How to disable background tab throttling in Chrome

Background tab throttling is the reason a page that updates every second suddenly updates once a minute after you leave it for a while.

How the throttling works

When a page becomes hidden, Chrome caps its timers. setTimeout and setInterval callbacks are bundled so they run at most about once per second. After the page has been hidden for five minutes, timers that keep re-scheduling themselves are bundled further and run about once per minute. requestAnimationFrame stops entirely, because nothing is being drawn.

We measured this in Chrome with a test page: a 100 ms timer ran ten times a second in front, about once a second in the background, and zero times in a 30-second window after five minutes hidden.

The browser-wide switches

Chrome can be started with switches such as --disable-background-timer-throttling. They exist for automated testing, they affect every tab and window, they have to be added to how Chrome is launched, and they cost battery everywhere. Most people should not use them.

Per-tab instead

TabRevive turns throttling off only for the tabs you protect. While such a tab is hidden, its timers and animation frames are driven by the extension at full speed, which Chrome doesn’t throttle. When you come back, the page’s own timers take over again.

If you protect many heavy tabs and want to save power, you can switch off Aggressive Mode in the settings: the tabs still stay visible to the page and won’t be discarded, but their timers slow down like normal.