This is a Chrome extension designed to do 2 things:
- Reload specific tabs at some interval (30 seconds or more)
- Disable Chrome recent-ish, memory-freeing "sleeping"/"discarding" behavior for specific tabs
Regarding reloading: Reloading is a means of refreshing server-based web pages to check for changes, and also keeps a timed session alive. Both can be useful. There are plenty of extensions out there that do this. Mostly, this is meant to be minimal and trustworthy - source code is public and bare-bones. Also, just wanted to do it.
For "sleeping"/"discarding"-killing: Chrome has, in the last few years, implemented a mechanism to free up memory by making less-recently-used tabs dormant, which chucks all the UI state out. This can be annoying for partially-filled web forms, pages only accessible on VPN, etc. This lets you disable that function for a particular tab, so you can let the state hang out until you come back to it.
Installation currently is via chrome://extensions and enabling "Developer mode", then drag the extension folder to the
extension tab or click the "Load unpacked".
This does not yet have persistent configuration options. Planned options are fairly limited - default reload time, for example.