A light-weight chrome / chromium plugin which ensures that tabs are lazily loaded.
Requires Chrome 54+.
Available in Chrome store.
This plugin uses the discard API available since Chrome 54. All tabs except
new tabs or "special" tabs are discarded. Discarded tabs are visible in the tab
bar, but not loaded from the network nor kept in memory.
If a window doesn't have a new tab, it is created and activated. This prevents any tab from loading during startup, unless you explicitly select it.
Special tabs are those with chrome:// URLs, for example.
Note: When there are hundreds of tabs open in the session, a couple of them manage to sneak through and become active. This is a limitation due to Chromium's design. See hrj#1.
If you can't / don't want to use the Chrome Store, you can install it manually as follows.
From the release page, download the zip file and extract it somewhere on your file-system. Go to chrome://extensions and click
Load Unpacked extension, select the slot directory and press Ok.
I found an extension called Native Lazy Tabs here. It was distributed under the GPL license. I adapted it and added the "new tab" feature.
The icon is by Jaime Serra, distributed under the CC license.