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Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

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Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#101

Post by lucb1e »

ct0 wrote: post #32
swang wrote: post #22

What 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 my pet peeve. Most of the time I notice this when im interested in a reddit thread that's deleted and I lose the ability to review it.

This, plus any sort of live data (think stock market, tweet feed, etc.), plus any sort of form input (input fields should survive since like Firefox 3.5, but then people discovered you could also dynamically build forms with Javascript and the rest is history).

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#102

Post by whatever1 »

keithalewis wrote: post #99
whatever1 wrote: post #82

Kudos to the devs who fixed it. In my c++ project I was trying for weeks to figure out how to release back to the OS the memory that my std::vector was occupying, only to find out that there is no straight forward way of achieving so.

Right curly brace '}'

I wish it was that easy. Destructing of your vectors does not guarantee that the memory will be released back to the OS, and it is not, if your OS is desktop Linux.

See an example here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26020580/huge-stdvectors...

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#103

Post by lucb1e »

smw wrote: post #95
kazinator wrote: post #68

> Firefox will respond by unloading memory-heavy but not actively used tabs. A dropped tab cannot always be reloaded to the same content. No thanks, I'd rather get more RAM or swap space for paging. The tabbing feature of "close all pages to the right of this one" is almost good enough for me. What I would like is some UI where all the tabs are compactly shown as rows in a table. Here, you could select tabs and move…

The Tree Style Tab add-on might be relevant to your interests? It's a little flaky since the switch to new style extensions, but still better than any other option I've seen: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

Seconded. I can't make heads or tails of other people's tabs but mine are in this neat list. Must say I don't use the tree feature at all and I disabled any kind of collapsing behavior, it's just vertical tabs (that Mozilla supported with an extension of their own! For all of two versions...) that help me with working on (looking at) various things in parallel across weeks.

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#104

Post by hiq »

earthscienceman wrote: post #21
animex wrote: post #13

I'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…

It sounds like you could just close these tabs once you switch to another one, or maybe have a timer on them so that they auto-close after N hours. There are probably extensions for that.

I use very few bookmarks now, the ones I have are just for websites that may be hard to find, or simply the ones that I visit enough to want a quick suggestion when I start typing the URL.

I almost never regret closing a tab, if I need it I can find it again. If not, it means it was not that relevant, and I might just as well start a new search from scratch to possibly find a better link instead.

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#105

Post by slightwinder »

danShumway wrote: post #62
earthscienceman wrote: post #21

Earlier 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…

Not going to expand on your point too much, but I've commented similarly in the past, and I heavily agree with you. There's so much room for innovation in browser UX, Bookmarks and tab archival never really evolved and it feels like we're just stuck in the past. Part of the problem is that it's tricky for people to innovate on bookmarks in an accessible way, because I'm not going to do heavy browsing in a 3rd-party C…

> Part of the problem is that it's tricky for people to innovate on bookmarks in an accessible way

Actually, I think it should be very simple. We already have Tree Style Tabs and it has Group-Tabs. Just mirror the Tab-Tree with a Bookmark-Tree, where Group-Tabs are folders, done. There is already a tab-tree-addon doing something similar (was it sideberry?), but it's still a bit fizzy and unstable and needs more polishing. I guess firefox itself needs more optimization in that area.

Similar could be done with Tab-Groups, when done good. There used to be a XUL-addon which added a tabbar for groups. Combined with tree style tabs on the side, this made a really awesome interface. I'm still sad that addons can't do this today anymore.

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#106

Post by bmicraft »

graindcafe wrote: post #46
sails wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ?

Not when the need is to increase battery life (reduce cpu usage). Having a couple of youtube/reddit tabs open in the background can really impact battery life I've found.

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#107

Post by remram »

swang wrote: post #22

What 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,…

My number one annoyance (with Firefox and Auto-Discard extension) is when I open back my tab and get a redirection to some login page. Login, get sent to homepage. Back button sends me to login page. No way to get back to the actual tab I'd left there...

That tab is then lost forever, unless I can find it in the history from whenever I had opened the tab.

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#108

Post by joemi »

asdff wrote: post #54
joemi wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

If the documentation site is worth its salt it will allow you to download a local html copy or even pdf. I personally haven't seen a documentation site that doesn't let you do this, since its important to store your documentation locally in the event the website goes down (happened to me so its not out of the question).

Oh, no doubt that (or just a single webpage view of all the documentation) _should_ be something that all documentation should provide, but I don't think it's any surprise that not everything has good/ideal documentation.

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#109

Post by shultays »

whatever1 wrote: post #82

Kudos to the devs who fixed it. In my c++ project I was trying for weeks to figure out how to release back to the OS the memory that my std::vector was occupying, only to find out that there is no straight forward way of achieving so.

Small allocations are allocated using sbrk and never truly freed. Larger ones use mmap which gets freed.

Guess the solution would be either preallocating/reserving everything, or maybe using custom allocators that works with bigger chunks

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#110

Post by progval »

remram wrote: post #107
swang wrote: post #22

What 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,…

My number one annoyance (with Firefox and Auto-Discard extension) is when I open back my tab and get a redirection to some login page. Login, get sent to homepage. Back button sends me to login page. No way to get back to the actual tab I'd left there... That tab is then lost forever, unless I can find it in the history from whenever I had opened the tab.

Long-click the back button to get a list of previous pages in the tab.
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