If you’re like me, it’s not uncommon for you to have so many tabs open in your browser that you can’t even read all their titles.

The problem with this, of course, is all these tabs consume system resources (memory, battery, and CPU), and if you never end up going back to them again (which, let’s be honest, happens more often than not) those resources were consumed for nothing.

The solution to this problem is for browser tabs to behave more like mobile apps, which can be started and stopped at any time by the operating system and gives these platforms the ability to streamline and reallocate resources where they best benefit the user.

The Page Lifecycle API brings this concept to the web and will hopefully allow browsers to become more energy and memory-efficient in the future.

In this article on developers.google.com I go deep into the Page Lifecycle API and give advice and best practices around managing and responding to lifecycle states and events.

The article is quite detailed, as it’s the result of months of research and cross-browser testing, so I hope you find it useful!