Will this also be implemented in the mobile browsers (e.g. Firefox for Android)?
I don't think it's necessary because Android has its own OOM killer and Android apps must be written to handle Android's OOM signals.
Tab Unloading in Firefox 93
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Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93
#42I've never had Firefox crash. I guess they are reaching for those edge cases on power users who keep a billion tabs open. Maybe I'm missing some sort of productivity hack that involves leaving 100+ tabs open.
I'm going to reply with a comment stolen from a different HN discussion: The fact that people (myself included) have 100s of tabs open is a symptom of just how broken bookmarking is on the modern web. Bookmarks are a miserable way to create a placeholder for your thoughts. It's too static, must be maintained, and generally prone to link rot. I'm a scientist. I open and read 10-20-100 links for a given topic depending…
Bookmarking systems are completely outdated, but I'm not sure what they should be replaced with. What would help you in this case so you didn't have to worry about losing the tabs if you closed them?
Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93
#43What I want implemented.. Chrome/Firefox whatever... is that instead of unloading and reloading when I go back to the tab I want it to export basically an HTML file and when I click back to that tab, I want it to reload the HTML file instead with some notification/marker that it is a "cached" version. There are times where I'll leave a tab in the background that I don't want refreshed but when it gets unloaded, poof,…
This is precisely what Edge does on Android, not sure if it's the same behaviour in Chrome on Android.
Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm going to reply with a comment stolen from a different HN discussion: The fact that people (myself included) have 100s of tabs open is a symptom of just how broken bookmarking is on the modern web. Bookmarks are a miserable way to create a placeholder for your thoughts. It's too static, must be maintained, and generally prone to link rot. I'm a scientist. I open and read 10-20-100 links for a given topic depending…
...or you could simply download what's necessary/interesting and ensure that you've got the data as it was. Because people seem to think that everything needs to be an app, having something open in a tab is no guarantee that it'll be there when you revisit the tab.
I can't speak for the person you're replying too, but I have somewhat similar use cases sometimes, and what you propose isn't really a fix. For instance, when programming, the documentation could be spread out amongst many webpages (like each chapter or each section in a chapter is a separate page). And that might not be the only reference I'm using. And then add in separate pages for examples, too. It's not always possible to anticipate all your reference/example needs at the beginning of the project, so downloading everything doesn't always work.
Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93
#45Something surprising I learned recently is that this is an anti-pattern when building an iOS app. iOS has a memory compressor, so if you try to purge resources in a low-memory situation, it can cause memory use to spike as the things you're trying to free get decompressed. The SDK provides a notification when memory pressure is high, so people try to get aggressive and purge their caches and unused assets when that n…
Sounds like they need a "free without uncompressing" feature.
I think the issue would be that the compressor works on whole memory pages (I assume), so you'd need to know that the whole page could be freed. There might be kernel VM functions to handle that functionality manually, like if you were building a zone allocator or something?
Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93
#46What I want implemented.. Chrome/Firefox whatever... is that instead of unloading and reloading when I go back to the tab I want it to export basically an HTML file and when I click back to that tab, I want it to reload the HTML file instead with some notification/marker that it is a "cached" version. There are times where I'll leave a tab in the background that I don't want refreshed but when it gets unloaded, poof,…
Would love to know if this is practically possible. I use Auto tab discard [] to save memory, but I'd much prefer the ability to retrieve an html file than having to reload the page. A simple way to save that html file of current view when bookmarking a page would also be a useful addition in a similar vein. [] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc...
Doesn't OS swap covers much of your need ?
Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93
#47I've never had Firefox crash. I guess they are reaching for those edge cases on power users who keep a billion tabs open. Maybe I'm missing some sort of productivity hack that involves leaving 100+ tabs open.
How is that possible, I get FF crashes literally every time I load a moderately intensive website (eg. Google Keep). I still use FF because I can't abide Chrome. My PC is admittedly a bit older (only 6 gigs RAM) but still.
I routinely have hundreds of tabs open in Firefox at any given time without crashes on macOS and Linux. The tabs include everything from documentation, Jupyter notebooks, papers, Jira, Reddit, HN, Github, Gitlab, GMail, Google Keep, Todoist, etc. I can't even recall the last time Firefox crashed for me.
Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93
#48I've never had Firefox crash. I guess they are reaching for those edge cases on power users who keep a billion tabs open. Maybe I'm missing some sort of productivity hack that involves leaving 100+ tabs open.
I'm going to reply with a comment stolen from a different HN discussion: The fact that people (myself included) have 100s of tabs open is a symptom of just how broken bookmarking is on the modern web. Bookmarks are a miserable way to create a placeholder for your thoughts. It's too static, must be maintained, and generally prone to link rot. I'm a scientist. I open and read 10-20-100 links for a given topic depending…
I hear your qualms about bookmarks but to me having 100 open tabs does not save you from any of those issues at all, it just exposes you to things you never would have encountered otherwise. Macbooks I've owned randomly crash, always has always will. If I had 100s of tabs that would certainly be annoying to deal with opening that session again and watching my computer achieve liftoff with the fans when those 100 tabs open at once again.
Personally as a scientist I'm aghast you operate this way. If you were my student I would change everything about this system of yours. My word. Use folders for your bookmarks to keep things organized. Save important documentation as local pdfs so you can refer to it when you need to keep working and the site is down and you can't click to new pages (happened to me before). Use zotero for gods sakes to organize your literature. Just do it, promise me you will. You've given me a headache just imagining your workflow :)
Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93
#49I've never had Firefox crash. I guess they are reaching for those edge cases on power users who keep a billion tabs open. Maybe I'm missing some sort of productivity hack that involves leaving 100+ tabs open.
As someone who regularly has >300 tabs I can promise you that it is not because of any productivity gains (if anything the opposite lol)
Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93
#50What I want implemented.. Chrome/Firefox whatever... is that instead of unloading and reloading when I go back to the tab I want it to export basically an HTML file and when I click back to that tab, I want it to reload the HTML file instead with some notification/marker that it is a "cached" version. There are times where I'll leave a tab in the background that I don't want refreshed but when it gets unloaded, poof,…
It'd have to be more than just the HTML, it'd need to be everything the page used. Basically, all the data you'd get by clicking the "download HAR" button in the DevTools Network panel. Including some special sauce on top to replay any XHRs (assuming you want to get to the last state by replaying... otherwise the JS page state would need to serialized some how)