This article is written for Google Workspace for Education Administrators.
The Chrome browser is notorious for its intensive memory usage over the years. Your students may accidentally crash other educational programs on the schools' managed Chromebooks by just opening 30+ Chrome tabs. Opening too many tabs also heavily degrades the performance of important tasks such as remote learning on Google Meet.
This article explains how Safe Doc help you manage limiting the amount of Chrome tabs your students are allowed to open. It prevents your students from slowing down and destabilizing their school managed devices.
If your school has yet to install Safe Doc, please get a 30 days trial first.
Limit the number of Chrome tabs
In the following demonstration, Safe Doc automatically closes the oldest created tab whenever a 7th tab is created. So students always can only open and use at max 6 tabs at any time. The system performance is better preserved since the RAMs used by old tabs are recycled.
The limit applies to tabs in all windows except incognito windows. We do not recommend you allow incognito mode for students because many extensions are not loaded in incognito mode.
How to set up?
First of all, you shall have deployed Safe Doc and have understand how Safe Doc Configuration works.
Now add and set the policy LimitBrowserTabs to your policy configuration in Google Admin Console. Please note this policy has 2 properties, MaxTabs and TabCloseStrategy. The MaxTabs property is the max amount of tabs students are allowed to open, and the TabCloseStrategy property is to specify which tab to close to accommodate the new tab. Please learn more usage in the LimitBrowserTabs policy specification.
The following is an example of limiting 6 tabs and closing the oldest created tab if a 7th tab is created.
"LimitBrowserTabs": {
"Value": {
"MaxTabs": 6,
"TabCloseStrategy": 2
}
}
If you wish to turn off limiting the number of Chrome tabs, set the property value of MaxTabs to 0.
"LimitBrowserTabs": {
"Value": {
"MaxTabs": 0,
"TabCloseStrategy": 1
}
}
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