The Ghost Bandwidth
Modern web applications (like Gmail, Twitter, or Slack) are designed to function almost like native desktop programs. To achieve this, Google Chrome utilizes a feature called “Background Sync.” By default, if you close a tab while a web app is in the middle of sending an email, uploading an image, or downloading new chat messages, Chrome allows that specific website to continue executing code and consuming bandwidth in the background for a limited time to finish its task. While convenient, this allows websites to secretly eat your CPU and internet data after you explicitly tried to close them. If you demand absolute control over when a website stops running, you must disable background syncing.
How to Turn Off Background Sync
You can permanently revoke the ability of web apps to run ghost processes via the Site Settings.
- Open the Google Chrome desktop browser.
- Click the three vertical dots (⋮) in the top right corner and select Settings.
- In the left-hand sidebar, click on Privacy and security.
- In the main window, click on Site settings.
- Scroll down and click on Additional permissions to expand the menu.
- Click on Background sync.
- Under the “Default behavior” heading, click the radio button next to “Don’t allow closed sites to finish sending or receiving data.”
Immediate Termination
The change is instantaneous. Google Chrome will completely shut down the background execution pipeline. The next time you click the “X” on a tab to close a web application, the browser will instantly and violently terminate all active processes associated with that site. If an email is halfway through sending, it will fail. This guarantees that closing a tab absolutely stops all data consumption immediately.