How fast is TabOverview?
Last reviewed: 1 November 2026
- With 500 tabs open, TabOverview’s grid appears in about 0.12 seconds. With 200 tabs it takes about 0.07 seconds.
- One search across your tabs, 20,000 bookmarks and 5,000 closed pages takes about 0.01 seconds.
- That’s fast enough to feel built in. It isn’t: TabOverview is an extension, not part of Chrome, and Google doesn’t make it.
Time to show the grid
Each row is 20 fresh openings of the real grid page, timed from page start to the first painted grid.
| Open tabs | Typical (median) | Slowest 1 in 20 | Slowest run |
|---|---|---|---|
| 50 | 63 ms | 83 ms | 109 ms |
| 200 | 71 ms | 84 ms | 88 ms |
| 300 | 97 ms | 120 ms | 130 ms |
| 500 | 122 ms | 168 ms | 175 ms |
1,000 ms is one second. On a slower computer it takes longer. With the processor slowed four times, 503 tabs took about 0.11 to 0.15 seconds. Slowed six times, they took about 0.17 seconds.
Why it can be this fast
- TabOverview runs no code on the pages you visit: 0 injected scripts.
- It makes 0 requests to the internet, so nothing waits for a network.
- Its code is under 400 KB, and everything it needs ships inside the extension.
- A small pinned tab stays ready in each window, so reopening is a tab switch. You can turn that off in Settings.
What it costs your computer
- Its background part goes to sleep within about 30 seconds of use and does no recurring work.
- An open overview used 0.01% to 0.03% of the processor when idle, in a five-second sample.
- The page’s JavaScript memory stayed under 15 MB, from 50 to 500 tabs.
How we measured
- Date: 1 November 2026, just before version 0.1.6. The final change to that version was to card icons.
- Computer: Apple M5 with 32 GB of memory.
- Browser: Chrome 153, window size 1440 × 900.
- Tabs: real pages loaded from a local test site, then put to sleep, with 20 fresh openings at each tab count and no samples discarded.
- Search: 100 queries at each tab count. The figure above is the 95th percentile, 11 ms at 500 tabs.
- Slowed tests: run on version 0.1.6 with blank tabs and Chrome’s processor slowdown, in two rounds of 15 to 20 openings.
Results vary with the computer, the tab count and what else is running. We repeat these tests when the extension changes.
TabOverview is a free extension for Google Chrome on a computer, coming soon to the Chrome Web Store. It needs no registration and sends nothing to a server.
