API to hibernate tabs?

[Nathan Pierce]

I'm curious if anyone knows of a way for chrome extensions with tab access to hibernate them? I can store state in my extension, remove tabs, and then restore them when the user wants, but I was hoping chrome could do this natively.

[wOxxOm]

There's chrome.tabs.discard

[Nathan Pierce]

Perfect! thanks!

[Nathan Pierce]

Do you happen to know how to resume the tab? I tried to update with active: true, but that doesn't seem to work.

[wOxxOm]

Judging by the description it's not really hibernation, it's essentially like task killing so nothing remains except an entry in the tab strip. It mentions reloading which probably means you can also do it via chrome.tabs.reload()

[ONLYHUMN]

Yep, reload works... Yet, other methods under chrome.tabs seem to claim they can't find the tabID after it's discarded... lol

[Belly King]

Hi, does chrome.tabs.reload  actually work? Say I have a tab with id 123, when this tab is discarded, calling chrome.tabs.reload(123) does not work for me...I get tab id does not exist error.

I am building an extension to manage tabs. If the tab discarded, I cannot find a way to update the discarded one with new tab id...

I listen to the  chrome.tabs.onUpdated  event. When tab(id=123) is discarded it is like this:

chrome.tabs.onUpdated: tabId: 456, tabChangeInfo:{ discarded: true, status: "unloaded" }

This is no way for me to know that tab 456 is actually linked to tab 123.

[kg_17]

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=910968

The id of a tab changes when a tab is discarded.  You can listen to chrome.tabs.onReplaced to get the new id.

Also, in case you are not aware, chrome.tabs.reload loads an up-to-date version of a page.  Form data, page position, etc are lost when a discarded tab is reloaded.  However, if a discarded tab is activated, the tab is restored properly.