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Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

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Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#102
post #56
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chrome actually already has this built in, too. If you close your window, you'll get a browsable "x tabs" entry in your browsing history. An additional 20-30 MB of memory could be saved by not installing this extension.

True, but this extension will help you distinguish between the tabs you want to close forever and the tabs you want to return to later.

So do bookmarks. And this overlap becomes obvious as people inevitably ask for Chrome or OneTab to allow them to cluster tabs by topic/project -- because a linear scan is never going to 'work' for people who leave enough tabs open that it becomes a 'problem'.

The underlying problem here is workflow.

People are leaving tabs open as a reminder of things to which they intend to return. (Regardless of whether they will or not; that's another discussion.) And they're not bookmarking, because bookmarking begs organizational overhead, which leads to its own mess. (neither tags nor folders are great or sufficient)

And who knows if a bookmark will still point to the content you intended, when you finally get back to it?

So the problem is ultimately that bookmarking is broken, both for quick reference and longer-term storage. So why not fix that?

Why not a system where bookmarking a site saves a copy to a (cloud-stored) cache. [1] And then searches can be done on the content in that cache. And hits can be served both from the cache, and a simultaneously downloaded 'live' result, available with a toggle. [2]

So that one can bookmark a brag-post about a neat jquery-enabled dropdown list and not have to worry about categorizing it, nor whether or not it will be there in a year, and be confident that they can refer to it again with a simple search of any of the key words that occur to them. [3]

[1] Because one can never know what will happen to content online (changes, broken links, takedowns, etc) and doing a federated search across thousands of bookmarked sites looking for 'jquery dropdown' is going to be a nightmare.

[2] Room here for a great feature of non-trivial difficulty: change-detection and display of diffs (if any) rendered in-line.

[3] Or even searching by meta-data such as date-of-bookmark, location or source-device. "That thing I was reading on my phone last spring, when I was stuck in Chicago on business..." can be surprisingly useful when searching.

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#103
post #94

This is the equivalent of closing all tabs, with the added bonus of having a list of what you just closed. I refuse to compromise on functionality because Chrome can't get its memory deal together.

Agreed. There is no bonus here. Now if you can hot switch between tabs, or rather use some key shortcuts to better manage the switching, that would bee good.

On a Mac, cmd-1 or cmd-2 or cmd-3 or cmd-n jumps to the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, nth tab.

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#104

Memory use seems like a really pointless thing for users to care about. There's a widespread intuition that using RAM is inherently bad and low memory usage is a worthwhile goal, but it doesn't really make sense. The key performance goal is minimising latency, which is best served by using as much RAM as possible without having to swap out. RAM is now fantastically cheap. 16GB of DDR3 costs less than $120 in either D…

Completely disagree. We've seen too much complacency in recent years when it comes to memory usage. Developers think it's ok for their applications to bloat out and have a huge memory footprint. I'd rather applications were developed in such a way that they were more memory efficient. I've had a recent incident in which Chrome was consuming about 7GB of memory, just because I had about a hundred tabs open! It was rea…

just because I had about a hundred tabs open

That is a lot of tabs, though.

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#105
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some long-running hidden chromium process that doesn't seem to die when you quit or force-quit chrome on mountain lion. You have to go into activity monitor to kill it. This never happened in Snow Leopard.

Could it be that you have "Continue running background apps when Google Chrome is closed" setting to be on?

"This is only applicable to Google Chrome browser on Windows and Linux." (source: https://support.google.com/chrome/bin/answer.py?hl=en&an...)

the mystery continues ...

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#106
I want the opposite for Firefox on android - some way to instruct the browser NOT to unload background tabs because I might have been partway through entering data in those and just gone off to another tab to check something I was writing about.

I have 1GB of RAM in my Note and rarely run more than one thing at a time. FF for android seems to have a really aggressive unload policy.

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#107
It could be an extension that froze a tab: for example right click on a tab, save the data on disk and saves ram. When you go back it will take a lot of time.

This extension opens the page again, loading it which leads to bigger time load.

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#108
post #106

I want the opposite for Firefox on android - some way to instruct the browser NOT to unload background tabs because I might have been partway through entering data in those and just gone off to another tab to check something I was writing about. I have 1GB of RAM in my Note and rarely run more than one thing at a time. FF for android seems to have a really aggressive unload policy.

This is a big problem for me in ChromeOS too.

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#109
Noticed that when I use CRTL+click to open tabs from the list the tab counter still decrements even though the number of tabs in the list does not decrease. Now I'm looking at a list of tabs with -3 tabs at the top.

Re: Show HN: Save Memory in Google Chrome

#110

Memory use seems like a really pointless thing for users to care about. There's a widespread intuition that using RAM is inherently bad and low memory usage is a worthwhile goal, but it doesn't really make sense. The key performance goal is minimising latency, which is best served by using as much RAM as possible without having to swap out. RAM is now fantastically cheap. 16GB of DDR3 costs less than $120 in either D…

i agree.

this is the logic of someone willing to adapt to the environment around him. While the best solution would be more efficient programming, consumers are best served to max out their RAM and work with what they're given.

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