How to stop Chrome from discarding background tabs

You switch back to a tab you left open an hour ago and the page is gone — a pale snapshot for a second, then a full reload. Scroll position lost, form fields blank, whatever the page was doing dead. That reload means Chrome discarded the tab.

What tab discarding is

Chrome frees memory by unloading tabs you haven't looked at in a while. The tab stays in the tab strip with its title and icon, but the page itself is removed from memory. When you click it again, Chrome loads it from scratch, as if you had just typed the address. In recent versions this is driven by Memory Saver, which is usually enabled by default.

Discarding is the aggressive end of a spectrum. Before a tab gets discarded, Chrome may first freeze it — the page stays in memory but stops running. If your problem is music stopping or an upload stalling rather than a blank reload, see keeping background tabs awake instead.

Option 1: turn Memory Saver off

Open chrome://settings/performance and switch Memory Saver off. No tab gets discarded to save memory anymore. The trade-off is real, though: with many tabs open, Chrome's memory use grows unchecked, and on a low-RAM machine that slows everything down. You're trading a targeted problem for a global one.

Option 2: add sites to the exception list

On the same settings page, "Always keep these sites active" lets you list sites Memory Saver should leave alone. This is the better native option — Memory Saver keeps working everywhere else. Its limits: the list only covers Memory Saver's discarding (frozen tabs are a separate mechanism), you maintain it by hand, and nothing on screen tells you whether a given tab is actually protected right now.

Option 3: the hidden discards page

chrome://discards lists every open tab with an "Auto Discardable" toggle per tab. Flipping it off stops Chrome from auto-discarding that tab. It works, but it's an internal page with no guarantees: the setting doesn't survive the tab being closed, and you have to dig the page out every time.

Option 4: protect the site with one switch

FreezeFence wraps this into a single switch. Open the page you care about, click the icon, flip the switch — the site is now protected from both discarding and freezing, and a green check on the toolbar icon shows the protection is live. The switch protects the whole site persistently; a keyboard shortcut gives the current tab temporary protection without any prompt. When something fights back — a revoked permission, severe memory pressure — the icon says so instead of pretending all is well.