Chrome For Android Will Soon Prevent Important Inactive Tabs From Being Purged
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Summary
- Chrome for Android is getting an update to prioritize background tabs containing user edits (like filled forms and drafts), reducing the risk of them being prematurely closed by Android’s memory management.
- This feature is currently live in the Chrome Canary build (version 137) and can be enabled through specific flags, with a likely arrival in the stable channel around mid-May 2025.
- By giving these tabs higher memory priority, Chrome aims to prevent data loss that could occur when Android’s Low Memory Killer Daemon (LMKD) terminates less essential processes under memory pressure.
Losing essential data to background Chrome tabs on your Android device could soon be a thing of the past.
For reference, on Chrome on Android, inactive tabs are often susceptible to automatically being discarded if they haven’t been visited for an extended duration. The same can also happen in memory-constrained situations.
Related
Said tabs aren’t completely discarded — they’re simply moved to the ‘inactive tab folder,’ and can easily be restored. This works fine when that inactive tab was a news article or a static webpage that you were browsing. However, if the tab that went inactive contained user edits — filled out forms or drafts, for example, Chrome doesn’t save the fields that you had populated.
This isn’t a concern in most situations, considering that you won’t leave tabs with important drafts inactive for extended durations. However, in the case that you do forget about important tabs, Chrome Android’s new higher memory priority for background tabs will keep your populated fields safe.
Expect the feature to arrive in May
Credible Chrome analyst @Leopeva64 highlighted that Google was working on ‘protected tab memory priority’ for Chrome on Android back in March. The patch was merged with Chrome Canary earlier this week, and is now fully functional in the experimental version of Google Chrome. For reference, the current Chrome Canary build is Chrome 137, which should hit the stable channel around mid-May.
Once available, Android devices will allocate higher memory priority to background Chrome tabs, preventing Android’s Low Memory Killer Daemon (LMKD) from terminating them when it’s crunch time.
For users that don’t want to until Chrome 137 hits stable, the feature is available to try out in Canary by enabling these two flags:
- Enable protected tab for Android (ensures that renderer processes for protected tabs will be killed after other discard-eligible tabs. Requires #process-rank-policy-android to also be enabled).
- Enable performance manager rank policy for Android (Enables performance manager ranking policy to update memory priority of renderer processes).
