How to stop Chrome tabs from sleeping

“Sleeping” covers two different things in Chrome, and they need different fixes.

Memory Saver: tabs get unloaded

With Memory Saver on, Chrome frees memory by discarding tabs you haven’t used for a while. The tab stays in the strip, but when you return the page reloads from scratch. Anything you hadn’t saved, and any place in a video or a long form, is gone.

You can add sites to the always-active list under Settings → Performance, or turn Memory Saver off entirely. The list works per site, not per tab.

Background throttling: tabs slow down

Even when a tab is not unloaded, Chrome throttles it once it is hidden. Timers run about once a second, and once a minute after five minutes. Animations stop. For most pages that’s fine. For live dashboards, uploads, timers or games it means the tab is effectively asleep.

There is no setting for this. Chrome has command-line switches that turn throttling off, but they apply to every tab in the browser and are meant for testing.

Keeping chosen tabs open and awake

TabRevive handles both for the tabs you pick: it tells Chrome not to discard them, and keeps their timers and animations running at full speed while they are in the background. It also keeps the page from seeing that you switched away, which stops sites that pause themselves when hidden.

One thing no extension can override: if Energy Saver freezes a tab, nothing runs in it until you return.