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Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

hacks.mozilla.org

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Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#21

Post by earthscienceman »

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 on if I'm coding or if I'm writing my own papers. These pages are often very temporary for me, in the sense that maybe I'm browsing documentation and the exact place in the documentation that I'm visiting changes in time. Or maybe I initially believe a paper will be relevant to future work but I haven't read it and would like to get back to it in some time. I could spend the mental overhead of keeping an organized bookmark system that changes with these workflows day in and day out... or... I could just leave the tabs open. Guess which I choose? I have a laptop with 64Gb of ram for a reason. Although firefox is pretty fantastic these days in terms of resource usage.

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#22

Post by swang »

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 lose the original data from that page.

I know about Chrome and its ability to prevent discards, but I want this to be the default or at least a toggle option. I don't mind the unloading of the tab, I just get annoyed when it reloads.

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#23

Post by bombcar »

favorited wrote: post #17

Something surprising I learned recently is that this is an anti-pattern when building an iOS app. iOS has a memory compressor, so if you try to purge resources in a low-memory situation, it can cause memory use to spike as the things you're trying to free get decompressed. The SDK provides a notification when memory pressure is high, so people try to get aggressive and purge their caches and unused assets when that n…

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

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#24

Post by favorited »

MayeulC wrote: post #12

> On Windows, Firefox gets a notification from the operating system (setup using CreateMemoryResourceNotification) indicating that the available physical memory is running low. I've longed for such a mechanism in Linux, but I don't think it exists. This should at least be an OS-level signal IMO, though a D-Bus interface could also work. Integrating with one of the recent userspace OOM daemons could be a good idea.

IIRC on Linux, it overcommits when allocating, so you can keep mallocing memory beyond capacity and it won't actually fail until you go to use that memory.

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#25

Post by parhamn »

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…

I'd love to talk to you! I'm making a browser which already has automated ML tagging and full text search of content (should you enable it) so you don't really need bookmarks to do smart search and recall. We also have a really cool and well indexed snippet tool built in for pieces of information you want to keep and share. Id love to learn more about your use cases, if you're interested reach out to parham@synth.app :)

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#26

Post by gostsamo »

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 using a screen reader and FF regularly crashes due to some broken memory management in the accessibility service. If this unloading cleans the memory before it gets critical, I'm all for it.

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#27

Post by toomuchtodo »

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…

The tabs are the bookmarks, we just need better management of tab contents (ephemeral, short term persist, long term persist, etc).

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#28

Post by lifthrasiir »

parhamn wrote: post #25
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'd love to talk to you! I'm making a browser which already has automated ML tagging and full text search of content (should you enable it) so you don't really need bookmarks to do smart search and recall. We also have a really cool and well indexed snippet tool built in for pieces of information you want to keep and share. Id love to learn more about your use cases, if you're interested reach out to parham@synth.app…

My use case may qualify; I have anywhere from 100 to 1,000+ open tabs across three different devices and four browser instances (three Firefoxes, one Chrome) at the peak. But judging from your website it looks like a full browser (presumably built out of Chromium) and not an extension that can be used in any browser, so, ugh.

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#30

Post by nvrspyx »

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…

Why not cache the HTML/CSS instead of using a screenshot? I'm no expert on web/browser development, so I don't know the difficulty or feasibility in caching just the visible bits leaving a static HTML/CSS snapshot minus any javascript seems, but it seems more ideal IMO since you'd still be able to click links.

Just a thought

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