Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

hacks.mozilla.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 283 posts

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#171

Post by dredmorbius »

1. Just. Fucking. Unload. The. Tab. Already. I keep tabs around for context and reference. Lots of them. [1]

2. Preserve. User. State. I don't want the page to reload. I want what had been there to be restored. Page position, content, any inputs or adjustments I'd made. Not updated data, but previous state.

3. Do. Not. Lose. My. Shit. I can accomplish this far better myself than you will ever have need to do.

4. Any tab last viewed > 10--15 minutes ago is all but certainly fair game. Just peel it off disk quickly when resumed, that's all I ask.

All that said, this is progress, thank you, I don't want to sound ungrateful.[2] But there is so much futher to go.

________________________________

Notes:

1. 1,530+ at last count. Don't judge me, unless you're a sphynx of black quartz, and then only my vow.

2. A bit late for that, I'm aware.

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#172

Post by subsection1h »

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…

> I use very few bookmarks now [...] if I need it I can find it again.

I have thousands of Org files that include hundreds of thousands of references to sources of information, and I'm confused by your workflow. How do you quickly relocate sources of the highest quality information that aren't among the top search results for relevant queries (which is the result of search engine rankings mostly being popularity contests whose participants are dummies)?

For example, I recently bought a new toilet after reading in-depth discussions about toilets at a small web forum for plumbers who were far more knowledgeable than people at related subreddits, etc. I don't remember the name of that forum, but it's in my toilets.org file, along with 452 other toilet-related links. Why would I want to relocate that web forum and the other 452 sources of information in toilets.org the next time I buy a toilet?

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#173

Post by dredmorbius »

parhamn wrote: post #16

I've been experimenting and exploring a few ways to implement this for my own browser [1]. The options seem to be: - Great Suspender style suspension [2] - swap page with a simple low memory placeholder and reload back (detecting interactions) - Chrome/FF style tab discarding (only happens with memory pressure) [this post and 3] - Optimistic unloading with screenshots (this is what we're experimenting with) - we susp…

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28768413

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#174

Post by vessel »

DangitBobby wrote: post #165
Arcsech wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet another instance of SPAs pointlessly reinventing problems we solved decades ago.

Can you seriously not think of a single use case for SPAs?

Single-page apps are forgivable for media oriented sites, so the video/music can keep playing as you navigate the site. in the past this was done with pop-up players and was generally messier, so I like SPAs for this.

Literally every other type of website on the planet should use traditional loading pages.

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#175

Post by ajot »

So, if I want to disable this, I should set a big number to the browser.low_commit_space_threshold_mb pref in about:config, right?

I just don't get why this would be useful. When I start Firefox, inactive tabs aren't loaded until I click on them. If something is eating RAM, I can close that tab or close Firefox, and very rarely Firefox would crash. Why would someone like me, that doesn't suspend/hybernate their computer, want this and get a tab unloaded without my explicit will to do so?

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#176

Post by brokenmachine »

danShumway wrote: post #151
hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I respectfully disagree with both of you. A tab is a bookmark, the fact that tabs are allowed to run background processes and consume a crazy amount of system resources is the problem. Why the hell is JavaScript allowed to run amok? I understand things like Spotify, but Facebook has no need to stream news feed updates if you aren’t even looking at the page. It really needs to be up to browsers to stop this behaviour…

I'm not sure I follow. Either that or I'm not sure you understand what I'm trying to say. Turning off Javascript won't suddenly make 900+ tabs easy to manage. The UX isn't designed for that volume of separate pages, the tabs are cumbersome to navigate and still just don't really lend themselves well to large sessions that span multiple topics. I'd believe the same thing even if Javascript had never been invented, tab…

>Turning off Javascript won't suddenly make 900+ tabs easy to manage.

I'm fine with searching. I want to have searchable fulltext in those 900+ tabs.

Just for a back of the napkin calculation, I took the plain text from this comments page and saved it, and it came to 52kb.

My PC has 64Gb RAM. So even without any form of compression or indexing, I should be able to hold searchable fulltext of over a million tabs in RAM.

My PC also has Terabytes of slower storage.

Now please tell me, why should I ever have to close a tab?

Because Facebook needs continuous doomscrolling for its victims?

Well, that's a tradeoff that I wish wasn't forced on me, because I'd gladly force all those sites to be paginated if it was possible.

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#177

Post by brokenmachine »

asdff wrote: post #48
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…

I hear your qualms about bookmarks but to me having 100 open tabs does not save you from any of those issues at all, it just exposes you to things you never would have encountered otherwise. Macbooks I've owned randomly crash, always has always will. If I had 100s of tabs that would certainly be annoying to deal with opening that session again and watching my computer achieve liftoff with the fans when those 100 tabs…

Problem with that is that now I spend my whole life figuring out how to save stuff as an offline pdf or whatever, and the pages always break in some way when you try to save them.

Often when given the option either mucking around with that or just leaving the tab in the background, I end up choosing the latter.

Our tools should be better.

Why can't it be one click to save the whole page? At least the url/text/images... I have terabytes of storage but no easy way to save a webpage.

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#178

Post by nieve »

ajot wrote: post #175

So, if I want to disable this, I should set a big number to the browser.low_commit_space_threshold_mb pref in about:config, right? I just don't get why this would be useful. When I start Firefox, inactive tabs aren't loaded until I click on them. If something is eating RAM, I can close that tab or close Firefox, and very rarely Firefox would crash. Why would someone like me, that doesn't suspend/hybernate their compu…

This is intended for when the alternative is the browser crashing or worse the OS locking up. Your browser exiting unloads _every_ tab.

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#179

Post by brokenmachine »

techwizrd wrote: post #47
throwaway123x2 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that possible, I get FF crashes literally every time I load a moderately intensive website (eg. Google Keep). I still use FF because I can't abide Chrome. My PC is admittedly a bit older (only 6 gigs RAM) but still.

I routinely have hundreds of tabs open in Firefox at any given time without crashes on macOS and Linux. The tabs include everything from documentation, Jupyter notebooks, papers, Jira, Reddit, HN, Github, Gitlab, GMail, Google Keep, Todoist, etc. I can't even recall the last time Firefox crashed for me.

Many hundreds of tabs here in FF on Windows and pretty rock solid.

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#180

Post by bombcar »

favorited wrote: post #45
bombcar wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like they need a "free without uncompressing" feature.

I think the issue would be that the compressor works on whole memory pages (I assume), so you'd need to know that the whole page could be freed. There might be kernel VM functions to handle that functionality manually, like if you were building a zone allocator or something?

I think it’s kind of related to how the oomkiller really needs to be integrated with the applications - the application needs to be able to identify memory as “critical, nice to have, ehhhhh, and cache” and then let the kernel throw them away as necessary. Once you start having to throw away critical pages you oomkill the process.
Post reply on HN