Exclude sites from suspend

Not every tab wants to be discarded. A music tab, a video call, a real-time dashboard — if Safari drops it, you lose state or audio. TabControl lets you build a per-site deny list so those tabs are never touched.

Good candidates for the deny list:

• Streaming audio — music services keep playing in a background tab, but only while the tab is alive.
• Video calls — Google Meet, Whereby, Zoom web app. A discarded tab means a dropped call.
• Long-polling dashboards — anything with a live WebSocket or long-running HTTP stream that you actually want to keep fresh.
• Tabs with unsaved form state — e.g. a draft post that exists only in the browser’s memory. (Safari shouldn’t discard tabs with modified form data, but some sites don’t trigger the right signal.)
• Tabs you expect to come back to immediately — if you’re pair-programming and constantly swapping windows, exclude your active coding tab so it doesn’t discard between context switches.

Settings → Tab Suspend → Excluded sites

Click Add site and enter a domain or URL pattern. TabControl supports:

• Exact domains — music.apple.com matches only that hostname.
• Wildcard subdomains — *.slack.com matches every subdomain under slack.com.
• URL fragments — meet.google.com/* matches every Google Meet call.

Matches are case-insensitive. TabControl checks the tab’s current URL at every suspend-check interval.

Pinned tabs are automatically excluded from suspend. You don’t need to add them to the deny list. Pin important tabs as your primary strategy; the deny list is for sites that aren’t always pinned.

1. Add a site to the deny list.
2. Open a tab to that site.
3. Switch to a different tab and wait longer than your suspend timeout.
4. Switch back. The tab should still be live (audio still playing, WebSocket still connected, and so on).

If it was suspended anyway, double-check the pattern — wildcards especially. Match on the hostname Safari shows you (the one in the URL bar), not a redirected or canonical version.

In the same settings pane, click the × next to any deny-list entry. Removal is immediate.

• AI session analysis overview — how TabControl understands what’s in a session.