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Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

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Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#291

Post by porker »

visakanv wrote: post #177
blauditore wrote: post #166

Earlier 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.

One-tab doesn't sync or let you backup to another source (e.g. Dropbox). I use it, but taking manual backups is a pain.

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#293

Post by reitanqild »

blauditore wrote: post #166
cortesoft wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I am doing coding work, I often have a ton of tabs open. I will keep different documentation tabs open to the relevant sections. I will keep some tabs with answers on StackOverflow. My open tabs are kinda like my working memory. I could close them and reopen them as needed, but it is easier to just click a tab then to try to find the thing again. In addition, sometimes the pages I am looking at have dynamic navi…

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.

With Firefox you just open a new one and start typing part of the title or url and it finds the tab.

If I want to add a new tab instead of finding the old I can press shift (IIRC).

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#294

Post by cr0sh »

mjevans wrote: post #209
altimin wrote: post #176

Hi, 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…

Color change on the tab would be nice - maybe have it slowly grow more red (and perhaps add an option to change the color as well - for colorblind folks) - then start blinking - then burst into flame...

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#295

Post by mdwrigh2 »

__jal wrote: post #268
nothrabannosir wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest neither is slack. They've got push notifications through web service workers. What for would they need aggressive background activity? I'm not saying this to be pedantic, just trying to nip this entitled vendor mentality in the bud. "We're important so give give give without asking." It's a bit what you see with permissions on mobile: the more famous a company is, the more brazen a permission policy they…

Bingo. The user ultimately needs to retain control. And I'm especially interested in the exception for audio - that really should be user-controllable, otherwise it just encourages annoying page authors to be even more annoying.

Note that you can always mute a tab in Chrome, which I suspect would remove the exemption as well.

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#296

Post by rasz_pl »

overcast wrote: post #5

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

This is design issue, inefficient data structures, lazy programming etc.

Im affraid tabs taking 2MB(two megabytes for a page with javascript, not 20, not 200, two) like in the good old Opera 12.16 wont come back :(

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#297

Post by mikeash »

cookiecaper wrote: post #287
mikeash wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 inv…

Bugs which only affect a small minority of users don't exist, nor do unusual but perfectly legitimate usage patterns?

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#298

Post by reitanqild »

blauditore wrote: post #280
visakanv wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use one-tab.com; works fantastically for me. Not a huge stretch to say it changed my life.

For what it's worth, there's a similar feature currently available in Firefox Test Pilot: https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/tab-center

Are you taking about tab center? That thingy had a number of issues last I checked, I especially remember there was something weird about the layout of it. I think it extended all the way up on the side of the menu bar. This looked weird to me (and I think UI is overrated) and makes the toolbars slide when I open/close the tab drawer.

I'd recommend using one of the extensions instead.

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#299

Post by rasz_pl »

jankotek wrote: post #266

I am surprised nobody mentioned battery saving mode in Opera. It throttles background tabs similar way, but not so aggressively. This will be great thing. Right now my Chrome eats about 10% of CPU, mostly Skype, Slack, Calendar... With Opera it is bellow 1% and I get much better battery life.

Even in Opera it is less about throttling cpu usage, and more about coalescing wakeups/timer interrupts.

There should never be a situation where background tab cant even get a 1 second timer running reliably, unless its trying to compute pi at the same time.

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#300

Post by sirclueless »

__jal wrote: post #268
nothrabannosir wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest neither is slack. They've got push notifications through web service workers. What for would they need aggressive background activity? I'm not saying this to be pedantic, just trying to nip this entitled vendor mentality in the bud. "We're important so give give give without asking." It's a bit what you see with permissions on mobile: the more famous a company is, the more brazen a permission policy they…

Bingo. The user ultimately needs to retain control. And I'm especially interested in the exception for audio - that really should be user-controllable, otherwise it just encourages annoying page authors to be even more annoying.

The audio thing works because there is an obvious icon in the tab bar that shows the source of audio, so if developers use it in an annoying way the user can easily respond appropriately.
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