Prevent Chrome from messing up your tabs upon reload

One (but not the only) problem that I have with Google Chrome is that it tries to reload all tabs after restart. This has two consequences:

I have lots (50+) of tabs. Trying to load them all at once wastes my CPU and RAM.

Accessing some resources require re-authentication, so I am redirected to the auth/SSO page instead. Like 50 times. If I don’t re-auth quickly, the SSO session is no longer valid, and my SSO system fails to redirect me back to the original page. There are also many other reasons, why I may not be able to get the automatic redirect to the original page URL. Worse, Chrome doesn’t always correctly save the URL history when redirects are involved, nor does it offer proper session management. Basically, at this point my page is lost (searching history doesn’t help either).

In this super-quick post I will provide solutions to both of these annoyances.

First, let’s make Chrome stop trying to load tabs in the background. The solution was found here. Kudos to the author!

What we need is these two flags in chrome://flags in this configuration. They are pretty self-explanatory

Set these two flags as shown to prevent Chrome from loading tabs in the background upon startup

In addition, I can recommend a plugin that helps conserving Chrome CPU/RAM usage and adds some basic session management: The Great Suspender

With these two your tabs will stay where you are, and if you have SSO-protected resources you will not lose their URLs/context.

Summary

I was so happy with Firefox until Mozilla killed it with Quantum…

Advertisement