Disabling Chrome’s Automatic Tab Discarding and Using the Tab Wrangler Extension

Starting with Chrome version 48, the browser automatically discards tabs that have been inactive for a long time to save memory; when you click a discarded tab, Chrome refreshes the page to reactivate it.

The author’s workflow with the BlueLake design tool involves deep navigation hierarchies, so when Chrome discards and refreshes the page, the view jumps back to the first directory, causing inconvenience.

To prevent a specific page from being discarded, open chrome://discards , locate the page under the Auto Discardable column, click the [Toggle] button until an X appears, which disables automatic discarding for that tab.

Because toggling each tab is time‑consuming when many tabs are open, the author recommends installing the Disable automatic tab discarding extension, which automatically disables discarding for all opened tabs without further configuration.

Note that if system memory becomes critically low, Chrome may still discard tabs despite the extension.

For automatically closing idle tabs, the author suggests the Tab Wrangler extension. After disabling discarding, many open tabs can consume memory, and Tab Wrangler can close tabs that have been inactive for a configurable period.

In Tab Wrangler’s options page, set the “Close inactive tabs if over:” field (the first input is minutes, the second is seconds); for example, setting it to 60 minutes will close tabs that have been idle for an hour. Use the “Auto lock” section to add exclusion rules for URLs you do not want closed, such as the BlueLake site, by specifying a matching string (preferably a domain) in the rule.

The extension offers additional configurable features; download links for both extensions are provided in the original article.