Why an idle game stops when the tab is in the background

What the browser does with the tab you are not looking at

Modern browsers are built to save battery and memory. For a regular website that is great. For an idle game, which exists precisely to run while you are not watching, it is the opposite. When the page becomes hidden — a background tab, a minimized window and, on Windows, even a window completely covered by others — four things happen:

1. Animations stop. The page no longer gets frames to draw. A game that runs its logic together with the drawing stops along with it.
2. Timers get limited. In a hidden tab, whatever the page schedules to run frequently runs at most once per second. After a few minutes hidden and silent, Chrome tightens further and batches these wake-ups into roughly one per minute.
3. The tab can be discarded. With Memory Saver on (Chrome) or sleeping tabs (Edge), a tab left unused for a long time is unloaded. When you come back, it opens from scratch, as if you had just arrived.
4. On battery, everything gets tighter. Energy Saver cuts back even more on what runs in the background when the laptop is unplugged.

A game that calculates everything on the server keeps progressing anyway. A game that needs the page open — many browser idle games, including the auto-hunt ones — slows down, disconnects or stops.

How to tell if this is the problem

• Your XP or loot per hour drops when you minimize and goes back to normal with the window on screen.
• The hunt seems "frozen" and jumps ahead when you switch back to the tab.
• You come back and the page is reloading from scratch, or asking you to log in.
• The account always disconnects overnight, when nobody is watching.

How to soften it in Chrome and Edge

• Take the game out of the memory saver. In Chrome, under Settings › Performance, add the game's address to the list of sites that always stay active. In Edge, under Settings › System and performance, add the site to the list of sites that never go to sleep.
• Keep the game in its own visible window. A background tab and a minimized window count as hidden. A separate window, even a small one in a corner of the screen, suffers much less.
• Do not leave the window covered. On Windows, Chrome notices when the window is completely hidden behind others and starts treating it as hidden.
• Stay plugged in or turn off Energy Saver while you farm.
• Do not let the PC go to sleep. In Windows Settings › System › Power, set sleep to "Never" when plugged in. With the PC asleep, nothing runs.

Playing muted audio in the tab and extensions that "keep the tab active" do ease the timers, but they do not bring the animations back and tend to break after a browser update.

The limits of a regular browser

Even with everything tuned, the main issue remains: the window has to stay visible on screen. With two, three or four accounts, that becomes a wall of windows, each in a different browser profile. And nobody tells you when one of them goes down: you find out hours later.

How IdleDeck solves it

IdleDeck is a Windows browser made for idle games. Each account runs in its own page that is not treated as hidden: it keeps drawing and its timers run at normal speed in the background, on the Dashboard, with the window minimized or in the tray — even after reloading on its own in the middle of the night. On top of that:

• all accounts in the same window, each with its own login;
• it notices a dropped connection, a page that will not load and a lost internet connection and alerts you (Windows notification, sound, taskbar badge or Discord); a page that goes down is reloaded on its own, and so is a dropped game connection, if you turn that option on;
• it does not play for you: no bot, no macro, no auto-click.