There was an firefox extension that did this as well, but it's been discontinued: https://github.com/palant/suspendbackgroundtabs
I wrote my own script that does this: https://github.com/kahing/bin/blob/master/throttle
Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs
281–290 of 403 posts
Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs
#282Hi, this is Alexander. I'm an engineer on Chromium team working on scheduling and on background tab throttling in particular. Firstly, I want to make clear that we are not shipping this in Chrome 56. We have enabled throttling as an experiment in beta channel to measure impact and collect feedback from web devs. We will aim to ship it in Chrome 57, subject to further feedback. In response to concerns voiced we will d…
I'd like to see the user better informed of hot (active) tabs. Just like there's an audio icon to help the user track down which tab is making noise, there should also be some mechanism to let the user know that a tab is more active than usual. I'd recommend a different background color for the tab, except that I'd also like to see (sign in) profiles have distinct background colors to aid the user in keeping their pr…
This would be great - and the measurements used to do this throttling could be used to populate that data!
Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs
#283Hi, this is Alexander. I'm an engineer on Chromium team working on scheduling and on background tab throttling in particular. Firstly, I want to make clear that we are not shipping this in Chrome 56. We have enabled throttling as an experiment in beta channel to measure impact and collect feedback from web devs. We will aim to ship it in Chrome 57, subject to further feedback. In response to concerns voiced we will d…
I'd like to see the user better informed of hot (active) tabs. Just like there's an audio icon to help the user track down which tab is making noise, there should also be some mechanism to let the user know that a tab is more active than usual. I'd recommend a different background color for the tab, except that I'd also like to see (sign in) profiles have distinct background colors to aid the user in keeping their pr…
This made me picture one of the old school nintendo games where your character starts sprouting flames when on a hot streak. There are times I would like to see flames flying off tabs that are pegging my cpu.
Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs
#284Hi, this is Alexander. I'm an engineer on Chromium team working on scheduling and on background tab throttling in particular. Firstly, I want to make clear that we are not shipping this in Chrome 56. We have enabled throttling as an experiment in beta channel to measure impact and collect feedback from web devs. We will aim to ship it in Chrome 57, subject to further feedback. In response to concerns voiced we will d…
If a page signals it's desire to opt-out of aggressive throttling, the user should be notified of this, perhaps by an icon in the tab, so that we can either close it or force the throttling. I'm a laptop user and CPU-hungry background tabs are a huge drain on my battery life. If something is opting out of or otherwise excluded from throttling, I want to know about it. Thanks.
While I agree with you in theory, this will only help a small fraction of us techie users. The average user is going to see a new, weird icon on their eBay Auction tab and call their computer company to ask them what it is and if they're being hacked.
When I did support for Apple Care, every single update if it had new or extra icons we always got lots of calls like this.
Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, I basically do the same thing, but that hardly ever requires 10 tabs for me. When that happens, finding tabs becomes especially harder once their width starts to shrink. As for read-later, I usually pull them into the bookmarks bar (top level, directly visible) to free up some space.
I use one-tab.com; works fantastically for me. Not a huge stretch to say it changed my life.
OneTab can make a huge difference. And being able to do a quick find on your list of old tabs certainly makes things easier for those of us who are, uh, a little over the top when it comes to opening tabs.
The only bad thing is realizing you have a couple hundred old tabs to go through and delete. They really add up over time.
Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs
#286Personally speaking (That means I'm speaking for myself), I could absolutely care less about the plight of the developer who wants their page to run stuff in the background. If you really think I should be running something in the background, you should ask Chrome for that permission so Chrome can ask me. If I say yes, then feel free, but no website should have this for free.
> no website should have this for free.
Why not? Your applications on the desktop can run background tasks without your approval. Your phone's applications on iOS and Android can run background tasks without your approval. The web has tons of web applications some of which more complex than stand alone apps. So why wouldn't they be afforded the same?
Asking would be a bit of a UX nightmare. You'll have so few users enable it. It's a pattern they've never seen before.
Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're doing something wrong. I use Chrome on Windows as my main now and I usually have more than 100 tabs open. I just switched a few months ago from Firefox on Linux, also usually with 100 tabs or more open. Both are very stable. Chrome is worse with handling tons of tabs, but I certainly don't have daily crashes. People who have extremely unstable/inconsistent experiences with these platforms usually have a rogue…
Why is it that whenever somebody has a problem that less than 100% of people experience, the response is always "you must be doing it wrong" rather than "I must be lucky"?
Because the quantity isn't just less than 100%, it's a small minority. Chrome and Firefox are among the most widely-used pieces of software in the world. I'm not saying they don't have weird bugs, but they don't crash daily for most users.
While the OP may not be doing anything "wrong", he is almost definitely doing something unusual, or has deeper issues like malware or malfunctioning hardware.
If the ratio were inverted and most users were experiencing daily crashes from normal use, I would consider myself lucky. That's just not been my experience with Chrome/Firefox.
Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
If a page signals it's desire to opt-out of aggressive throttling, the user should be notified of this, perhaps by an icon in the tab, so that we can either close it or force the throttling. I'm a laptop user and CPU-hungry background tabs are a huge drain on my battery life. If something is opting out of or otherwise excluded from throttling, I want to know about it. Thanks.
While I agree with you in theory , this will only help a small fraction of us techie users. The average user is going to see a new, weird icon on their eBay Auction tab and call their computer company to ask them what it is and if they're being hacked. When I did support for Apple Care, every single update if it had new or extra icons we always got lots of calls like this.
I'm sure some good UX could alleviate this. Maybe a spinning gear icon? Maybe a battery draining animation? Something to signify, 'this tab is doing some heavy lifting right now'.
Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs
#289It's awesome to see Chrome trying to improve performance for people with many tabs open, which is many of us. I use a LOT of tabs, and the best plugin has been The Great Suspender. Highly recommend it for anyone who wants memory & CPU back and keeps many tabs/windows open at once: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspende...
I meet many tab hoarders (always open a new one, never close any, ending up with hundrets), but just can't wrap my head around it! I hate having more than 6-7 simultaneously open because it gets increasingly harder to keep an overview of what you're doing. The same applies for IDE tabs or windows. Too much of them and finding the right one becomes increasingly hard, and losing the thread more likely.
I've given up on navigation.
I use my tabs like a generational garbage collector. Tabs to the left of the current tab are processed, tabs on the right are to-be-processed. I'll go to a page like reddit or HN and spin off a dozen tabs of things to read. Then I'll go through one by one and either process, delay or close.
Once I reach about 250 - 300 tabs, I'll do a longer generation sweep and go through all the tabs and try to get it down to less than 100 or so.
Basically, I'm never in need of finding any specific tab. If I want the content from that tab, I'll just open a new one and navigate back to that point. The tabs are really a lightweight to-read list.
Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
I run Chrome on a decently-powered desktop, and too many tabs can still kill it. This is a good default; too many websites are built under the assumption that they're the only thing open and they have infinite resources to burn. Granted, I'd like to see more configuration options before this hits primetime, but I think it's going in the right direction to force some discipline on pages if the developers don't code it…
> too many tabs can still kill it "Kill"? Does your desktop stop responding and show a BSOD? How many tabs do you have open when that happens? I don't know how heavily people use their Chrome but for me, ~50-100 tabs across ~5 windows across 3-4 virtual desktops seems to not hinder my laptop at all. It's very responsive and no crashes. To be honest I've never seen a system getting "kill"ed due to too many tabs. My us…
Kill performance. It's 2017; if you're running Win10, BSODs nowadays almost always mean you have a legitimate hardware failure or you're actually working on developing drivers. The OS has gotten very robust against the kinds of crap application-level software can pull to crash the OS.
It is not yet bullet-proof against a process deciding that it deserves all of your CPU and so much RAM that the disk cache needs to thrash to support it.