The Memory Saver Feature
Google Chrome is notorious for consuming massive amounts of RAM. To combat this, Google introduced a feature called “Memory Saver.” When enabled, Chrome constantly monitors your open tabs. If a tab is inactive for a certain period and sits in the background, Chrome automatically discards it from active memory. While this saves RAM, it means that when you finally click back to that background tab (perhaps an hour later), Chrome must automatically refresh and update the entire page from the server. If you were filling out a long form, watching a specific timestamp on a live feed, or reading a dynamically updated chat, this automatic background refresh instantly destroys your active session and resets the page.
Disabling Memory Saver Discarding
To protect your unsaved data and stop Google Chrome from automatically updating or refreshing background tabs by discarding them from memory, you must explicitly disable the Memory Saver feature.
Open Google Chrome. Click the three vertical dots in the top-right corner of the window and select Settings. In the left-hand navigation sidebar, click on Performance. Look at the very top of the main panel for the Memory Saver section. You will see a master toggle switch. If it is turned on (blue), Chrome is actively killing your background tabs. Click the toggle to turn it Off (grey). By disabling this, Chrome will now hold every single tab you open in active memory permanently, ensuring they never auto-refresh when you switch back to them, though this will significantly increase your overall RAM usage.