The thing I would most like in both Safari and Chrome would be a per-tab toggle (make it a little on/off switch in the menu bar of that tab) that would control whether that tab gets any CPU time for JavaScript and such. And have a setting in the options for whether tabs opened in the background get this defaulted to “on” or “off”. When researching something I will frequently go through search results, or a particularly fruitful page, and open a dozen or so interesting looking links as tabs in the background, to get to as my research progresses. Both Safari and Chrome will excitedly devote resources to those tabs long before I get to them, and then, once they do, I can’t get those resources back without closing the tab in question.
Repeat this over a handful of different things I’m researching, and now there’s 50 or so tabs, across a half dozen or so windows, that the browser is trying to keep fully active, and is slowing down my system to do so. But I don’t want that, I want all those tabs open, and grouped the way I’ve grouped them, and the windows arranged the way I’ve arranged them, but with the tabs sleeping until I get to them. The browser should serve my needs, not those of dozens of websites. Give me control over whether a given page is active - including the ability to shut off processing for a page if I wish - and give me a setting for whether to open new links “awake” or “asleep”. (It would also make sense to have an exception list, for pages/domains that one always wants to start in “awake” state - e.g. a Gmail user likely wants any page under “mail.google.com” to start up upon opening and remain active. And the toggle switch I speak of could be handled like the other optional buttons at the top of each browser window - the back button and such - that can be shown / hidden / rearranged at the user’s whim; it could be left hidden by default, and power users could set it to display.)
One thing that’s helpful in this regard, that Chrome has but Safari doesn’t, is a “Task Manager” window, that shows all open pages (grouped by the process running them) which can be sorted by their percent of CPU load. If Chrome spins up my fans, I can bring up its Task Manager window, sort by CPU, and if one or two processes are particularly bad, I can decide if I want to close the related tabs (possibly saving off their URLs first). Safari doesn’t even have this - if the browser starts spinning up the fans, I am left to guess which of those 50 tabs, across half a dozen windows, is the bad actor. This is infuriating.
But neither browser will let me put tabs to sleep, short of closing them. This puts me in the position of having to remember and/or record state information (before I close tabs that I want to come back to) in order to keep the browser from becoming overburdened - it’s supposed to be the other way around - the browser should be helping me remember details so that I don’t become overburdened with them. This is a substantial failing, and it could be adequately (if not ideally) addressed by giving me a toggle switch on each tab to control whether or not that tab is getting any CPU time - I don’t care how cool your page effects are, if I’m not going to get around to looking at your page until tomorrow, I don’t need all your JavaScript running today.
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