Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs • Hacker News Board

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#11

Post by dchuk » Tue, Jan 24, 2017, 4:04 PM UTC

dumbmatter wrote: post #4

What are we supposed to do about stuff this? Like I wrote a video game https://play.basketball-gm.com/ that lets you open multiple tabs for viewing multiple screens even while simulation is occurring in another tab. But Chrome recently stopped running the simulation if it's in a background tab. Putting my simulation code in a Shared Worker would be nice, except Safari and IE will never support it and it seems likely…

Yes? I mean, you have to admit what you built is the epitome of edge case when it comes to how a browser is typically used, and is actually exactly the type of thing they want to optimize because basically if you aren't looking at the tab, it's not being used (generally).

Maybe use electron or something?

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#12

Post by tonylemesmer » Tue, Jan 24, 2017, 4:05 PM UTC

Can't they just have an enable / disable button with a warning about battery life?

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#13

Post by recursive » Tue, Jan 24, 2017, 4:05 PM UTC

andre3000 wrote: post #2

About time. I have been using extensions such as one-tab to prevent background tabs from draining memory.

I've got some bad news for you. This change has nothing to do with memory consumption of background tabs.

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#14

Post by tambourine_man » Tue, Jan 24, 2017, 4:05 PM UTC

overcast wrote: post #5

Can we aggressively throttle memory usage? Why does it require 300-500MB of ram PER TAB?

It probably doesn't. Measuring memory usage is hard on a modern OS.

I'd guess there's a lot of shared memory between tabs

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#15

Post by Cthulhu_ » Tue, Jan 24, 2017, 4:05 PM UTC

dumbmatter wrote: post #4

What are we supposed to do about stuff this? Like I wrote a video game https://play.basketball-gm.com/ that lets you open multiple tabs for viewing multiple screens even while simulation is occurring in another tab. But Chrome recently stopped running the simulation if it's in a background tab. Putting my simulation code in a Shared Worker would be nice, except Safari and IE will never support it and it seems likely…

Make it a single page thing and spread the image out over multiple desktops. Make it a real desktop app instead. I do think Chrome / Google is (if they go through with this) actively going to fight against using the browser as an application platform though. At the very least they should give notifications to webapps that they are about to go to low-power mode, act differently when on a power cable, and check whether the tab is visible or not.

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#16

Post by ogig » Tue, Jan 24, 2017, 4:06 PM UTC

Can't we use serviceWorkers to workaround this? That's what they were created for.

I have a webaudio side project that works nicely even on the background using serviceWorkers for timing. I'm hoping it will be the same on 56.

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#17

Post by Nycto » Tue, Jan 24, 2017, 4:07 PM UTC

dumbmatter wrote: post #4

What are we supposed to do about stuff this? Like I wrote a video game https://play.basketball-gm.com/ that lets you open multiple tabs for viewing multiple screens even while simulation is occurring in another tab. But Chrome recently stopped running the simulation if it's in a background tab. Putting my simulation code in a Shared Worker would be nice, except Safari and IE will never support it and it seems likely…

This isn't a full solution, but perhaps inter-tab communication would work? Use whichever tab is focused as the master, then other tabs send messages to the primary as they need work done. It wouldn't work when none of your tabs are focused, but perhaps that's an acceptable constraint.

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#18

Post by benologist » Tue, Jan 24, 2017, 4:08 PM UTC

dumbmatter wrote: post #4

What are we supposed to do about stuff this? Like I wrote a video game https://play.basketball-gm.com/ that lets you open multiple tabs for viewing multiple screens even while simulation is occurring in another tab. But Chrome recently stopped running the simulation if it's in a background tab. Putting my simulation code in a Shared Worker would be nice, except Safari and IE will never support it and it seems likely…

Iframe them onto one page and make the browser window huge. Something like:

There's also the and tags to divide pages between URLs.

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#19

Post by JoeCoder_ » Tue, Jan 24, 2017, 4:08 PM UTC

Why not have a "this page would like to perform work in the background [allow|block]" notification?

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#20

Post by lucb1e » Tue, Jan 24, 2017, 4:09 PM UTC

I like the change as a general idea but there obviously needs to be a manual override. Like, I don't want websites to access my camera without permission but obviously I want to allow some websites to do that. A similar permission could be used here and is perfectly backwards compatible:

1. a tab exceeds its quota and throttling kicks in;

2. you visit the tab to check why it stopped working;

3. you get a permission pop up (like all others) once you visit the tab again, asking you whether you want to allow it unlimited resource usage, noting that it'll decrease battery life of your device.