Web-Facing Change PSA: Faster background freezing on Android

[Chromestatus]

Contact emails

mthi...@google.com

Specification

None

Summary

Shortens the time to freezing background pages (and associated workers) from 5 minutes to 1 minute on Android. See the original intent to ship for background: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/NKtuFxLsKgo/m/XmQganj9EAAJ. Android 15 has introduced a 1 minute background network restriction on apps, and faster background freezing aligns with this OS-level restriction which causes any network requests made by the site to fail after the 1 minute mark anyways.

Blink component

Blink>Scheduling

TAG review

None

TAG review status

Not applicable

Risks

Interoperability and Compatibility

None

Gecko: No signal

WebKit: No signal

Web developers: No signals

Other signals:

WebView application risks

Does this intent deprecate or change behavior of existing APIs, such that it has potentially high risk for Android WebView-based applications?

None

Debuggability

None

Will this feature be supported on all six Blink platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux, ChromeOS, Android, and Android WebView)?

No

Is this feature fully tested by web-platform-tests?

No

Flag name on about://flags

Finch feature name

stop-in-background

Rollout plan

(RARE) Experiment users ramp up over time

Requires code in //chrome?

False

Tracking bug

https://issues.chromium.org/issues/435623337

Estimated milestones

Shipping on Android

139

Anticipated spec changes

Open questions about a feature may be a source of future web compat or interop issues. Please list open issues (e.g. links to known github issues in the project for the feature specification) whose resolution may introduce web compat/interop risk (e.g., changing to naming or structure of the API in a non-backward-compatible way).

None

Link to entry on the Chrome Platform Status

https://chromestatus.com/feature/5386725031149568?gate=6256651732254720

This intent message was generated by Chrome Platform Status.

[Ben Kelly]

Can you clarify if this changes the default behavior in WebView?  Thanks.

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[Ben Kelly]

Thanks for the clarification!  No specific request for WebView here.  Just trying to understand if it might impact things.

On Tue, Aug 12, 2025 at 11:11 AM Michael Thiessen <mthi...@google.com> wrote:

The experiment is targeting only non-webview, non-desktop Android, so webview should be unaffected. I could target webview as well if there's desire for consistency but I expect that to be higher risk.

[Rick Byers]

Thanks Michael. I'm personally always surprised at how long a web page gets to run in the background on Android, so this SGTM. There's some web compat risk here so we'll have to keep an eye on feedback, but I agree this is really an OS-level heuristic and not something subject to our web-facing breaking change process. Thanks for the PSA!

Rick

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msgid/blink-dev/CAK7rkMiRhTQCijyzVjmLjn9_W_XHiX72NoeTkwj5q1Bqi47ccg%40mail.gmail.com.

[Michael Thiessen]

The experiment is targeting only non-webview, non-desktop Android, so webview should be unaffected. I could target webview as well if there's desire for consistency but I expect that to be higher risk.

On Tue, Aug 12, 2025 at 10:39 AM Ben Kelly <wande...@chromium.org> wrote: