FooTab is an extension for Google Chrome and Chromium browsers which disables automatic tab loading when the browser starts.

You have likely enabled the " Continue where I left off " option in Chrome/Chromium browser. This option allows us to recover the tabs opened in the last browser session. That is to say, if we close the browser with 5 tabs opened, the next time the browser is launched, it will open these 5 tabs automatically.

This option is a great advantage because we can continue easily and quickly where we left it last time.
The only drawback of this option is that if we have many tabs opened, all of them will be loaded when the web browser is launched. This is not a problem if the last session, we opened 5 tabs or less, but if we open a lot of tabs, we will have to wait until all tabs are loaded.
This means that when we start the browser, we are loading tabs that we may not use at that session, consuming more memory than needed.

To solve this problem, the extension FooTab will prevent loading browser tabs when it is launched.
The operation of this program is simple; once installed, when we launch the browser, this extension will block for 10 seconds all the tabs in the browser. After those 10 seconds, we will be able to click on any tab to load that tab's content.

When we click on a tab the program has blocked, the following message will appear: “An extension blocked this webpage.” This indicates that the extension is working OK and has blocked that tab's content.
Just by clicking on the tab we want to navigate, it reloads the content after a few seconds. If the content of a tab is not reloaded, we have to press the “ Reload this page ” button or press the F5 key on the keyboard.

The function of only loading the tabs that we use is known as “Lazy Load,” In other browsers, such as Firefox, it is configured by default so that when we open the browser, it only loads the active tab, blocking the load of the other tabs.

This extension can not be installed in the Windows Chrome browser due to the installation policy of extensions on Windows, which only allows the installation of extensions from the Chrome Web Store.