I've heard a rumor that this is intentional so it refreshes Adsense so Google makes more money. I'd rather have a slow computer than one that basically only lets me have 1 active tab at a time. I've lost Twitter threads because of this I've had to rewrite emails because the tab reloaded before it saved a draft. But it's still happening with levels of regularity. I emptied my cache and turned it off and back on (why don't Chromebooks have an actual "restart" function?) and that kinda fixed the issue. It's like it was punishing me for daring to multitask. I understand this being a memory saver with inactive tabs, but it was reloading the exact second I switched tabs. Realizing what was up I did some experimenting and switched tabs a few times. I hit the YT tab again and the video refreshed and started over. Suddenly, the audio on the video stopped. I was watching a video and minimized it to check another tab. I finally figured out that tabs were reloading when it got very, very bad. Also, I was watching a 90ish minute video in chunks, but it kept restarting every time I went back to it.
Sometimes, when I have the Chromebook in the living room and open it up real quick to check Twitter or find out how to do something in a game, the video I left off on would start playing the moment the screen warmed up. Since we lost our Hulu account I've been focusing on YouTube. I keep my Chromebook floating around the apartment and so I can watch videos while doing the dishes or folding laundry. I started noticing the problem with YouTube.
I guess this is a "feature" designed to save memory but it's quickly becoming a "problem" that has me unable to use my computer for anything. To elaborate: Google Chrome basically closes out of inactive tabs and completely reloads them when you click back over to them. I've done some research on this issue and have found the "Auto discarding experiment" solution like 50 times. I am on a Samsung Chromebook and I am pretty sure everything is up to date.