs and leave the other sixty alone.
Turn On Memory Saver
If memory really is the issue, this is the single most useful setting. Memory Saver frees the memory used by tabs you haven't looked at in a while. The tab stays in your strip, with its title and favicon, and reloads when you click it.
- Open Chrome's settings with Cmd + , (or go to
chrome://settings/performance). - Click Performance in the sidebar.
- Turn on Memory Saver.
Recent versions of Chrome let you choose how aggressive it is, from a moderate setting that waits longer before freeing a tab to a maximum setting that frees tabs sooner. If you have dozens of tabs and a Mac with 8 GB of memory, the stronger settings are worth trying. Older versions just have the on/off switch.
The trade-off is the reload. A tab that has been freed takes a moment to come back, and a page with unsaved work, like a half-written form or a web app that doesn't save as you go, may not come back exactly as you left it. On the same Performance page, under Always keep these sites active, click Add and list the sites you need kept live: your email, a chat app, a music player, anything you type into for long stretches.
Set Up a Safety Net Before You Close Anything
Much of the reluctance to close tabs is fear of losing them. Chrome already keeps more than most people realise, and two settings make it close to foolproof.
- Reopen your tabs after a restart. In Chrome's settings, under On startup, choose Continue where you left off. Quitting Chrome, or a Mac restart for a macOS update, then brings your windows and tabs back.
- Learn the undo. Cmd + Shift + T reopens the last tab you closed, and pressing it again keeps going back through earlier ones. If you closed a whole window by mistake, it brings back the window with its tabs.
- Know where history lives. The History menu in the menu bar has a Recently Closed list, and Cmd + Y opens your full history, searchable by title or address.
Once you trust that a closed tab can be found again, closing stops feeling risky.
Close Tabs in Bulk
Closing tabs one at a time with Cmd + W is fine for five tabs and tedious for fifty. Chrome has faster options on the tab's right-click menu:
- Close other tabs closes everything in the window except the tab you right-clicked.
- Close tabs to the right is useful because new tabs usually open at the right-hand end. If the left side of your strip is the stuff you care about and the right side is a trail of search results, right-click the last tab worth keeping and use this.
You can also select several tabs at once. Hold Cmd and click tabs to pick them individually, or click one tab and Shift-click another to select everything between them. Then press Cmd + W to close them all, or drag them out of the strip to move them into a new window together.
Park Tabs You Need Later, Not Now
A lot of open tabs are really a to-do list. They don't need to be open; they need to be somewhere you'll find them. Chrome gives you three places to put them.
Bookmark a whole window into a folder
From the menu bar, choose Bookmarks → Bookmark All Tabs… (Cmd + Shift + D). Chrome asks for a folder name and saves every tab in the window into it. Give it a name you'll recognise, such as the project and the date, then close the window. When you need them back, right-click the folder in the bookmarks bar or Bookmark Manager and choose Open all. This is the cleanest fix for a research session you've finished for now but might come back to.
Add single pages to your Reading list
For articles you mean to read, right-click the tab and choose Add tab to reading list, then close the tab. The Reading list lives in Chrome's side panel and keeps track of what you've read. It syncs to Chrome on your other devices if you're signed in with sync on.
Save a tab group
If your tabs are already in a group (see below), recent versions of Chrome let you take the whole group off the strip and reopen it later. Right-click the group's name and look for the option to hide or close it. The wording has changed between versions, so read the menu before you click: Delete group, where it appears, removes the group for good.
Organise the Tabs You Keep
Some tabs genuinely need to stay open. For those, the aim is to make the strip readable again.
Tab groups
Right-click a tab and choose Add tab to group → New group. Give the group a short name and a colour. Drag other tabs onto it to add them. Clicking the group's name collapses it into a single coloured label, which is the main benefit: four collapsed groups of fifteen tabs take up less room than five ordinary tabs. Click the name again to expand it when you need it.
Pinned tabs
Right-click a tab and choose Pin for the handful you always want open, such as email and calendar. Pinned tabs shrink to an icon at the left end of the strip and stay there, so they don't get lost among the rest.
Separate windows or profiles
One window per project keeps each tab strip short enough to read. Drag a tab out of the strip to give it its own window, and press Cmd + ` (the key above Tab) to cycle between Chrome's windows. If your tabs are a mix of work and personal, a separate Chrome profile for each (click your profile picture at the top right of the window, then add a profile) keeps the two apart, each with its own windows, bookmarks and history.
Move Between Them Faster
Even after a clear-out, many people still have twenty or thirty tabs open, and the remaining problem is getting around them. A few built-in tools help:
- Cmd + Shift + A opens tab search. Type part of a page title or address to jump straight to it, however many tabs are open.
- Cmd + 1 to 8 jump to the first eight tabs, which works well with pinned tabs. Cmd + 9 jumps to the last tab.
- Cmd + Option + ← / → step to the previous or next tab.
Our guide to navigating 100+ tabs on a Mac goes into which of these hold up at large tab counts and which don't.
What Chrome on a Mac doesn't have is a trackpad gesture for switching tabs. Two fingers sideways goes back and forward through a page's history, and three or four switch desktops. That's the gap our app, TabSwipe, fills: a three-finger swipe moves between tabs in Chrome (and Safari, Arc, Edge, Brave and other browsers), gliding across several tabs in one movement with a haptic tick on each, and Tab Bookends stop you at the first and last tab. It won't reduce your tab count or Chrome's memory use, so it complements the steps above rather than replacing them, and it takes over three-finger swipes, so Mission Control and desktop switching move to four fingers. Switching Chrome tabs with a trackpad compares it with the free options.
A Five-Minute Weekly Routine
Tabs build up again, so a short habit beats an occasional purge. Once a week:
- Sort by memory. Open Window → Task Manager, sort by Memory footprint, and close anything heavy you aren't using.
- Park finished work. For each project window you're done with for now, use Bookmark All Tabs into a dated folder and close the window.
- Move reading to the Reading list. Any article you've had open for days and haven't read goes there.
- Trim the trail. Use Close tabs to the right on the search results and one-off pages that piled up at the end of the strip.
- Regroup what's left. Put the remaining tabs into named groups and collapse the ones you aren't working on today.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Chrome tabs is too many on a Mac?
There's no fixed number. It depends on how much memory your Mac has and what the tabs are: fifty static articles can use less than five busy web apps. Use the Memory Pressure graph in Activity Monitor as your guide. If it stays green, your Mac is coping, whatever the count.
Will Memory Saver lose my tabs?
No. The tabs stay in the strip with their titles; Chrome only frees the memory behind them and reloads the page when you click it. The risk is limited to unsaved content on the page itself, which is why it's worth adding sites you type into to the Always keep these sites active list.
Does having lots of tabs open drain a MacBook's battery?
It can, mainly through tabs that keep running in the background, such as video, animated pages and busy web apps. Chrome's Task Manager has a CPU column; tabs that stay high there while you aren't looking at them are the ones costing battery. Closing those, or letting Memory Saver free them, helps more than closing quiet tabs.
Keeping a lot of tabs open on purpose? Download the TabSwipe free trial and swipe between them from the trackpad.