How to keep a tab active in Chrome

If you have ever come back to a dashboard that stopped refreshing, a chat that marked you as away, or a game that paused itself, the tab was not broken. Chrome was saving resources, and the page noticed you had left.

What Chrome does to background tabs

The moment a tab is no longer in front, Chrome tells the page it is hidden. Pages can read that through the Page Visibility API, and plenty of them pause on purpose when they see it.

Chrome also limits how often the page’s timers can run: about once a second while hidden, and after five minutes, once a minute for timers that keep scheduling each other. Animations driven by requestAnimationFrame stop completely.

Finally, if memory runs low, Chrome may discard the tab. It stays in your tab strip, but the page is unloaded and reloads when you click it.

What Chrome’s own settings can do

Under Settings → Performance, Chrome has a list of sites to always keep active. Sites on that list are not discarded by Memory Saver. That is worth doing for anything you never want reloaded.

It does not change the rest: the page still learns it is hidden, and its timers are still throttled. So a site that pauses or logs you out when you switch tabs keeps doing exactly that.

Keeping a tab fully active

TabRevive covers all three. For a tab you protect, the page keeps seeing itself as visible and focused, its timers and animations run at full speed, and Chrome won’t discard it. Every other tab keeps behaving normally, so you only pay for the tabs that need it.

Click the TabRevive icon on the tab and choose Make Always Active, or Always keep this site active to cover every tab on that site.