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Reducing power consumption for background tabs

blog.chromium.org

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Re: Reducing power consumption for background tabs

#21

Post by fauigerzigerk »

Someone wrote: post #15
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a similar thought. I think browsers should require user permission for a tab to use more than 1% of a core on average.

That would get annoying soon. You won't want your browser to ask for that permission or throttle page layout to use 1% of a single core during page loads or the moment that browser-based shooting game gets lively and requires fast reactions, for example. I think it would be better to give each tab a power budget that, initially, allows it to run for S seconds at full power, and that give it new budget at a rate of x…

Initial page load and rendering should be excluded from any quota.

After that the browser should automatically throttle and provide an API to let the web app ask for permission to use more CPU, similar to how geolocation works today.

I don't see why this should be too complicated from the user's point of view. We're not talking about hard limits or real time guarantees. Browsers have a lot of wiggle room on the implementation side.

Re: Reducing power consumption for background tabs

#22

Post by branchless »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #21
Someone wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would get annoying soon. You won't want your browser to ask for that permission or throttle page layout to use 1% of a single core during page loads or the moment that browser-based shooting game gets lively and requires fast reactions, for example. I think it would be better to give each tab a power budget that, initially, allows it to run for S seconds at full power, and that give it new budget at a rate of x…

Initial page load and rendering should be excluded from any quota. After that the browser should automatically throttle and provide an API to let the web app ask for permission to use more CPU, similar to how geolocation works today. I don't see why this should be too complicated from the user's point of view. We're not talking about hard limits or real time guarantees. Browsers have a lot of wiggle room on the imple…

Would love this, or the ability to "throttle" similar to limits set on network bandwidth. So many times I come back to my server to find cpu high and it's caused by one or two web pages doing god-knows what. They don't even appear complex pages.

Re: Reducing power consumption for background tabs

#23

Post by sudoscript »

Filligree wrote: post #11
bdamm wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This looks nice! As I enabled it, I got the normal warning about "This plugin can view all data" etc, and I started looking for a plugin that can show me what servers plugins are connecting to... it seems there is no such thing. Perhaps time to re-enable little snitch.

OneTab is another one to look at. It bundles the tabs into a list instead of leaving them open.

You can also turn tabs into a webpage of a list of links. Very useful for sharing.

Re: Reducing power consumption for background tabs

#24

Post by kilroy123 »

zerr wrote: post #2

The Great Suspender is a great plugin to achieve this.

This is an amazing tool, IMO. It saves my laptop's battery and memory. A big +1 for the great suspender.

Also link for the lazy like me:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspende...

Re: Reducing power consumption for background tabs

#25

Post by erikdesjardins »

vdnkh wrote: post #3

I wish this could be (maybe it already can be?) disabled for environments where I don't care about battery life/power consumption. This change probably saves me a fraction of a cent per month at the cost of a worse web experience (I'm a bit of a tab hoarder).

Seems that it can be turned off at:

  chrome://flags/#expensive-background-timer-throttling
...though they may eventually remove the flag.

Re: Reducing power consumption for background tabs

#26

Post by Terribledactyl »

joe_the_user wrote: post #19

I'd honestly like to be able to "freeze" a page entirely once it fully appeared in the browser window. A good percentage of web pages both take all my CPU and become unreadable halfway through the page. A big factors seems to be that the pages that are built out of layers of active advertising devices - a given advertiser isn't concerned that they're one of ten monetizing devices pasted onto a gvien page. And there's…

I'm not sure this would have the outcome you'd want. A HN page is simple, loads and the DOM isn't really altered, so no real gain. Some pages alter the DOM significantly just when scrolling, or even wait to request content until you get there. The harmful sites would probably just break, but in a different way.

Re: Reducing power consumption for background tabs

#28

Post by overcast »

Not sure if any of you use "okcupid.com", but a single tab of that site will consume 4-5GB of RAM in a matter of an hour. Eventually grinding the entire browser to a halt, and nearly killing the OS in the process. There is a SERIOUS memory issue on that site, and it's always been that way for me. Safari, Chrome, Firefox on a Mac.

Re: Reducing power consumption for background tabs

#29

Post by e40 »

joe_the_user wrote: post #19

I'd honestly like to be able to "freeze" a page entirely once it fully appeared in the browser window. A good percentage of web pages both take all my CPU and become unreadable halfway through the page. A big factors seems to be that the pages that are built out of layers of active advertising devices - a given advertiser isn't concerned that they're one of ten monetizing devices pasted onto a gvien page. And there's…

Try uMatrix (in Chrome). 95% of sites are readable with no modifications. Videos often don't play, but I consider this a feature not a bug.

Re: Reducing power consumption for background tabs

#30

Post by cmurf »

joe_the_user wrote: post #19

I'd honestly like to be able to "freeze" a page entirely once it fully appeared in the browser window. A good percentage of web pages both take all my CPU and become unreadable halfway through the page. A big factors seems to be that the pages that are built out of layers of active advertising devices - a given advertiser isn't concerned that they're one of ten monetizing devices pasted onto a gvien page. And there's…

Privacy Badger helps a ton once you go through a dozen sites and it starts blocking ads and trackers.
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