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Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

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Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#261

Post by simonster »

espadrine wrote: post #240
hnriot wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there isn't a strict limit, its just not a viable use case for current browsers. Maybe what we need is Chrome/FF to consider the very high tab count as a use case and handle it better, when you have so many tabs it's not easy to find the 1 in 100 that you're looking for, we would need a new find tool, possible the browser should build a client side tf/idf index and make the whole working set (workspace) searchable. Y…

The design of Firefox makes it able to handle a lot more tabs than Google Chrome. You can easily have two hundred with no sweat. It also features Panorama built-in, which lets you search through all the tabs. It's as simple as Ctrl+Shift+E, type your keyword.

Huh, I didn't realize you could search. That's neat.

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#262

Post by derleth »

k3n wrote: post #150
kintamanimatt wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely disagree. We've seen too much complacency in recent years when it comes to memory usage. Developers think it's ok for their applications to bloat out and have a huge memory footprint. I'd rather applications were developed in such a way that they were more memory efficient. I've had a recent incident in which Chrome was consuming about 7GB of memory, just because I had about a hundred tabs open! It was rea…

There's no way you could effectively work with 100 tabs open, and that is surely a smell for inefficiency. For any given task, 5 tabs is probably reaching the upper limit on what's actually _required_, with around 10 being the upper limit. Granted, you could have multiple tasks ongoing in parallel, but are you really working in parallel at that point? If not, save the tabs and return to them later. I really doubt you…

> There's no way you could effectively work with 100 tabs open

I'm sure there's no way you could effectively work that way, but imagining that what's true for you is true for everyone is a massive smell for ignorance of other workflow styles and cognitive abilities.

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#263

Post by derleth »

k3n wrote: post #210
kintamanimatt wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What can I say? It worked for me. I was doing a lot of research and things I'd read would lead to more searches of tangential topics that I'd want to revisit in the coming hours. This method of working fit my mental model and I was flitting between tabs as necessary, not just opening them up with the hope that I'd read them sometime . Also, if I need to click on a whole bunch of links that I know I'm immediately goin…

Originally you explained the problem as if you always had 100+ tabs open, but now it sounds like an occasional occurrence. I was mainly speaking to if you always had 100+ open -- as if that was your normal workflow. I do understand at times you want to open many more than that for a limited time, but those situations (at least in my experience) are typically very short-lived and don't represent my ordinary common usa…

Guess what? Your preferred workflow is just as smelly. Clean it up.

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#264

Post by a_p »

tripzilch wrote: post #258
sciurus wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is using this tool significantly different than bookmarking then closing all your currently open tabs, which you can easily do now?

Good point, we'll have to see. I have the same problem as the GP (though up to 50 tabs usually) and indeed "bookmark all"+"close all" doesn't really help because if you never review those bookmarks, you tend not to take the step either. As someone else itt already said, a better solution would be some improved bookmarking system that I can use to just file away a tab, knowing that it'll be there when I need it, as we…

I'm not sure if I understand your comment. Firefox does allow you to organize bookmarks by tag, and it even lets you use the tag collection as a bookmark folder (meaning that you can add the tag to the bookmark bar and it behaves like a normal bookmark folder.) You can even add different links to different bookmark folders and give them the same tag, so that they appear under the original bookmark folder and under the same tag category, or tag folder if you drag the tag to the bookmark bar. If you decide to remove the tag folder from the bookmark bar, the tag will still exist.

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#265

Post by chenster »

DavidHogue wrote: post #131
kintamanimatt wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really, especially if you're doing a lot of research, or for whatever reason the page is particularly complex and it causes the process that tab is running under to consume a lot of memory.

I end up with quite a few tabs open myself. I find if I bookmark a tab, add it to Pocket, or copy the URL into my notes that I'm far more likely to go back and actually read it. Before I would keep tabs open for weeks "just in case".

I can relate, I do the same to keep the tabs open so to read them later. Most of them end of not reading them weeks later. Never use Pocket. Presumably, it's similar to ReadItLater or Instapaper? Perhaps indeed that's better approach.

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#266

Post by pests »

srgseg wrote: post #10

OneTab developer here: thanks for all your suggestions, I'll be working on them :) A few FAQs: 1. The OneTab tab persists even if you close your web browser. 2. If you ever close your OneTab tab, this doesn't lose your tabs. You can always get it back by clicking the blue extension icon. 3. Your tabs are never sent to our servers unless you press the button to 'share as a web page'.

Thanks a lot for this! Just wanted to point out something and maybe make a suggestion:

I had six windows open each with some tabs related to a specific task. Used OneTab on one window and then tried to use it on another and it looks like the window just closed. Took me a minute to release the OneTab tab was on another window and another to find the right window. Not sure if this needs to be fixed or anything but maybe allowing a OneTab tab on each open window would be less confusing.

As for the suggestion, it would be nice to be able to give each tab group a name instead of just showing the number of tabs. Could be useful on the shared web page as well.

Thanks again!

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#267

Post by chenster »

OneTab doesn't seem to preserve individual tab browsing history. So if I understand it correctly it really just converts the unpinned tabs to bookmarks and them close the tabs. Am I correct?

In Chrome, you can right-click any tag and choose "Bookmark All Tabs". Occasionally, I do that to save open the tabs if I don't have enough time to read them all. Admittedly, OneTab has a simpler interface and conveniently closes the tabs for you.

See http://screencast.com/t/biqAF65Fdd

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#268

Post by qu4z-2 »

rikkus wrote: post #98
srgseg wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only does it save you memory, it also reduces CPU usage because Chrome would otherwise continue to run scripts in all of your open tabs. Depending on the complexity of the web pages, having 100 open tabs can easily cripple a brand new laptop with 8GB ram.

Having 100 open tabs would be unmanageable from a UI perspective. I can't deal with more than about 8 open at once, per window. I just bookmark stuff to come back to later if I'm dealing with more. So ... it's not a technical problem.

My UI lets me press b to do a substring search on the url/title, which makes managing 100+ tabs trivial. And I often need to have a lot of tickets/revisions/forum threads/stack overflow questions open in tabs at the same time for my work.

Don't project your UI limitations onto other people please :)

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#269

Post by Sunlis »

joshmlewis wrote: post #139
DennisP wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are very few cases where I actually want tabs running in the background, and I'd be happy to add those cases to a whitelist in exchange for Chrome not eating my computer. But as long as no browser does that, OP's option looks like a huge timesaver for me.

But you're a power user, most users wouldn't want the hassle of adding sites to a whitelist.

If something like that was implemented, I would hope that it would be turned off by default and hidden away under the "here be dragons" section of Chrome's settings.

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#270

Post by qu4z-2 »

jdietrich wrote: post #79

Memory use seems like a really pointless thing for users to care about. There's a widespread intuition that using RAM is inherently bad and low memory usage is a worthwhile goal, but it doesn't really make sense. The key performance goal is minimising latency, which is best served by using as much RAM as possible without having to swap out. RAM is now fantastically cheap. 16GB of DDR3 costs less than $120 in either D…

The thing is, unused RAM gets used as disk cache, which helps performance.

Also, good luck figuring out how much is "as much RAM as possible without having to swap out".

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