Blame for Chrome

Your browser is often the biggest thing in memory. On the Mac Blame was built on, Chrome held 9.7 GB on average whenever memory ran short, most of it in open tabs. The extension lets Blame unload those tabs when your Mac needs the memory, and only then.

Install

1. Install Blame for Mac, if you have not.
2. Add the extension from the Chrome Web Store. It works in Chrome, Arc, Brave and Edge.
3. Nothing to set up. Blame › Autopilot shows "Unload browser tabs you have left".

What it does

When memory is short, Blame asks the extension to unload the tabs you have not looked at for 30 minutes. The browser does the unloading: each tab stays where it was, with its title and icon, and reloads when you click it. Blame measures what the browser gave back, two minutes on.

With Blame Pro, Autopilot does it on its own, at most every ten minutes. If you go back to more than one in five of the tabs it unloaded within ten minutes, that counts as a mistake: it leaves the browser alone for an hour, and turns the rule off if it keeps happening. Without Pro, Blame offers it in the panel and you click Do it.

What it never unloads

• The tab in front, in every window.
• Pinned tabs, and tabs playing sound.
• A tab still loading, or one the site has asked the browser not to unload.
• A tab holding something you have typed and not sent yet, so nothing you were writing is lost. Once it is sent or cleared, the tab may go again. Chrome's own Memory Saver keeps these too.
• Any tab while memory is not short.

Privacy

The extension counts tabs and how long since each was looked at. It cannot read which sites your tabs show, no URLs and no titles, and what you type never leaves the page: a small script on each page looks only at whether a box you typed in is empty, so it keeps that tab until you send or clear it. That is why your browser asks to let it "read and change your data on all websites" when you install it. It sends nothing over the network: its only channel is to Blame on your Mac. Privacy has the rest.