The newer versions of Firefox has a great feature where upon startup, web pages in tabs aren’t activated until they are clicked on. It’s really nice when you’re restarting the browser with several tabs open. Unfortunately, Google Chrome doesn’t offer this feature. As I was searching for something like this for Google Chrome, I came across The Great Suspender.
This extension lets you suspend tabs, either automatically after a time or from a menu option. I leave it set to auto suspend tabs after 5 minutes in the background. You can also whitelist web pages that should never be suspended, which I use for Feedly and IMO.im.