Enable Tab Freeze or Tab Suspend Feature in Google Chrome

This tutorial will help you in activating and enabling a brand new feature in Google Chrome web browser known as “Proactive Tab Freezing“. This new feature automatically unloads or suspends background tabs which haven’t been used for 5 minutes.

This new feature is not enabled by default and users need to manually enable it using a hidden preference/flag mentioned in this guide.

Tab Freeze feature is also known as Tab Suspend which was recently implemented in Mozilla Firefox web browser as well. We posted a tutorial to disable it if someone faces issues with this feature.

When you turn on Tab Freeze feature in Google Chrome web browser, it monitors all running tabs and if it finds that one or more tabs have not been clicked and used for 5 minutes, it automatically unloads or discards the tabs and their web pages from memory which saves CPU resources and RAM. This feature has been introduced to make Google Chrome light on system resources.

If you like the idea behind this new feature and want to try the feature in Google Chrome browser, following steps will help you:

1. Open Google Chrome web browser and type chrome://flags/ in addressbar and press Enter. It’ll open the advanced configuration page.

2. Now type freeze in the “Search flags” box.

It’ll directly go to following option:

3. To enable this feature, select Enabled for Tab Freeze option from the drop-down box.

You can also select other available options from the drop-down box which are as following:

• Enabled
• Enable Freeze – No Unfreeze
• Enable Freeze – Unfreeze 10 seconds every 15 minutes
• Disabled

4. Google Chrome will ask you to restart the browser. Click on “Relaunch now” button to restart Google Chrome.

That’s it. Now Google Chrome will automatically suspend or hibernate background tabs which are inactive for 5 or more minutes.

BONUS TIP:

You can visit chrome://discards/ page to check tabs status.

PS: If you decide to disable the feature, select “Default” option from the drop-down box and restart the browser.