As surely as the sun rises in the morning, so continues mankind's struggle with managing too many tabs in Google Chrome. Fret not, here are some free extensions to soothe your worries.

Chrome might be the most popular browser in the world today, but it's not perfect. When you open up too many tabs, you can barely see them as they scrunch up together, and they start taking up a lot of RAM. These Chrome extensions offer different ways to tackle this perennial problem, from closing inactive tabs to ditching tabs for Chrome windows.

1. Tabby (Chrome, Firefox, Edge): Close Inactive Tabs Automatically and Save Memory

Tabs take up memory, and the solution to that for the longest time was an extension called The Great Suspender. But then Google flagged it as malware. Well, don't worry, Tabby is the best alternative Chrome extension to The Great Suspender.

Tabby automatically closes tabs that aren't important to you, freeing up memory and other resources. It judges importance by time spent on the tab, the last time you viewed it, and how often you check it. Of course, if it's a pinned tab, then the extension won't auto-close that.

Every time Tabby closes a tab, you'll see a notification badge on its icon in the toolbar. Click this to view all the tabs closed in the current session. You can also restore any tab through the same panel.

Tabby offers three profiles: Focus (5 tabs open), Relax (12 tabs open), or Customize (you specify how many max tabs). You can also enable or disable Tabby on specific windows.

Download: Tabby for Chrome | Firefox | Edge (Free)

2. Tab Bucket (Chrome): Temporarily Close Tabs, But Save Them for Future

Tab Bucket is a temporary place to store tabs you'll need for later but want to suspend right now

Some tabs are useless at the moment but could be useful after some time. If you close them, you'll have to hunt for them in your History. If you bookmark them, that's just more mess in your bookmarks folder. Tab Bucket is the go-between solution.

When you have any tab open, press the keyboard shortcut Alt + A to add it to your Tab Bucket. This closes the tab but saves it in the bucket, which you can access by clicking the Tab Bucket icon. You can re-open tabs through the bucket, or eventually empty it out if you don't have any more need for those links.

Download: Tab Bucket for Chrome (Free)

TabMerge is a powerful exension to handle too many tabs by color coding them into groups

OneTab is a fantastic extension to turn all open tabs into a text file of links, which you save for later. It has inspired many similar creations like Ktab, one of the best bookmark apps to organize links. TabMerger is the next step in these types of extensions.

The default version of TabMerger gives you five groups. You can give each group a title, change its color, lock it so it can't be edited, move it up and down in position, and pin it to the top of the TabMerger dashboard. In one click, you can open all tabs, or open them separately.

To save tabs to TabMerger, you need to first open the TabMerger dashboard as a tab. Each group gives you the option to save all open tabs in the window or all tabs to the left or right of the dashboard.

You can reorder saved tabs with simple drag-and-drop, and even move them to other groups. Tabs can be individually pinned so that can't be deleted, and renamed in case the title is too long. You can also open all tabs from all groups in one click.

TabMerger's settings offer several customization options, including fonts, colors, size, and the ability to exclude certain websites. For example, if you don't want your Gmail inbox showing up in saved tabs, just add gmail.com as a filter.

The free version of TabMerger allows five groups and 100 tabs. This should be enough for most people, but a subscription plan increases those limits and adds other options like syncing across devices, search filters, JSON support, etc.

Download: TabMerger for Chrome (Free)

4. Tabbs and Hare (Chrome): Keyboard-Friendly Spotlight for Chrome Tabs

Tabbs Pro is like Spotlight for Chrome to quickly search for open tabs, pin tabs, mute tabs, or close tabs

When you have a lot of tabs open, Chrome scrunches them up into tiny icons. When you want to go back to a tab, you can't figure out where to click because you can't see it. Tabbs and Hare solve that problem with a macOS Spotlight-like feature.

Call up Tabbs with a keyboard shortcut to display a console in the top-right corner of Chrome. Type a few letters to see all the open tabs that match the letters. You can then open the tab, pin it, mute it, or suspend it, all with keyboard shortcuts.

Hare works similarly, but the search results were better, or more intuitive, in our test. It doesn't let you do anything more than open or close the tab, but you can select multiple tabs and close them together.

The real difference between the two is the design. While Tabbs offers a few more things you can do with the selected tab, it's not a dealbreaker. Try both, pick whichever you like more.

Download: Tabbs for Chrome (Free)

Download: Hare for Chrome | Firefox | Safari (Free)

5. TabXpert (Chrome): Forget Tab Management, Just Use Multiple Windows

TabXpert saves tabs in different windows, turning Chrome tab management into window management

TabXpert has a radically different solution to the problem of having too many tabs open. It says open as many as you want, just start a new window for each task. And as long as you do that, TabXpert will remember all the tabs in that window, both open and closed.

So for any task you start, press Ctrl + N to open a new Chrome window and work in that. TabXpert tracks the entire session so it knows everything about your tabs. If you close the window, don't worry, just open the TabXpert console to see the session. Here, you can save it, rename it, or reopen it.

The TabXpert dashboard (available as a drop-down console, a pop-out mini window, or a tab) offers a variety of ways to interact with sessions and tabs. You can move tabs between windows, rename sessions, assign hotkeys to certain tabs, interact with multiple tabs, add bookmarks, suspend tabs, and a whole lot more. The paid version of TabXpert also offers cloud sync to work on multiple devices.

It's a different approach to the idea of tab management, but it might be the simplest one yet. The only thing is, this won't solve problems about Chrome using too much RAM. It'll be up to you to close windows when you don't need them and save sessions before TabXpert purges them.

Download: TabXpert for Chrome (Free)

Check Out Chrome's Built-In Tab Grouping Feature

As you can see, there are myriad solutions to the problem of managing too many open tabs in Chrome. In fact, in 2020, Google took a shot at a solution by launching Tab Groups in Chrome beta. The feature is now available in stable versions of Chrome for desktop and Android, and you might want to check it out before trying extensions.

It's quite simple to use. Right-click any tab and choose Add tab to new group to create your first group, which automatically appears after any pinned tabs. You can then right-click other tabs to add to this group or create a new group. Groups and their tabs are color-coded for easy identification. Double-clicking the group name will collapse or expand the tabs, making space for others.

It's a basic implementation of tab management, but hey, it might just be all you need rather than fancy extensions.