Does/Will Chromium implement the "sleeping tabs" concept like Microsoft Edge?

[Ryan C.]

Hi,

I just saw that Microsoft Edge recently introduced their native feature called "sleeping tabs", which is like "The Great Suspender" Chrome add-on.  Do you know if Chromium will likely include a feature like this?  I think this would be a really great idea to implement natively too.

Thanks!

Ryan

[Joe Mason]

Rather than suspending background tabs entirely, we're focusing on throttling them to assign them less resources: https://blog.chromium.org/2020/11/tab-throttling-and-more-performance.html

This gives most of the benefits of suspending, but with much less risk of breaking sites. We've experimented with suspending in M79 (we called it "tab freezing") but found a lot of corner cases of sites that expected to keep running in the background (eg. chat apps that want to give notice on incoming messages) - generally these sites are coded in a non-optimal way but we decided to take an approach that has less compatibility risk, while it looks like Microsoft has decided to use UI to show the user which tabs are asleep and let them report breakages.

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[Ryan C.]

Hi Joe,

Sounds good!  Thanks so much for the blog link and explanation!

Ryan