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Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

hacks.mozilla.org

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Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#31

Post by Kliment »

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.

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 so I don't know if it still is) and then it bogs down everything.

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#32

Post by ct0 »

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 my pet peeve. Most of the time I notice this when im interested in a reddit thread that's deleted and I lose the ability to review it.

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#33

Post by stan_rogers »

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…

...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.

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#35

Post by capitainenemo »

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,…

I know this doesn't help with the cache part, but if you pin a tab, it used to prevent it from getting unloaded. Might help if a particular tab is important to you and they still honour that.

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#36

Post by SilasX »

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! 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 almost exactly what I would (already) get if I just opened every link in a new tab and switched back instead of triggering the back button.

(Which, incidentally, is what many sites recommend doing now for that very reason -- at least reddit.)

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#37

Post by sails »

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,…

Would love to know if this is practically possible. I use Auto tab discard [] to save memory, but I'd much prefer the ability to retrieve an html file than having to reload the page. A simple way to save that html file of current view when bookmarking a page would also be a useful addition in a similar vein.

[] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc...

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#38

Post by throwaway123x2 »

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.

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.

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#39

Post by bitcuration »

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…

That and the fact bookmark may ends up in a removed page, orphan link. Essentially people leave tabs open meant to keep a cache of it, maybe subconsciously. Bookmark doesn't do that.

I don't mind maintaining it, so sometimes I use getpocket for that purpose but getpocket is not organized and frankly is not made for this purpose.

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#40

Post by cpeterso »

gostsamo wrote: post #26
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.

Do you have any crash report IDs in your Firefox's about:crashes page? I can check whether a Bugzilla bug report has already been filed for those crashes.
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