Guide on How to stop your browser from refreshing/reloading/freezing the game tab

Browsers nowadays are built to save power and resources by sleeping the tabs that are not actively in use.
This can cause issues for games like TSO because those use a lot of resources even if its not active because it has to send and receive data to display up to date info.

Here I am showing you how to disable this behavior. This should help your game be more stable, however changing these settings will disable the power saving and data saving features! Keep that in mind. Of course all of these are reversible but if youre playing on a data plan, this might increase it significantly.

Now. The first setting we need to change is the browser's power saving feature, which limits javascript timers that run in background. These are code timers not some sort of a clock. Huge majority of websites use Javascript. Your browser knows how to read 3(usually) programming languages that make up the web sites you visit: HTML, CSS, Javascript. HTML is the framework. CSS is the styling, everything visual from colors,position to animations. Javascript is the code that makes everything dynamic and alive and can change HTML and CSS and other Javascript. Javascript has NOTHING to do with Java. Not related at all. People get this confused. It was named Javascript because Java was already popular at the time and they wanted to ride on their hype... It worked and still gets people confused.

Anyways, Javascript uses timers to execute code after some time has passed. Either once or repeatably. Your browser runs them actively when you your page is active - it is currently displayed on your screen. When your page is inactive, your browser limits the number of timers that the website is able to execute. Heavily slowing down the website which saves your power and data.

To disable this behavior you need the change flags in your browser settings. Flags are basically settings but still considered experimental. Dont think this setting specifically will affect your browser's stability in any way but you can always come back to the flags to disable/reset it.
Flags can be changed on a hidden page called chrome://flags/ on Google Chrome or edge://flags/ on Microsoft Edge. You use this link as any other links. All chromium based browser should be able to use chrome://flags/. On other browsers the page is in a different form and the setting has a different name.

After opening the flags page, search for "Throttle Javascript timers in background" and set it to disabled. It will ask you to restart your browser after you change it.

The next step is to stop the browser from making your tab falling asleep. Open TSO on a tab, then on another tab open chrome://discards/ or edge://discards/ Find tabs you dont want to be falling asleep and under the column Auto Discardable, click on Toggle until and X is displayed.

Both of these changes are reversible. Just repeat the steps and select the opposite value.

Some browsers like Edge or Opera have additional sleeping tab features that do similar things. You can usually find them under Settings. Can be called Sleeping Tabs or "Snooze inactive tabs to save memory" etc.

There are also plugins/extensions that help with making the browser stop snoozing certain tabs. I made this post to let people know of these features and that they may affect the game and other websites you visit. There are tons of articles about this and you can read and discover more on your own. Websites themselves can also limit the amount of data they send to you if they detect that the tab is inactive. Youtube and Twitch are known for doing this. They save a lot of money doing that. Of course you can download extensions for working around that as well.

One last work around is to keep the background music enabled. Tabs that have sound being played should be excluded from throttled and sleeping tabs.

Hope this helped someone. Good luck

so far this is an awesome change on vivaldi - haven't had a refresh yet and the adventure I am doing is a lot smoother. why would they program this game in a way the standard browser settings would work though? on my island itself, I am still getting zone refreshes and freezing, although it doesn't appear to be as bad.

I only did the trottle javascript part though

lol and as I when back to my game from writing this, my game froze and I had a zone refresh - I was pretty sure vivaldi was putting my tabs to sleep though, I noticed I couldn't do as much of that as with firefox.

You need both. It will keep freezing though. Thats bad programming. This helps with freezes caused by your browser limiting javascript. They still need fix a lot of issues with the game.

I have tried all browsers I have and came up after searching for Throttle Javascript timers in background no thing avaialable

I guess it got removed as a flag then or its fully implemented. They change them with updates. However there are many flags there. You can change a lot of things. Also, Discards is a fully implemented feature on Chromium based browsers so it should work without issues. Sadly throttling is a feature of browsers and you usually cannot touch it. The game/web developers have to make sure it doesnt become inactive and get throttled via code. One way to work around it is to enable background sound. Browsers usually do not throttle tabs with playing sound.