Firefox – How to prevent background tabs from loading in Firefox

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I am searching for what the "Don't load tabs until selected" options promises in Firefox.

As it seems the option works fine when Firefox is set to load the tabs from the last session upon start. Only the foreground tab is loaded and all other tabs are only loaded when I select them. For all other cases background tabs are always loaded straight away. (Scenarios tested: load diverted tabs in background, open multiple bookmarks my middle-click on a folder)

What I want is a setting, plug-in or greasemonkey script that prevents every tab that is opened in the background from loading.

OR even better: if there is only one backgrund tab opened -> load it, if there are multiple tabs opened in background within a short amount of time -> prevent loading.

Edit:

My question is just slightly related to this one: Prevent auto-loading of tabs in Firefox when starting browser
They search for something that works at start, but this is already achieved by the "Don't load tabs until selected" option.

Best Answer

This works for me on Firefox 45: the Load Tab on Select add-on prevents background tabs from loading until selected. According to the description, this addon is only useful if you have browser.tabs.loadInBackground set to true.

As a suggestion, you might also want to use the Suspend Tab add-on, which automatically suspends background tabs to save the memory. The functionality is configurable and you can choose the delay before suspending tabs.

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