 <p>I know this isn't an ideal solution but you could use a HTML5 worker instead of setInterval (though I don't know if they are paused in the background as well - I'm assuming they are not, that would be very odd if they were)?</p> <p>And it does add lots of backwards compatibility issues for PC browsers that are not HTML5 compliant :(</p> <p><a href="http://www.sitepoint.com/javascript-threading-html5-web-workers/" rel="nofollow">http://www.sitepoint.com/javascript-threading-html5-web-workers/</a></p>