Chrome 110 automatically discards background tabs. Here’s how to stop it.

Attention everyone: Chrome will start doing something with your always-open tabs. Chrome version 110 is out now, and on Windows, macOS, and Linux, this version comes with a new “Memory Saver”feature that will be automatically enabled. We first wrote about it when it hit Chrome’s “Canary Channel”nightly build in December, but the feature is now available to everyone.

Chrome has a reputation for consuming RAM, and Google seems to think the best way to combat this is to automatically close your tabs when they’re “inactive”. Google’s explanation of this feature reads: “When a tab is deleted, its title and icon still appear in the tab strip, but the page itself disappears, just as if the tab were closed normally. If the user revisits this tab, the page will reload automatically.”Google says this method will reduce Chrome’s memory usage by “up to 40 percent “, which sounds great as long as it doesn’t break anything or cause users to lose their page state.

As stated on the support page, Google has several use cases excluded from this feature:

Some settings and actions on your computer may prevent the tab from being deactivated.

• Active audio or video (playback or calls)
• Screen demonstration
• Page Notifications
• Active Downloads
• Partially completed forms
• Connected devices (USB or Bluetooth)

You can see how it all works by entering “chrome://discards”into the address bar, which will bring up the developer UI to control the new tab removal feature. The “Cancel”tab will show you the status of all your tabs, and the “Actions”column on the right contains a “Urgent Delete”link allowing you to manually delete any tab for testing purposes. After browsing some of your favorite sites to see how they’re responding, I highly recommend checking out the Graph tab here (there is a gif in the gallery above), which is a process and tab association graph that animates and moves while you use Chromium.

You can try to guess the Chrome tab reset behavior on this page. Visible foreground tabs cannot be dismissed even manually – you have to click on some other tab, put a window in front of Chrome, or minimize Chrome to dismiss a tab. Presumably, the auto-reset function works the same way. Pages with severe unsaved state can be a real problem: if you dump a bunch of text in WordPress and try to close a tab with the normal close button, instead of closing you will get an unsaved changes popup asking if you want to leave the site and potentially saving you from losing heaps of work. If you use Chrome’s new tab deletion feature, Chrome will delete your unsaved text as if it were nothing. Some sites like Gmail

How to disable

The good news is that you can control all of this. Memory Saver consumer controls are located under “chrome://settings/performance”or, for the user interface, click menu, then “More Tools”, then “Performance”. You can disable this feature entirely, or add sites to a list called Always Keep These Sites Active. Google has detailed instructions on how exception parsing works on their support page, but it supports everything you’d expect, such as subdirectories, wildcards, and specific subdomains. Personally, I need to add an Ars Technica WordPress instance because the potential loss of unsaved article text is every writer’s nightmare.

Apart from the memory saver feature, this version of Chrome also comes with a “Power Saving”mode for laptops, where if you have a low battery it will limit the power consumption of tabs by lowering the video frame rate and scrolling. The controls for this feature will be on the same Performance tab.