Why though? I run Chrome on my decently powered laptop and most of the time I am connected to AC power. I want the machine to run as close to full potential as possible. This is not a mobile phone that needs to preserve battery by killing every background process. It's frustrating because no other browser matches chrome in smoothness and bug-free-ness, so I have no option but to tolerate the trademark anti-user behavior from google.
I run Chrome on a decently-powered desktop, and too many tabs can still kill it.
This is a good default; too many websites are built under the assumption that they're the only thing open and they have infinite resources to burn. Granted, I'd like to see more configuration options before this hits primetime, but I think it's going in the right direction to force some discipline on pages if the developers don't code it in (especially since there are events to tell when you've gone background).
"Kill"? Does your desktop stop responding and show a BSOD? How many tabs do you have open when that happens?
I don't know how heavily people use their Chrome but for me, ~50-100 tabs across ~5 windows across 3-4 virtual desktops seems to not hinder my laptop at all. It's very responsive and no crashes. To be honest I've never seen a system getting "kill"ed due to too many tabs.
My usage does not involve many video/audio tabs though. It's mostly lots of text pages and the usual mailboxes etc.
I think browsers should follow a similar paradigm for background tabs as the OS follows for background apps, ie, both have an equal share on resources unless foreground apps start slowing down due to background activity.
Kill performance. It's 2017; if you're running Win10, BSODs nowadays almost always mean you have a legitimate hardware failure or you're actually working on developing drivers. The OS has gotten very robust against the kinds of crap application-level software can pull to crash the OS.
It is not yet bullet-proof against a process deciding that it deserves all of your CPU and so much RAM that the disk cache needs to thrash to support it.
Firefox y u sux so much?