AFAICT the comparisons to safari are no longer true
https://birchtree.me/blog/everyone-says-chrome-devastates-ma...
That might be different on other platforms
I can't vouch for Chrome and Safari themselves, but I can between Thorium and Falkon, because I regularly suspend Thorium and open the same page with Falkon, and watch the CPU usage graph drop from pegging a core to almost nothing.
> Chrome doesn't let you suspend tabs, and as far as I could find there aren't any plugins to do so
Auto Tab Discard exists and works fine, but I am not sure it's what people call "suspending tabs". They need to reload when you click them and they objectively free the memory they used (I watch my memory usage closely).
It's made worse on the Strix Halo platform, because it's a performance first design, so there's more resource for Chrome to take advantage of.
The closest browser to Safari that works on Linux is Falkon. It's compatability is even less than Safari, so there's a lot of sites where you can't use it, but on the ones where you can, your battery usage can be an order of magnitude less.
I recommend using Thorium instead of Chrome; it's better but it's still Chromium under the hood, so it doesn't save much power. I use it on pages that refuse to work on anything other than Chromium.
Chrome doesn't let you suspend tabs, and as far as I could find there aren't any plugins to do so; it just kills the process when there aren't enough resources and reloads the page when you return to it. Linux does have the ability to suspend processes, and you can save a lot of battery life, if you suspend Chrome when you aren't using it.
I don't know of any GUI for it, although most window managers make it easy to assign a keyboard shortcut to a command. Whenever you aren't using Chrome but don't want to deal with closing it and re-opening it, run the following command (and ignore the name, it doesn't kill the process):
When you want to go back to using it, run: This works for any application, and the RAM usage will remain the same while suspended, but it won't draw power reading from or writing to RAM, and its CPU usage will drop to zero. The windows will remain open, and the window manager will handle them normally, but whats inside won't update, and clicks won't do anything until resumed.