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Open links in new tabs without loading them with Silent Tab

Firefox add-on adds an option to open a link in a new tab without loading the page until you switch to the tab.

Matt Elliott Senior Editor
Matt Elliott is a senior editor at CNET with a focus on laptops and streaming services. Matt has more than 20 years of experience testing and reviewing laptops. He has worked for CNET in New York and San Francisco and now lives in New Hampshire. When he's not writing about laptops, Matt likes to play and watch sports. He loves to play tennis and hates the number of streaming services he has to subscribe to in order to watch the various sports he wants to watch.
Expertise Laptops, desktops, all-in-one PCs, streaming devices, streaming platforms
Matt Elliott

According to the Activity Monitor, Firefox uses a great deal more of my Mac's resources than does Chrome. The situation can become quite gruesome when I have dozens of tabs open in Firefox. With the Silent Tab add-on, I can open tabs without guilt or regret or slowing down my system.

Silent Tab adds an item to the right-click menu for links. Nestled between the Open Link in New Tab and Open Link in New Window is this: Open Link in Silent Tab.

silent-tab.png
Screenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET

What exactly is a silent tab, you ask? Great question. A silent tab opens a tab for your requested link but does not load the page. It then loads the page when you click on the tab to open it. Helpfully, the add-on loads the page title so you can keep track of your silent tabs just by scanning the portion of the title visible on your tabs, at least on a Mac. AddictiveTips reports that on Windows, the actual URL is displayed as the title of silent tabs.

(Via Ghacks)