I have a love/hate relationship with Google Chrome.
On the one hand, I love it a lot. I love the broad ecosystem of extensions, and the compatibility across all the devices I use, regardless of operating system. It’s less a browser and more a platform for all I do online.
But I also hate it. It’s a massive performance hog (and I’m an Adobe Creative Cloud user, so that’ saying something). It devours RAM by the gigabyte, and can bring even the most robust of systems to its knees.
I’ve done a lot to optimize the browser (and regular readers will know how much I’ve researched this topic), but I still manage to hit hard walls of limitations that get in the way of me getting my work done.
So, I’ve finally given in and I’m doing the unthinkable. I’m paying to make Google Chrome faster and use less RAM.
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So, who am I paying? Google? No. I’ve taken out a subscription to Partizion.
What is Partizion?
Partizion is a plugin that allows me to condense down my myriad of tabs into workspaces (think home, work, plans, hobbies), and then further refine and distill that down to collections (so maybe email, social media, research, etc). The workspaces allow me to shift between what I’m working on quickly, while collections allow me to open and close a bundle of tabs with as little as a click.
Another massive timesaving feature is that I can also choose to close all current tabs before opening a collection.
The main Partizion workspace also gives me a listing of tabs that re currently open, allowing me to quickly and easily build workspaces and collections. It also keeps a list of tabs that have been closed through Partizion, so they can easily be reopened.
I’ll be honest and say that it took me a good day to get used to using Partizion and to break my old ways of opening heaps of tabs, leaving them open (partly because browser bookmarking is still a mess despite it being the 21 century), and wondering why things were slow.
But once I broke that old habit, I found it very quick, easy, and intuitive to be shutting and opening tables using collections in various workspaces.
I love how I can even set it to pin tabs when they open up — a nice feature!
Another feature I’ve grown to love is the advanced search, which means I no longer have to keep the tabs in my head as well as in my browser.
Partizion isn’t free, but it is cheap. Currently you can get a $4 a month subscription that’s locked in against an upcoming price rise as soon as it comes out of beta. That seems like a good deal to me, especially since I’m seeing and experiencing the best Google Chrome performance and productivity boost since, well, since I shifted to Google Chrome.
