I've had the experience of keyboards going faulty and perpetually pressing keys for me.

If the circuitry under your F5 key (or perhaps a ctrl-R combo) is dirty, compressed, or otherwise problematic, it might explain rapid refresh.

You do have a tough problem. <sigh>

One suggestion is to turn off 'prerendering' of webpages, which is a feature intended to speed up page loading but can cause other problems:

Go to settings in Chrome and paste this into the search box:

(The option used to be called Predict network actions to improve page load performance).

If it's on, disable it. (You can also check to see if that setting exists in Edge. It might use the prior name if it's there.)


Another cited possibility is that Chrome is fiddling around with the webpages to reduce their memory draw, when it thinks that memory is running low. They refer to this as 'discarding' a tab, although it doesn't close the page but rather, refreshes it. This is a so-called experimental feature but it may be turned on by default.

You can check if it's 'discarding' pages by pasting chrome://discards/ into the address bar, after you've been in a session for awhile. To just make sure that the option is off, first paste into the address bar. Then paste into the search box on the flags page. Change the setting from 'default' to 'disabled'.

FWIW While it might seem intuitive for the experimental products to always be 'off' unless you turn them on, that isn't always the case with Chrome. I also use a Chromebook, and when they update the OS, they occasionally introduce something annoying into the system. At one point they removed the physical scroll bar from the right side of the browser, leaving only the mouse wheel or touch-pad as a way of scrolling down a page. On very long pages, I personally like being able to drag the the scroll bar to navigate it, so once I learned the cause, I turned it off it chrome://flags.

Another browser option to consider is Opera, which has been around for a long time. Like many browsers these days, it is based on the chromium open source code which is the source for the Google chrome browser.

Last edited Wed Mar 7, 2018, 11:35 AM - Edit history (28)

ON EDIT: Am going to log the dates of Restarts here instead of kicking the thread with new posts. Today/01-10, I'm guessing this is a Windows problem, not a browser problem

I checked into Edge & didn't find those words & it has no Search in Settings. But to clarify, the Auto Refresh is my problem, and it has only happened in Chrome once since I started using Chrome 01-06-18 a couple of days ago. So, I'm guessing that it might fit in the category of "other problems".

01-09-18 - Had an Auto Refresh about 15 minutes into session, yes in Chrome, with the Disabled predict-load. Will log here all the Auto Refresh(s).

01-10-18 - Auto Refresh about 10 minutes into session. So far it only happens once per (day/event), not like an article in Google about people having CONTINUOUS restarts and losing work. In Chrome when the Restart is over, it goes to Google Search (not my home page, but has a popup saying Chrome closed (incorrectly) and asking whether I want to go to my home page or whether restoring last page viewed wanted.

01-13-18 - Auto Refresh about 10 minutes into session. Have been selecting Restore Pages, should I be?

01-15-18 - A/R about 15 minutes into session. Doesn't matter what site it's in. This time had just opened g-mail. Looks like it happens every other day or so.

01-16-18 - A/R 45 minutes into session. So far it happens once during day, only in the first session of the day. This time chose the "Open start pages" instead of "restore pages".

01-17-18 - A/R, o.k., the weirdest yet - *IMMEDIATELY* after the first Start of the day, it went straight to A/R. Power, Login, pause, A/R, (2nd/AR) Login.

01-19-18 - A/R about 15 min into the SECOND Start of the day. All previous ones have been in the FIRST Start of the day.

01-21-18 - A/R about 10 minutes into the first Start of the day.

01-23-18 - A/R *IMMEDIATELY* after the Start, an evening session after a couple of brief sessions earlier in the day.

01-26-18 - A/R about 15 minutes into the second Start of the day.

01-27-18 - A/R at the very beginning of evening session, right after the login.

01-28-18 - A/R again at the very beginning, right after the login, first session of the day.

01-29-18 - A/R at the very beginning, right after the login. Looks like settling into daily thing. Like a double login.

01-29-18 - Same day, evening session, right after the login. Apparently a constant.

01-31-18 - About 20 minutes into first session.

01-31-18 - Immediately following login, like a double login, 2nd session.

*********Almost daily occurrences in this log-gap/here, just didn't log them in; usually the 15 minutes types.

02-08-18 - An hour into the the first session. First time for the HOUR delay.

02-11-18 - Less than 5 minutes into first session. Another thing to note: Sometimes when the A/R is soon-upon the first powering-on, the Windows fanfare music plays. It never plays with manual power-on.

02-12-18 - 20 min. into 2nd session. Windows fanfare when it did its thing.

02-19-18 - 2 1/2 hours into first session. Windows fanfare.

03-07-18 - about 10 minutes into the first session. Have slacked off logging here, but it has continued fairly much on a daily basis.