Save memory and reduce tab cluster by automatically closing idle background tabs

It is a common problem for modern browsers to use a lot of system memory when you open a lot of tabs. Each tab has a lot of images and videos. Your system memory can be used up in no time. Also, the JavaScript running in all the tabs can make the CPU busy all the time. That’s why we have provided an option to automatically unload idle tabs sitting in the background to save memory and reduce CPU usage. When a tab is unloaded, the tab is still sitting there but the web page content is no longer hosted. When you click on an unloaded tab, the browser will simply reload the web page again. So you save memory at the cost of a little bit delay when you try to access an unloaded tab. It wouldn’t be much of an issue if you rarely have to access an unloaded tab.

After turning on the option of automatic tab unloading, we are still faced with the problem of having too many tabs on the tab bar. A couple of hours after opening the browser, we usually have 30 or more tabs on the tab bar. That makes finding a tab you want painful and time consuming. What I normally do is stop what I am doing and manually close the tabs I no longer need. If we rarely have to access an unloaded tab, why not closing unloaded tabs completely to free up the tab bar space? That’s why we have added an extra option to automatically close the tabs that we no longer need, as shown below

After turning on this option and using the browser for more than 10 days, I think it works pretty well for me. I never have to manually close tabs I don’t need any more. I limit the number of tabs to 15. When I open more tabs beyond that, an existing tab will be automatically closed based on the order of last accessed time. That is, we will close a tab that hasn’t been accessed for the longest time. There are also other conditions that prevent a tab from being closed, such as the exception list. If the tab currently has data being input or processed, it won’t be closed. The browser will rarely close a tab resulting in loss of data. If you need bring back a recently closed tab, you can easily get it back by searching for it with the “Search Tabs” drop down. It can search for open tabs as well as recently closed tabs.

I encourage you guys to give this option a try. I think you will like it.

Phase out of QuickFill Form filler

We are planning to remove the QuickFill form filler starting from V30. At the beginning, QuickFill had many advantages over the default password manager. Over time, with the on-going improvement of the Chrome password manager, it no longer makes sense to keep supporting a separate form filler like QuickFill. The biggest disadvantage of QuickFill is that it is not able to sync across difference devices like the default password manager. Being able to sync across devices is more important than ever with all the difference devices people are using.

We have provided an easy way to copy your saved passwords from QuickFill to the default password manager. First, make sure the QuickFill button is visible on the toolbar. If not, you can customize the toolbar and add it. Then click the QuickFill Button and select “More->Copy passwords to default password manager” from the drop down menu. That will complete the migration of data. After that, turn off the option “Use QuickFill form filler instead of default password manager” in the settings page.

Side tab bar in Slimjet

Since Slimjet 26.0.5, support for side tab bar has been added. To enable side tab bar, right click on any of the tabs on the horizontal tab bar and select “Side tab bar->Enable side tab bar” from the popup menu. It looks something like this:

If you don’t want to be always visible, you can select “Side tab bar->auto hide” to switch to auto-hide mode for the side tab bar.

So what’s the point of a side tab bar? The biggest reason of doing this is that a reasonably sized screen show more than 30 tabs without running out of screen space. For every tab shown on the side tab bar, it has the same width and you can see more letters on the title of each tab so that it is easier for you to quickly locate the tab you want to find. On the horizontal tab, the tabs will become really short and squeezed when there are too many tabs. It is hard for you to find the tab you want. Yes, the side tab bar takes some screen space. But most monitors have 16:9 ratio right now. When you view most websites, you have more than enough space to view the full width of the pages even if you add a side tab bar.

Switch back to last active tab with a shortcut key

A convenient shortcut key (Ctrl+Q) is added in Slimjet 25.0.10.0 to help users quickly switch to the last active tab. This is very useful if you need switch back and forth between two tabs many times when you compare information in two tabs. You can also do the same thing by right clicking on the tab and select “Go to last active tab”. But we put that menu item out there so that people know there is a shortcut key for this function.

Such a shortcut key is not available in Chrome or Firefox. We think it’s really needed for people who really need it.

How to enable password leak detection in Slimjet

To enable password detection in Slimjet, type slimjet://flags/#password-leak-detection in the ominbox and press enter. You will see the following option:

After that, go to slimjet://settings/passwords and make sure the following option is turned on:

When this feature is enabled, Slimjet will automatically alert you if one of your saved passwords is the same as one of the publicly leaked passwords. Please be aware this feature is only available when you have signed into your Slimjet browser.

Gmail support in Slimjet 10 for XP

According to this blog post, Google plans to discontinue support of Chrome 53 or older with Gmail starting 2018. After the end of support, users using Chrome 53 or older will be redirected to a primitive version of Gmail using basic HTML. Since Slimjet 10 for XP is based on Chrome 50, it will be impacted by this decision of Google as well.

We believe for most users a basic html version of Gmail is actually sufficient. So there is no need to panic and ditch Gmail right now if you are a user of Slimjet for XP. Let’s wait and see how crippled the basic html version of Gmail will be before thinking about switching to a different email provider.

Both XP and Vista users will be supported on Slimjet 10 branch

After spending a lot of time trying to get Slimjet 12 compatible with Vista, we have decided to give up on that effort. Although we have managed to get Slimjet 12 to run and browse sites properly under Vista, it is not able to load any plugins under vista, most importantly, the flash plugin. That means you will not be able to watch any videos since Slimjet doesn’t have h.264 codec support on Vista. With the pace the chrome guys at Google is quickly introducing vista-incompatible features and API calls, it will be a losing fight for us to hunt out their changes from the huge code base and find a workaround for each of them.

Therefore, we have decided not to continue Vista support in Slimjet 12. Since it doesn’t make a lot of sense for us to create a separate branch just for Vista users, we have decided to continue both XP and Vista support on the Slimjet 10 branch. Slimjet has the best support of all the legacy features, including Java and NPAPI.

If you are visiting the download page of Slimjet from an XP or Vista PC, you will be automatically redirected to the download page of Slimjet 10. If you do want to try Slimjet 11 or 12 on Vista, you can get it from the Slimjet version archive. Slimjet 11 works just fine on Vista. Slimjet 12 can’t load any pepper plugins on Vista. 

Thanks a lot for your understanding.

Windows XP users should stay with Slimjet 10 for best experience

Despite our efforts, Slimjet 11 still has compatibility issues with Windows XP that we are not able to fix so far due to widespread changes made by the Chrome team to make it incompatible with XP. The issues we are aware of are these:

1. Can’t view PDF with the internal pdf viewer.
2. Can’t install any extensions from the web store.

If these issues don’t bother you, you can stay on Slimjet 11. Otherwise, please install Slimjet 10 instead from this archive directory: http://www.slimjet.com/release/archive/10.0.8.0/ . From now on, when users visit Slimjet.com with a Windows XP PC, they will be automatically redirected to the download page of Slimjet 10. We will continue to fix bugs for Windows XP users on the Slimjet 10 branch.

XP support will be dropped in Slimjet 12

We managed to support Windows XP in Slimjet 11 with significant efforts invested. However, based on the way the Chrome team has been quickly introducing more and more XP-incompatible code into the Chromium code base, it doesn’t make sense for us to spend a lot of time every time to find every little changes and undo them in order to support XP. Therefore, we have decided to stop supporting XP when we migrate to Slimjet 12 running on Chromium 52.

XP users can continue to download Slimjet 11 from the early version archive. If there is a critical security issue with Slimjet 11, we will update it into the Slimjet 11 branch.

As for Vista support, based on the current estimate, supporting Vista takes much less effort. However, I guess much fewer people use Vista anyway.

Thanks a lot for your understanding and support.