Google Chrome automatically discards unused tabs after a certain period of time when the memory is low, the Chromium team is now testing another variation for this. Freezing of eligible tabs that have been backgrounded for 5 minutes, the company offers this for checking behind the “Tab Freeze” flag in Chrome 79 Canary.
This feature reminds you about tab discarding/hibernation or The Great Suspender extension, Chome has already this feature built-in where it automatically unloads tabs when there isn’t sufficient memory and they’ll be loaded when you select them.
Mozilla too tried tab discarding feature in Firefox but disabled it later as it hasn’t worked to their expectations. Firefox not able to detect low memory conditions perfectly then, Mozilla is working to correct that.
Now the new “Proactive Tab freeze” feature can be enabled by visiting chrome://flags, you need to search for “free” to find it. The flag, apart from offering Enabled option, gives two other options: Enabled Freeze -No Unfreeze
Enabled Freeze -Unfreeze 10 seconds every 15 minutes.
If you select Enabled, tabs after 5 minutes of inactivity will be frozen.
If you select the third option, frozen tabs won’t unfreeze.
If you select the fourth option, frozen tabs get unfroze for 10 seconds every 15 minutes.
To see what’s happening, how is Chrome tackling freezing of tabs, visit chrome://discards page where you can see all tabs and load or freeze/discard/urgent discard individual tabs.
The chromium team in the associated bug provides a link to a design document that talks about “Priority boosting of Execution Contexts in Chrome”.
The doc says “Chrome doesn’t always allocate resources to right execution contexts (documents, workers, worklets) to provide the fastest and smoothest user experience”. The flag that Chrome is testing may address that.
