How to Stop Chrome from Reloading When You Switch Tabs

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When you have a lot of tabs open, Chrome can be really slow. The situation is even worse when you change tabs and have to wait while the browser downloads the entire page from the Internet. Now, just imagine that you are looking through several tabs to find the one you want and now they all have to reload just because you clicked on them! 

By default, if it's using a lot of memory, Chrome purges the contents of some background tabs from RAM to conserve system resources.  When you click back onto those tabs, the browser has to reload them because they have been erased from memory. Fortunately, you can disable this purge and reload process in a few simple steps.

1. Navigate to chrome://flags/#automatic-tab-discarding.

2. Set Automatic tab discarding to Disabled.

You may also want to change the setting for Offline Auto-Reload Mode to Disabled. That feature causes Chrome to automatically load pages that failed to load because of a bad or non-existent Internet connection. However, by the time you get a better Internet connection, you may not even be interested in seeing those pages anymore.

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Avram Piltch
Avram Piltch
Online Editorial Director
The official Geeks Geek, as his weekly column is titled, Avram Piltch has guided the editorial and production of Laptopmag.com since 2007. With his technical knowledge and passion for testing, Avram programmed several of LAPTOP's real-world benchmarks, including the LAPTOP Battery Test. He holds a master's degree in English from NYU.