01 Part 1 · Tab Manager

Tab Freezing

Suspend background tabs to save memory, with whitelists and automatic idle rules.

~6 min read 5 / 22

What freezing does

Freezing a tab calls Chrome's own tab-discard mechanism: the tab's network activity, scripts, and memory usage stop entirely, while its title, favicon, and URL stay exactly as they were in the tab strip. Clicking back into a frozen tab reloads it from scratch — you lose unsaved form input on that page, but you get the memory back in the meantime. Frozen tabs get a visual marker (a background tint plus a grayscale favicon) so you can tell at a glance which tabs are live and which are dormant.

Freezing manually

Right-click any tab for Freeze this tab, Freeze other tabs (everything except the one you're on), or Restore all tabs. These same actions are also available as global context-menu entries so you don't need the sidebar open.

Freezing automatically

Turn on auto-freeze and set an idle threshold (1–1440 minutes) — any background tab that's been untouched that long gets frozen without you having to do anything. Exclusions keep the important cases safe by default:

Pinned tabs are never auto-frozen.
Tabs currently playing audio are never auto-frozen.
The tab you're actively looking at is never auto-frozen.
An "online only" mode skips auto-freezing entirely while you're offline, so you don't discard the one tab you were about to retry.

The freeze whitelist

Add exact URLs, whole domains, or regex patterns to a whitelist to make sure specific sites are never auto-frozen — a webmail tab you're mid-draft in, a dashboard that needs to keep polling, a long-running upload. A built-in tester lets you check a URL against your whitelist before you rely on it.

When to reach for this If your browser tends to slow down after a few dozen tabs pile up over a long day, turn on auto-freeze with a modest idle threshold (30–60 minutes is a reasonable start) rather than manually freezing tabs one by one.