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

211–220 of 283 posts

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#211

Post by gcp »

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…

>very rarely Firefox would crash

The feature stops (or reduces the likelyhood) of that happening. It literally is made to trigger in a situation where the alternative is to crash.

>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?

This will ensure that you crash and have to reload all of your tabs instead of the oldest ones, yes :-)

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#212

Post by gcp »

forgotpwd16 wrote: post #185

This has existed for two years now (option browser.tabs.unloadOnlyOnLowMemory) but someone had to manually enabled it.

It wasn't enabled by default because it didn't work well enough. Getting better low memory triggers was a key to making this an overall benefit, and not just a user annoyance.

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#213

Post by gcp »

netman21 wrote: post #162

Why wait until a crash is imminent? Before I hop on an important video conf I have to remember to open Activity Monitor and manually kill all the FirefoxCP Web Content processes. It crashes each tab and frees up all the memory.

Because for some people their open sites, and the ability to switch quickly between them, is the most important use of their machine and what they want their RAM to be used for.

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#214

Post by perryizgr8 »

yunohn wrote: post #200
eloisius wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s cheaper to build single page apps using web developers than to build and maintain multiple platform-specific native apps.

Not everything needs to be a native application, nor should it be. The vast majority of SaaS and such apps are SPA/equivalent and would NOT benefit from being yet-another-installable app. Could you provide examples (not exceptions) maybe to support your PoV?

> The vast majority of SaaS and such apps are SPA/equivalent and would NOT benefit from being yet-another-installable app.

Could you provide few examples of such apps that would not benefit from being native?

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#215

Post by Kliment »

hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #135
Kliment wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a handful of horrible websites that use enormous amounts of CPU and memory. You don't need too many of those to drag a browser down. I am a thousands-of-tabs user (and yes it's an awesome productivity hack for a number of my workflows, but never mind that) and I don't normally have any problems. Unless I make the mistake of opening some trash website (Slack used to be like that, I've not used Slack in years s…

Slack is still trash. I segregate browsers by using different Linux users for different tasks (slack, Facebook, general, etc) which works well with my similarly bespoke workflow. The problem with this arrangement is that When Firefox has pending system upgrades it requires all browsers be closed and reopened. I’m curious about your productivity hack though, I use a grid keyboard layout with ~20 workspaces grouped to…

I do electronics. I keep my BOM entries as tabs, with a tab for each major component, its distributor page, and often its manufacturer page where the documentation lives. Different projects have their parts chunked together as bunches of tabs, so I can search my tabs for a part number and get that and everything else in the same project is nearby in the tab list. I currently have >3000 tabs open.

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#216

Post by nunodonato »

dredmorbius wrote: post #171

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…

I can never understand people that have more than 10 tabs open :P When I reach that number I start closing. Seems to me just a waste of space and the whole tab bar is useless and messy (yes, I know about tab extensions).

People should really get back to bookmarks, thats what they are for.

Besides my usual bookmark folders, I have folders to hold temporary bookmarks (ToRead, ResearchSupport, etc...). These I know I will delete after going through the content.

But I wonder if the whole bookmarking thing got frozen in time, and is not sufficient for most people. Perhaps new features are needed in order to become more useful again and replace the whole "keep-tabs-open" behavior

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#217

Post by Kliment »

TapamN wrote: post #142
Kliment wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I know what you mean, and yeah unfortunately it doesn't work that way. I have js disabled on almost everything anyway, but having a way to pause js would indeed be delicious.

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#218

Post by Dylan16807 »

stan_rogers wrote: post #33
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…

...or you could simply download what's necessary/interesting and ensure that you've got the data as it was. Because people seem to think that everything needs to be an app, having something open in a tab is no guarantee that it'll be there when you revisit the tab.

The problem is it's not simple.

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#219

Post by iggldiggl »

Zardoz84 wrote: post #190
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,…

Firefox dont loses state or information when unloads a tab.

Of course it does. It tries saving the current scroll position and form data that might be present, and a few other bits of information, but for any even-just moderately complex JS-powered page this can easily break down unless the page in question has been properly coded to save and restore its state across a tab closing and re-opening (and a lot of pages haven't been properly coded in that regard).

Just try using any infinite scroll-type page – unless the pages saves the scroll position itself (to name one popular page, Instagram doesn't for example), all your scroll progress is lost once the tab is unloaded.

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#220

Post by yunohn »

perryizgr8 wrote: post #214
yunohn wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everything needs to be a native application, nor should it be. The vast majority of SaaS and such apps are SPA/equivalent and would NOT benefit from being yet-another-installable app. Could you provide examples (not exceptions) maybe to support your PoV?

> The vast majority of SaaS and such apps are SPA/equivalent and would NOT benefit from being yet-another-installable app. Could you provide few examples of such apps that would not benefit from being native?

I haven't wished for any/most web-apps that I use to be native. This is also the status quo.

As such, people with an opposing viewpoint (like the earlier commenter) should provide a basis for their argument.

https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/burden-of-proof

Post reply on HN