Tabs

The sidebar

Tabs are listed vertically in the sidebar. Each shows the site's initial on its theme colour and the page title.

Links that open a new window (target="_blank", window.open) open as a new tab next to the one they came from. ⌘-click a link to open it in the background. Sign-in pop-ups keep working because the page that opened them can still reach them.

When you close the last tab, the window closes.

Tabs belong to a room. The sidebar shows the current room's tabs; the strip at its bottom switches rooms.

Pinned tabs

Pinned tabs are for sites you always keep open, such as mail or a dashboard. They sit at the top of the sidebar under Pinned.

• Pin or unpin the current tab with ⇧⌘P (Tabs → Pin/Unpin Tab).
• Drag a tab onto a pinned tab to pin it. Drag a pinned tab down among the others to unpin it.
• Closing a pinned tab doesn't remove it. It is unloaded and goes back to the address it was pinned with.
• Pinned tabs are always restored, even when tab restore is off.

How Litr saves memory

Each loaded tab has its own web view, and pages can use a lot of memory. Litr keeps as few of them as it can:

• A new or restored tab has no web view until you show it.
• Only the active tab is in the window. Background pages are suspended (macOS 14 and later) or throttled, and their drawing buffers are released.
• Litr keeps within a memory limit: 1 GB by default for Litr and its pages together. When the total goes over, the heaviest background tab is unloaded, one at a time, every few seconds until it fits. You can choose 500 MB to 3 GB, or turn the limit off.
• At most three tabs stay loaded, the active one included. Opening more unloads the ones you used least recently. You can choose 1–6 in settings.
• Background tabs are unloaded after five minutes without use. You can choose 1 minute to 1 hour, or never.
• When macOS reports memory pressure, every background tab is unloaded at once.

Tabs that play sound or are in a call (using the camera or microphone) are never unloaded automatically, by the limit, the timer or memory pressure. They show ♪ in the sidebar. Close them yourself when you are done.

Unloaded tabs look dimmed in the sidebar. An unloaded tab keeps its address, title, colour, zoom level, back/forward history and scroll position, so clicking it brings the page back where you left it. It reloads from the network, so a page with unsaved form input may lose it.

Switching to an unloaded tab still looks instant. When you leave a tab, Litr takes a picture of it, and when you come back it shows that picture while the page reloads underneath, then fades it away once the page is ready (at most four seconds). The pictures are small JPEGs of about 100 KB each, and they are saved with your tabs, so restored tabs look instant after a restart too.

If a tab is unloaded while you are looking at it (by a schedule), the page area says so. Click it or press ⌘R to load it again.

Seeing memory use

Each loaded tab shows its memory in the sidebar, for example 412 MB. Unloaded tabs show nothing, because they use none. At the bottom of the sidebar, Memory shows Litr's total against the limit, such as "815 MB of 1.0 GB". The bar turns orange near the limit and red over it. It stays red when the active tab and tabs that play sound need more than the limit, since Litr won't unload those.

The figure for each tab is its web page process's memory, the same number Activity Monitor shows. Tabs from the same site can share a process; the total counts each process once. Litr's total leaves out WebKit's shared networking and graphics processes.

Turn the numbers off with Show memory use in settings.

Restoring tabs

Litr saves your tabs as you go and restores them the next time it starts, all unloaded except the one you were on. Turn this off with Restore tabs on launch in settings; pinned tabs are restored either way.