The Discarded Data
Google Chrome is a notoriously memory-hungry browser. To combat this on systems with limited RAM, Chrome employs a feature called “Memory Saver” (formerly known as tab discarding). If you have many tabs open, Chrome will automatically suspend the tabs you haven’t looked at recently, freeing up their memory for active tasks. The problem arises when you click back to one of those suspended tabs: Chrome must automatically reload the entire page from the internet. If you were halfway through filling out a complex form or reading an article that shifts position on reload, this automatic refreshing destroys your progress.
Protecting Specific Tabs from Reloading
To preserve your active data and stop Google Chrome from automatically reloading specific pages when you switch back to them, you must exempt those sites from the Memory Saver feature.
Open Google Chrome. Click the three vertical dots in the top-right corner and select Settings. In the left-hand navigation menu, click on Performance. You will see the main toggle for Memory Saver. You could turn it off entirely, but this will drastically increase Chrome’s memory usage. Instead, it is better to whitelist specific sites. Look just below the main toggle for the section labelled Always keep these sites active. Click the Add button. In the pop-up box, type the core domain of the website you never want to reload (e.g., `google.com` or `yourcompany.com`). Click Add again. Chrome will now aggressively manage memory on other tabs, but will never suspend or auto-reload the sites on your whitelist.