If you use Google Chrome and notice your computer slowing down, you’re not alone — Google’s browser has a bit of a reputation for eating up RAM. 

If you don’t want to use Chrome’s  built-in task manager all the time, there are some extensions that can help you out.

Option 1: The Great Suspender

The Great Suspender places your apps in stasis, pausing them if you haven’t used them in a while. With one click, you can bring a page back from suspension and have memory allocated to tabs that are actually being used. Here’s how:

1. Click Add to Chrome on The Great Suspender in the Chrome Web Store.

2. Click Settings on the resulting page.

3. Fill out your settings, including how long to wait before suspending tabs, which tabs to whitelist and whether or not to suspend pinned tabs. Click Save Settings at the bottom of the page.

4. Click in the blue box to make suspended tabs active again. They will refresh and be available to use.

Option 2: OneTab

1. Click Add to Chrome on OneTab in the Chrome Web Store.

2. Click on the funnel button among your extensions in the top right of the browser.

3. Your tabs will be rolled into one tab directory. Click on a link to put it in a separate tab, or click Restore All to put them all in new tabs. Having all of your links in one tab should reduce memory usage.

It happens all the time. You open a web page expecting to read a plain text article and you’re confronted by a video that starts rolling without your permission. Fortunately, if you’re on Firefox, there’s a built-in option that prevents videos from starting until you click their play buttons.

In our experience testing the feature, it worked pretty well, preventing autoplays on YouTube, on video ads we encountered and on a number of web articles we visited. However, if you’re on YouTube and you click from one video to another, without refreshing the page, the subsequent videos don’t require you to hit play.

Here’s how to disable autoplay videos in Firefox:

• Launch Firefox, if it’s not already open.
• Type “about:config” into the address bar and hit Enter. 

•  Enter “autoplay” into the searchbox beneath the address bar. A list of results should appear below.

• Double click on media.autoplay.enabled. It should change from “true” to “false.” 

From now on, the web videos will not autoplay.

Clicking a mailto: link in any browser typically opens up the default email client your PC got bundled with (usually Windows or Mac Mail). But Firefox allows you to change how these links are handled in just a few steps. Once changed, you’ll open all mailto: links in the client of your choice, whether it’s Gmail on the web, or a third-party client, like Inky.

1. Open Firefox.

2. Click the hamburger menu at the right of the address bar.

3. Click the Options icon.

4. Choose Applications from the sidebar at the left.

5. Type mailto into the search bar and then click the link that remains below to highlight it.

6. Choose an option from the drop down menu with an email client you’d prefer to use.

Alternatively, you can add your own if your preference isn’t listed. If you have the client installed, it’ll typically display in this window.