Trick Focus — Julien Fabbro

You switch tabs to check an email, and the video pauses, the game freezes, the chart stops refreshing. It is not your browser slowing down: it is the pages themselves detecting that they are no longer in the foreground and deciding, on their own, to suspend what they were doing.

Trick Focus stops them. The extension simulates browser focus, so the page carries on as if you were still looking at it, whether it is minimized or sitting in another tab.

In practice, YouTube, Twitch and other players stop lowering the quality or buffering the moment they move to the background. Video ads, for their part, no longer freeze their countdown just because you switched tabs: it keeps running in the background while you do something else, instead of holding you in front of the screen until it is over.

An idle game keeps making progress without having to stay on screen. Your crypto prices, stock tickers and analytics dashboards stay fed, with no dropped connection and no frozen chart waiting for you when you come back. And web apps that sign you out after a few idle minutes keep your session open.

You can switch the extension on for the current tab only, or pin a domain so that it starts by itself: after a reload, in a new tab, and even after a browser restart. Either way, one click undoes it, and nothing runs on a site you did not choose.

Everything happens on your machine. Trick Focus sits between the browser and the Page Visibility API, and nothing more: no browsing history, no personal data and no identifier is collected, stored or sent anywhere.

To get started, open the site you care about, switch Trick Focus on from its icon — the page reloads once — then change tabs. The site will carry on as if you had never left.