I would like to see Chrome utilize what I think is the right solution for loading background tabs; I would like it to let you (when you want to) rather than OPEN a background tab, only ENQUEUE a background tab -- opening it only when that tab becomes active, meanwhile keeping a barebones tab with that URL in the tabs menu until you actually make it active or it becomes active the way any other tab would, at which point it loads at the same location in the tabs bar that a background tab would have opened.[1]
If this were implemented then finally I could open 120 tabs in a window for a detailed query (and they're not all loaded, there's zero overhead), then after 11 minutes of reading a few of those tabs, closing the ones I've read and having others load in their place if they weren't already loaded, be left with 87 unopened tabs with which I could close, since I've learned everything there is to know about that subject and I don't feel the need to read the rest anymore: I feel I've found the answer.
As it stands I can become an expert in any subject accessible in a day or two, in twenty minutes - unless, as sometimes happens, Chrome gets in my way. I can do it by opening them in background tabs today - but Chrome will just shit itself after a while because it's stupid and feels the need to open a 99th background tab actively just because I may want to read it in a bit. Come on.
Also there needs to be a way (not necessarily the default way) to open private (incognito) windows opened privately "Except for crashes" meaning that it's open until I close it, by clicking the fucking X button, not whenever Chrome decides to barf all over itself (crash) - which usually happens when it's done using all my memory. If you fundamentally disagree that there is a distinction between the user actively exiting and you crashing unexpectedly, then why not change the text to "Pages you view in incognito tabs won’t stick around in your browser’s history, cookie store, or search history after you’ve closed all of your incognito tabs or Chrome crashes unexpectedly".
Doesn't make much sense does it -- So please make the functionality match what you just promised, and keep pages open until I've closed them. Not you.
This stuff would improve people's experiences drastically. It's too bad Chrome's developers don't care about getting Google more clicks, more traffic, letting people open more ads from Google search results, and so forth - by letting people keep more pages and searches open or queued for opening. And that they don't care about their users and give them what they've just promised. Instead, in Incognito windows especially, this stuff just disappears whenever Chrome decides to crash -- which is often, given that it feels like aggressively eating memory for any tab anyone might want to follow.
The web is about links. I hope Chrome will start letting people follow more of them and not lose their trail if they don't want to keep it in their history.
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[1] Functionality. Right-click a link, click "enqueue", this should be the same as "open in background tab" except the tab is added with the URL in it and it is not loaded until you actually make the tab active. Right-clicking the tab bar should give you the option (in addition to normal options) "Close all enqueued tabs", leaving just ones you've already opened. Example usage: say I'm searching for an article. I can start by doing some obvious Google searches in a few different tabs. I can go through the results and enqueue each one. Then I can go through the first (when it becomes the active tab, it is loaded) and enqueue any links that might lead to what I want. Then I close the now full-fledged tab when I'm done reading and following links, the next tab becomes active (which might have been an enqueued tab in which case it becomes loaded for the first time) and I can keep doing my search. Eventually I've found the page I'm looking for and can close all of the enqueued pages, or perhaps drag the tab into a new window (as you can today) and then close the old window - disappearing all the enqueued pages but also the normal, fully loaded tabs, per the normal behavior closing a window. (An enqueued tab is just a semi-loaded tab, just a URL that never loads until the tab becomes active. If its window or itself is closed in the way you usually close a tab - by right-clicking and clicking "close tab" or by middle-clicking on it, before it was ever the selected tab, then it simply wouldn't have even loaded a single time.)
This is exactly what I do today: except I have to be careful that Chrome doesn't crash while I do it, because it doesn't do it gracefully. I would like to manually specify whether I want the background tan to be actually loaded.