Tab Unloading in Firefox 93 • Hacker News Board

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#141

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

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.

Two web apps I use every day at work have this behaviour when I look away and my session times out. Both of them break web expectations by having the same generic URL for every page. I leave half a dozen tabs open, come back later or the next day and if I'm not careful to login again in a new tab before I refresh them, they're lost. It's the kind of thing which makes me convinced the developers never use their own system, never sit with real users, and think a lot less of the vendor even though I have no power to influence the decision to renew them or not.

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#142

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

Kliment wrote: post #34

ihsw wrote: post #2

It'd be great if this was tunable and usable in non-OOM scenarios.

It is if you add Total Suspender.

I just tried it out, but it doesn't work the way I hoped it would.

I was hoping for some kind of SIGSTOP equivalent on any JavaScript when the tab doesn't have focus (without unloading anything). Instead, it basically closes the tab but leaves it on the tab bar, and when you return to it the tab gets reloaded.

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#143

Post by heresie-dabord » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 11:10 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…

Right-click on a tab.

Select all tabs.

Bookmark tabs...

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#144

Post by swiley » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 11:16 PM UTC

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 what I'm planning for my browser; the web engine will serialize a continuation of sorts that you can load into new instances and mutate in eg cli tools or another computer. Still chugging through basic features like js for now though.

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#145

Post by swiley » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 11:19 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…

Bookmarks have limitations but I really think the issues most people have are not forming good habits.

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#146

Post by jodrellblank » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 11:19 PM UTC

tomjen3 wrote: post #94

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?

How can they be outdated? I have a bookmark folder at work related to some internal systems that I need to access to do a specific job. Being able to open a bunch of specific URLs at once and then have access to what I need right away is really, really nice and I haven't found any other way to get close. The same with youtube videos (I like to run hour long videos that create a soundscapes in the background), it is s…

I'm not saying it would be better, but you could shell script your platform's equivalent of:

    start firefox http://example.com
    start firefox http://example.org
    start firefox http://example.net

and that would "open a bunch of specific URLs at once" with a single invocation. Or make a filesystem folder with URL links in it and select many of them and open all at once. Or make a HTML page with some javascript which 'clicks' multiple links at once.

The only thing that does not do is appear in the browser UI itself, and browsers go a long way to try and make sure bookmarks don't either :|

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#147

Post by dmitshur » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 11:24 PM UTC

It’s interesting to me that the lack of this feature has been one of the key differentiating features of browsers on desktop OSes compared to mobile browsers, such as Safari on iPads (and iPhones). It’s hard to do serious work on a mobile device that may silently unload a tab with unfinished work just because it was placed in background, whereas desktop browsers somewhat guaranteed that wouldn’t happen.

In a way this change probably narrows the gap between browsers on desktop and mobile OSes. Hopefully this is a good thing, as I expect this implementation will be smart enough not to unload tabs with filled in forms and such.

I could be wrong in this interpretation.

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#148

Post by tyteen4a03 » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 11:28 PM UTC

Unrelated, but how do I get Firefox / Iceraven Android to _not_ unload tabs? It's really annoying when I want to load article pages for offline reading then Firefox just decides it wants to load the page again in Airplane mode.

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#149

Post by dorgo » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 11:29 PM UTC

NoGravitas wrote: post #61

SilasX wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This! I feel like Back used to get instant results all the time, and now it's almost always a big delay, which is a huge pain -- plus, it loses your position on infiniscroll and other dark patterns. Part of it is caused by site coding, but part of it is browsers treating "back" as some species of new page load/arrival/selection. And I know it's possible to get us back to the old days! The functionality I want is almo…

Back basically works like it always did on static sites. Blame the fashion for single-page apps and endless scrolling for it being broken.

No. Blame browsers for not being user-agents any more. Browsers can cache websites, but only if websites tell them to do so. Users are never asked ( there is no setting ). And since websites usually don't want to be cached (for too long) browsers have to reload them ( which takes time ). Thats the reason Back-buttons are slow. Thats ( one of ) the reason(s) everybody has 100+ tabs open.

SPAs and infinite scroll are (maybe) bad, but not the cause of this problem.

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#150

Post by dorgo » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 11:33 PM UTC

SilasX wrote: post #96

vbezhenar wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK whether page will be restored or reloaded depends on its cache headers. I remember breaking back button in one of my projects, because users asked for it, as they expected fresh data for some reason. It was not SPA, just old server rendered website, so I disabled caching via response headers and it worked.

Hm I'm going to see if there's a setting to override a site's choice of that header.

I found no setting. Im using an addon "ModHeader" to set the response header (for all websites) "Expires" to a date far in the future. It worked in the past, but doesn't work at the moment. Have to debug it.