Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

blog.strml.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 403 posts

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#331

Post by ramses0 »

chrissnell wrote: post #212
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…

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.

Icon: "speaker" for audio sites, icon: "Power cable" for background power usage?

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#333

Post by KirinDave »

LeanderK wrote: post #276
skilgarriff wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you happen to use React, I built a React component that helps you manage this! :) Hopefully it helps a bit! It also reports whether or not a user is idle, such that you can reduce cpu usage during that as well. https://github.com/Skilgarriff/react-user-focus

i don't know anything about React, but why can't react itself try to manage this?

Because there is no sufficient magic for that. App developers have to think about when they do work, how much work they do, and if and when it should be rendered. For any rule you can give, I can give you an example of an app that would break.

In general, the mantra for people who find this tough to fix should be, "Why didn't I use MVC, what a cretin I was!"

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#334

Post by codedokode »

josu wrote: post #48
lucb1e wrote: post #20

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 p…

Or just ask for the permission when you first open the page, the same way uber asks for your location. www.foobar.com wants to: "Run in the background unthrottled"

Every website would start showing such popup. Now (if you have enabled Javascript) many sites show popup to allow notifications the moment you open them. That is annoying when you search for something in Google and have to click "No" for every new page opened.

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#335

Post by codedokode »

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #286
steego wrote: post #272

Personally 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 e…

Mobile OSes are already throttling and stopping background tabs and applications. Otherwise the battery would be drained in several hours.

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#336

Post by Bjartr »

saurik wrote: post #321
cdvonstinkpot wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I've only seen it once, when I looked at it upon learning of its existence- the Chrome 'task manager' might show CPU usage of each tab. When I look at all the chrome.exe processes in the Windows Task Manager, the CPU usage is clear, but I can never tell which process is which tab. Something like a glowing tab coloration animation would be an unobtrusive informational thing, that would work even when tabs are pi…

No: the Chrome task manager shows activity per process, not per tab; processes typically have many many tabs lumped together (which undermines the security advantage, particularly as commonly-opened tabs like e-mail tend to end up having at least one instance open in every single process). You can't use this feature to figure out which tabs are using CPU unless you are barely using the web browser in the first place.

Whether or not tabs are in a new process depends on how it was opened. For example, opening a new tab with a control-click or middle-click will result in the new tab share a process with the original, however, right-clicking and selecting "Open in new tab" will result in the new tab having its own process.

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#337

Post by scholia »

k__ wrote: post #169
SerLava wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have to deal with a lot of task switching, blindly closing browser tabs would be a huge waste of time. You can individually check each tab before closing the ones you don't need, but that takes time and cognitive load. So I leave them open until the computer can't handle it.

Finding the right tab is much harder if you got a whole bunch of them. I always close them, most aren't needed for a long time. But if I need stuff I closed I just hit 'reopen closed tab' a few times.

Much easier in Firefox since you just start typing the name of the site then choose to switch to that tab from the drop-down menu. Or you can pick it off the (down-arrow) drop-down list of your tabs, or just use the mouse-wheel to scroll quickly through all the tab headings....

I typically have 100 or so tabs in Firefox. I did get over 600 once, but that's too many ;-)

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#338

Post by rasz_pl »

sengork wrote: post #327
rasz_pl wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :(

I agree, the Presto engine was (and still is) super efficient. We may see something similar come out of the Vivaldi project which is headed by folk who led the Opera <= v12 development who know very well what was lost when Opera moved to Chromium based web engine.

No. Vivaldi like new Opera is just a skinning project. They made UI slightly better, added some missing functionality (mostry tabs and gestures), but they do not touch core engine.

Case in point fresh Vivaldi on startup makes 4 connections to Google just to say hi, and will keep sending google delicious pieces of data throughout the day, not to mention hardcoded google DNS in case yours is too slow. How about spamming my local network with chromecast UDP garbage? or enumerating shares on startup? WTF would you even do that?

Ps I use Vivaldi :/.

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#339

Post by fiddlerwoaroof »

dajohnson89 wrote: post #221
pkamb wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd use Pinning a lot more if it didn't shrink the tab down to its Favicon size. Wish it would also prevent you from closing the tab.

+1. I just now found out about it. Tried it, saw the tab reduced to a favicon, and will probably never use it till that's fixed. Especially with how a Gmail Tab blinks when I get a hangout message.

The "reduce to favicon" is my favorite part of pinned tabs: I pin all my slack tabs and other messaging tabs and just watch for the blue dot indicating activity and/or the red circle that indicates a private message (on slack)

Re: Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs

#340

Post by fiddlerwoaroof »

mcintyre1994 wrote: post #174
kakarot wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tree Style Tabs is a nice idea, but I found the balance of aesthetic and speed for me to be with pressing Ctrl+L and then inputting a few letters relating to the open tab I seek, then just pressing Enter and switching to the tab.

I don't understand why this seems to only be a thing in Firefox - it's awesome.

I remember looking for a similar Chrome extension, but I think Chrome doesn't provide the appropriate hooks, or something.
Post reply on HN