Hi, I'm Anton, building TabVitals. Which Chrome tabs should never sleep?
Hi Product Hunt — I'm Anton, the maker of TabVitals for desktop Chrome on Mac and Windows.
I work with lots of open tabs and use TabVitals to free RAM without closing them. It combines a heavy-tab scanner, manual tab sleep and Auto-suspend, plus tools for fixing one site's cached data, removing its history and opening the current page in Incognito.
One design choice I'd like to discuss: saving memory should fit the way people work. A background tab isn't always an unimportant tab.
TabVitals protects active, pinned and audio-playing tabs, and you can add important sites to Always Awake. Auto-suspend runs a scan and sleeps eligible tabs, then repeats every 30 minutes, 1 hour or 2 hours. Sleeping pages reload when you return, so unfinished work needs to stay awake.
I'd love feedback from people who keep lots of tabs open:
• Which sites must keep working in the background in your workflow?
• Would you choose periodic Auto-suspend or decide what sleeps manually? Why?
You can try it here: https://tabvitals.com/
Tell me about the workflow that makes managing your tabs difficult, not just your tab count.
Replies
Welcome Anton! A case you might not have on the list yet: tabs an AI agent is driving. I let a coding agent work in my Chrome through an extension, it opens its own tabs and acts in them, and if one of those slept while the agent was mid task, it would come back to a reloaded page and lose its place. They're not pinned or playing audio, so by your rules they'd look idle. Others for me: the store consoles, where a half filled form of release notes in many languages is exactly the unfinished work you mention, and the local dev server tab. I'd choose the automatic sleep, but with a rule like "never sleep a tab with unsaved form input" rather than relying on me to remember Always Awake.