Chrome Memory Saver: keep the sites you need active

Memory Saver is the reason a background tab sometimes comes back as a blank page that has to reload. It's also, most of the time, a good thing — it keeps a hundred-tab session from eating all your RAM. The trick is telling it about the handful of sites where unloading actually hurts.

What Memory Saver does

When it decides a background tab has been inactive long enough, Memory Saver unloads the page and keeps only the tab strip entry. Clicking the tab reloads the page from scratch. Depending on your Chrome version you may also see settings for how aggressive it should be. For most tabs the reload costs you nothing; for a half-filled form, a running job, or a session that logs you out, it costs you the work.

Add sites to the exception list

Open chrome://settings/performance. Under Memory Saver you'll find "Always keep these sites active". Add the site — you can match a whole domain — and Memory Saver stops unloading its tabs. Done. For a fixed set of sites you never want reloaded, this native list is the right first move, and it costs nothing to set up.

Where the exception list falls short

It only covers discarding. Chrome separately freezes background tabs — the page stays in memory but stops running. A site on the exception list can still have its timers throttled and its scripts paused, so the "keep it active" promise is thinner than it sounds. If your real goal is a tab that keeps working in the background, see keeping background tabs awake.

It's a list you maintain by hand. Every new site means another trip into settings, and stale entries pile up quietly.

It gives you no feedback. Nothing on the tab tells you whether protection applied. You find out the way you found out about the problem: by coming back to a page that did or didn't survive.

One switch, both mechanisms, visible state

FreezeFence covers the full path — freezing and discarding — from a single switch on the extension icon, and shows a green check while protection is live. Flip it on the site you care about and you're done; flip it off and protection ends, with a short window to undo. Memory Saver keeps doing its job everywhere else, which is exactly how it should be.