
Click the “Show advanced settings” link to expand the menu, scroll to the bottom and uncheck “Continue running background apps when Google Chrome is closed”. Type “chrome://settings/” into the address bar. An alternative same setting can be found under advanced settings: Right click on it, and uncheck “Let Chrome run in the background”. To stop it from happening on Windows, find the Chrome icon in your system tray on the right-hand side of the screen (usually hidden under the little arrow). But in doing so it’s eating your laptop’s battery and hogging your computer’s resources. Google’s Hangouts chat app, for instance, needs Chrome to run all the time to work. That’s because Chrome can run, often hidden in your system tray on Windows or your Dock on MacOS in support of web apps. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The GuardianĮven once you’ve closed Chrome you might find it sticks around, consuming power unnecessarily. Stop Chrome and Chrome apps running in the background. Other tab suspender tools are also available on the Chrome store, should the Great Suspender not fit the bill, including those that can suspend a group of tabs and restore them as one complete session. It won’t suspend anything with active input, such as text chats or similar, while you can temporarily whitelist tabs, or permanently whitelist a whole domain so that your Guardian articles never get unloaded, for instance. All you have to do is click into the tab to reload it and continue where you left off. If you don’t use a tab for a few minutes, the Great Suspender will unload it, removing its workload on your computer but keeping the tab there ready to go again when you need it. The Great Suspender is the tool you need. Getting rid of tabs is a good start, but if you don’t want to change your usage, suspending tabs can be even better. One or two is OK, but when you end up with 20 or so sitting idle in your browser your battery pays the price. One of the best bits of the modern browser is the ability to have multiple tabs. The Great Suspender will unload the tabs you don’t need right that minute without losing the URL.
