Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

Post by robertoandred » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 9:09 PM UTC

Ajedi32 wrote: post #65

godshatter wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bookmarking systems are completely outdated, but I'm not sure what they should be replaced with.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?

Maybe a sufficiently good implementation of history search could replace the need for bookmarks entirely. Instead of just matching on page titles, match on content as well. Rank results according to relevance and time spent on the page. Or alternately, maybe bookmarks could become an extension of existing tab management features. Something like Chrome's tab groups or the Tree Style Tabs[1] extension for Firefox, but…

Post by oauea » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 9:11 PM UTC

hiq wrote: post #104

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…

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 n…

Post by Waterluvian » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 9:13 PM UTC

bogidon wrote: post #77

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,…

I was surprised recently to learn about the back/forward cache (bfcache) [1], a common browser optimization that sort of does what you're describing but stores a more complete snapshot of the page, including the JS heap. I'm not sure if it's used in this new FF feature (the article doesn't give details about the mechanism of unloading). However the bfcache unsurprisingly causes edge cases in JS-heavy pages/SPAs, and…

Post by ajsnigrutin » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 9:25 PM UTC

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…

Post by moehm » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 9:30 PM UTC

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #117

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…

It's more of a symptom, how bloated the modern web is. 5+ browser windows on 32mb of ram was never an issue back in the win95 time (so, whole os + browser and 5 pages). Now, we've got 8 gb of ram as pretty much minimum on mid range laptops, soon even on phones (flagships have it now), and browsers have become a biggest memory user (outside of newish games) on an average pc.