161–170 of 283 posts
> 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…
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.
Or you know you could just if (!malloc_tab()) do_unload();. But that assumes firefox wasn't coded with malloc can never fail.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Yet another instance of SPAs pointlessly reinventing problems we solved decades ago.
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,…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 polis…
are you getting it?
a tab, a bookmark, and a history entry
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 think this gets to the root of why you're leaving a tab open. You might have non-persisted state in the page, hence you don't want to close it.
None of the usual suspects generally suggested as alternatives to leaving tabs open really addresses any of this. For all the research into browsers and their use, the concept of user state and workflow is utterly ignored.
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…
Mobile devices are so utterly unsuited to actual productive use for this very reason. (I'm quite familiar with this, have attempted to use them in this manner for years, and am typing this on a Chrome/Android session I utterly despise.)
The problem extends to other tools -- Termux, useful as it is, also randomly gets garbage collected and killed. Best I can understand, Android actually employs some AI-based memory management whose training goal seems to have been "how to maximally annoy dredmorbius".
Someone's earned their KPI.