How to Completely Disable ‘Tab Discarding’ (Auto-Sleeping Tabs) in Google Chrome

Google Chrome is notorious for consuming massive amounts of RAM. To combat this, Google introduced an aggressive background memory management feature called “Memory Saver” (internally known as Tab Discarding). If you leave a tab open but inactive for a certain period, Chrome will silently “discard” it from your computer’s active memory. The tab remains visible at the top of your screen, but the actual webpage is gone. When you finally click back to that tab, Chrome is forced to reload the entire page from scratch.

While this is great for laptops with limited memory, it is incredibly destructive if you are actively working in web applications. If you are halfway through filling out a massive, unsaved web form, or monitoring a live data dashboard on a secondary monitor, Chrome’s Memory Saver might silently kill the tab, completely destroying your unsaved work or freezing your data feed. If you have plenty of RAM (16GB or more) and want your background tabs to remain fully active forever, you must completely disable Tab Discarding.

Disabling Memory Saver via Chrome Settings

The easiest way to stop this aggressive RAM management is to turn off the overarching Memory Saver feature in Chrome’s performance settings.

1. Open the Google Chrome web browser.
2. Look at the top-right corner of the window and click the three vertical dots (the menu button).
3. Select Settings from the dropdown menu.
4. In the left-hand navigation sidebar, click on Performance.
5. Look for the section labelled Memory Saver (or “Memory”).
6. You will see a toggle switch next to “Memory Saver.” Click it to turn it Off.

Allowing Specific Websites to Bypass Tab Discarding

If you want to leave Memory Saver turned on to save RAM, but absolutely must ensure that one specific website (like your email or a specific web app) is never put to sleep, you can add it to an exclusion list.

1. Navigate to the same Performance settings page described above.
2. Ensure the Memory Saver toggle is turned On.
3. Directly beneath that toggle, you will see a section labelled Always keep these sites active.
4. Click the Add button.
5. Type the exact URL of the website you want to protect (e.g., app.slack.com or mail.google.com) and click Add.

Once disabled (or once your critical sites are whitelisted), Chrome will stop interfering with your open tabs. A webpage will remain fully rendered, active, and loaded in your system memory until the exact moment you explicitly choose to close the tab yourself.