Chrome extension to indicate background network activity per tab • Hacker News Board

Re: Chrome extension to indicate background network activity per tab

#21

Post by awalGarg » Sat, Jul 09, 2016, 5:17 PM UTC

cocotino wrote: post #3

baby wrote: post #2

Something nice would be to see, next to the tab title, the CPU resource taken by that tab. I don't mind pages loading a lot of resources, I mind pages killing my CPU.

You can use Shift+Escape for that

(Un)Fortunately, that, along with a couple other things were removed from chrome 51. See https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=588790

Re: Chrome extension to indicate background network activity per tab

#22

Post by userbinator » Sat, Jul 09, 2016, 5:23 PM UTC

EugeneOZ wrote: post #6

> A lot of web pages use background network requests for tracking user actions and sending data to remote servers, lazily loading heavy assets etc., and all that goes unnoticed by the user. And there is nothing wrong with it.

That's the attitude which leads to users who don't know anything, can't easily learn, and can be easily controlled and manipulated. Of course, that might be your intention, in which case my only appropriate reaction is "DO NOT WANT!"

Re: Chrome extension to indicate background network activity per tab

#23

Post by Noseshine » Sat, Jul 09, 2016, 5:45 PM UTC

awalGarg wrote: post #21

cocotino wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can use Shift+Escape for that

(Un)Fortunately, that, along with a couple other things were removed from chrome 51. See https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=588790

It has? I have Chrome version 51.0.2704.106 m (64-bit) and I do get the task manager with SHIFT+ESC, with numbers for each tab and GPU and for some extensions for CPU, network and memory.

What you link talks about chrome://memory, which was indeed removed, but the parent post only says

    > You can use Shift+Escape for that

Re: Chrome extension to indicate background network activity per tab

#24

Post by qntmfred » Sat, Jul 09, 2016, 6:01 PM UTC

nice idea. I would prefer if it reset to 0 on page load though. I used it for a few minutes and after a few pages the count was already in the hundreds, at which point I've lost my sense of whether the count was increasing for this current page or if it was already high from previous pages

Re: Chrome extension to indicate background network activity per tab

#25

Post by rmsaksida » Sat, Jul 09, 2016, 6:23 PM UTC

cocotino wrote: post #3

baby wrote: post #2

Something nice would be to see, next to the tab title, the CPU resource taken by that tab. I don't mind pages loading a lot of resources, I mind pages killing my CPU.

You can use Shift+Escape for that

Shift+Escape made me realize HTTPS Everywhere[0] is by far my most resource intensive extension. Most extensions sit around the 20MB range (of memory usage). uBlock is in the 50MB range. HTTPS Everywhere is in the 100MB range and goes to 150MB sometimes. I love the extension but I do wonder how it manages to use so much memory...

[0] https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere

Re: Chrome extension to indicate background network activity per tab

#26

Post by agumonkey » Sat, Jul 09, 2016, 7:11 PM UTC

How hard is it to hook into tab icon / label ? I'd love to see it blink when something is moving. Reminds me of the audio icon when audio is sent.

Re: Chrome extension to indicate background network activity per tab

#27

Post by yoasif_ » Sat, Jul 09, 2016, 7:22 PM UTC

FWIW, this works fine in Firefox as well -- I used https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/chrome-store-... for the first time today, and it works great on the extension published on the Chrome store.

Re: Chrome extension to indicate background network activity per tab

#28

Post by deno » Sat, Jul 09, 2016, 7:46 PM UTC

rmsaksida wrote: post #25

cocotino wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can use Shift+Escape for that

Shift+Escape made me realize HTTPS Everywhere[0] is by far my most resource intensive extension. Most extensions sit around the 20MB range (of memory usage). uBlock is in the 50MB range. HTTPS Everywhere is in the 100MB range and goes to 150MB sometimes. I love the extension but I do wonder how it manages to use so much memory... [0] https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere

They load the entire rule dataset into memory.

https://github.com/EFForg/https-everywhere/issues/1775

Re: Chrome extension to indicate background network activity per tab

#29

Post by basemntunivrse » Sat, Jul 09, 2016, 9:13 PM UTC

I really like this, it's an excellent idea.

This might be quite useful for developers as well, just as a quick indicator instead of having the Developer Tools Network tab open all the time.

One thing that might be quite useful (though it would probably be beyond the scope of this project and perhaps hard to implement) would be the ability to block any further requests made by the tab. A sort of per-tab 'offline mode'. Perhaps as a context menu option when clicking on the icon.

Also, it would be very interesting to see statistics on which popular websites tend to do the most user-activity tracking, lazy loading etc. - but, in order to collect and collate these statistics your extension would itself have to send background requests to some central API. That'd be quite ironic...

Anyway, nice work!

Re: Chrome extension to indicate background network activity per tab

#30

Post by andersonmvd » Sat, Jul 09, 2016, 9:14 PM UTC

The license (WTFPL – Do What the Fuck You Want to Public License) grabbed my attention. Seems to be even more permissive than MIT and BSD? At least the name suggests.