Unloaded tabs using resources

[Lias-e]

i have this thing where the pinned and essential tabs are not loaded, yet appear as they are open when i hover on the application icon on the taskbar, and i believe they are active somehow even when not loaded.

OS: windows 11 Pro 24H2
Zen version: 1.14.9b

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• Zen using 8907 mb from the ram for 6 open tabs.

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• it looks like the other 13 unloaded tabs are all open and active:

[dosubot[bot]]

Hi @Lias-e! I'm Dosu and I’m helping the desktop team.

What you're seeing is mostly expected behavior in Zen: essential tabs are designed to always stay loaded and use resources, while pinned tabs can also stay in memory depending on your settings. Even when tabs are unloaded, Zen may still render them as "active" in the UI and taskbar previews, and not-yet-loaded or auto-unloaded tabs look the same as loaded ones unless you explicitly unload them via the right-click menu (which gives them a faded look) [1][2].

To reduce memory usage, check the about:config setting browser.sessionstore.restore_pinned_tabs_on_demand and make sure it's set to true—this prevents essentials and pins from fully loading on startup and should drop their RAM usage to around 10MB per tab instead of hundreds [3][4]. You can also disable taskbar previews if you don't want unloaded tabs to appear as open in the Windows taskbar [3].

If you want to unload a tab manually, right-click it and choose "unload tab." Note that essential tabs can't be unloaded with Ctrl+W; that's intentional [1][5]. If you notice that unloaded tabs are still using significant resources, there have been reports that the tab unloading feature doesn't always fully release memory for all tab types, so you may want to monitor this in about:processes [6].

Let me know if you want more details on changing these settings or troubleshooting further!

To reply, just mention @dosu.

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