What's the syntax of URL exceptions in Chrome's "Always keep these sites active"?

Question

I want to keep certain tabs from ever being discarded automatically by Chrome. The settings have a section for doing so, but the syntax of the exceptions is not clear. Should I use regexes? Globs? Should https:// be included? ...

Will this setting be reflected in chrome://discards/? Because my Gmail tabs show as discardable even with the exception I have added.

Related:

• How can I get Chrome to stop killing my tabs in the background?
• Stop Chrome from unloading pinned tabs
• How to force Chrome to keep tabs in memory?
• Can you keep a Chrome tab always active every time you go to a specific site?
• https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/12929150

Answer 1

Source: Personalize Chrome performance - Google Chrome Help

The web address format for the manual site exclusion policy is: [scheme://][.]host[:port][/path][@query].

Here are some examples of how to add sites manually if you want to create an exclusion for:

• Entire domains and subdomains: Exclude the URL scheme. For example, google.com matches and prevents deactivation of subdomains like drive.google.com and calendar.google.com.
• Specific domains, but not any subdomains: Include a dot (.) before the URL host. For example, .google.com won't match and prevent deactivation of subdomains like www.google.com, drive.google.com, and calendar.google.com.
• Specific subdirectory: Include the URL path. For example, www.google.com/finance matches and prevents deactivation of all Google Finance pages, but won't prevent deactivation of the www.google.com= =main pages.
• URL host and query components: Asterisks () can be used as wildcards. For example, https://* matches and prevents deactivation of all https sites and youtube.com/watch?v=* matches and prevents deactivation of YouTube videos.
  • Wildcards for prefix, suffix, or substring matches of the URL host component aren't supported. For example, *oogle.com or google.com/* won't match and prevent deactivation.