The Sleeping Tabs
Windows 11’s default browser, Microsoft Edge, utilizes a performance feature called “Sleeping Tabs.” To conserve RAM and CPU cycles, Edge monitors your open tabs. If you haven’t looked at a specific tab for a set duration (like 2 hours), the browser puts it to sleep, suspending its active processes. The consequence is that when you finally click back to that sleeping tab, Edge must automatically refresh the entire web page to wake it up. If you were in the middle of writing a long forum post or tracking a live data feed, this automatic refresh will instantly destroy your unsaved work and reset the page state.
Exempting Critical Sites from Sleeping
To preserve your active web sessions and stop Windows 11 (via Edge) from automatically refreshing specific web pages when you switch back to them, you must add those websites to the Sleeping Tabs blocklist.
Open Microsoft Edge. Click the three horizontal dots in the top-right corner and select Settings. In the left-hand navigation sidebar, click on System and performance. Scroll down the main panel until you find the section labelled “Optimize Performance.” You will see the master toggle for “Save resources with sleeping tabs.” While you could turn it off entirely, it is much better for your system’s performance to use the whitelist. Look just below the toggle for the option Never put these sites to sleep and click the Add button. Type the root URL of the website you want to protect (e.g., `reddit.com` or `yourworkportal.com`) and click Add. Edge will now aggressively manage other tabs but leave your specified sites permanently awake and immune to automatic refreshing.