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Reducing power consumption for background tabs

blog.chromium.org

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Re: Reducing power consumption for background tabs

#51

Post by hawski »

frontier wrote: post #42
zerr wrote: post #2

The Great Suspender is a great plugin to achieve this.

I have switched to The Great Discarder, by the same developer. Advantages over The Great Suspender: - More memory savings - Compatible with chrome tab syncing - Super lightweight extension that uses no content scripts or persistent background scripts Disadvantages over The Great Suspender: - No visibility on which tabs have been suspended - Unable to prevent a tab from reloading when it gains focus https://chrome.goo…

Word of warning!

I just switched to The Great Discarder from The Great Suspender. You probably want to resume all suspended tabs back, because if you will remove The Great Suspender extension suspended tabs will get closed.

Other then that it was what I always wanted from The Great Suspender (or the browser) in the first place.

Re: Reducing power consumption for background tabs

#52

Post by yladiz »

overcast wrote: post #28

Not sure if any of you use "okcupid.com", but a single tab of that site will consume 4-5GB of RAM in a matter of an hour. Eventually grinding the entire browser to a halt, and nearly killing the OS in the process. There is a SERIOUS memory issue on that site, and it's always been that way for me. Safari, Chrome, Firefox on a Mac.

Maybe Safari handles it differently, but I've left Okcupid on accidentally for hours at a time in the background and I've never noticed anything specifically memory hungry with it.

Re: Reducing power consumption for background tabs

#53

Post by vanderZwan »

a3_nm wrote: post #46
e40 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try uMatrix (in Chrome). 95% of sites are readable with no modifications. Videos often don't play, but I consider this a feature not a bug.

The problem with uMatrix is that many sites that rely on third-party Javascript will silently fail (i.e., not load, or show a "loading" animation that never ends), so you need to remember to turn it off for such websites.

It helps if you open uMatrix every time, see what third-party CDNs are used, give them necessary permissions but not more (only images if they don't need a script, no cookies unless it's necessary, etc), and put them in the whitelist. It's a bit of work in the beginning but after a while almost all new pages you'll come across will run fine.

Re: Reducing power consumption for background tabs

#54

Post by jorvi »

cmurf wrote: post #30
joe_the_user wrote: post #19

I'd honestly like to be able to "freeze" a page entirely once it fully appeared in the browser window. A good percentage of web pages both take all my CPU and become unreadable halfway through the page. A big factors seems to be that the pages that are built out of layers of active advertising devices - a given advertiser isn't concerned that they're one of ten monetizing devices pasted onto a gvien page. And there's…

Privacy Badger helps a ton once you go through a dozen sites and it starts blocking ads and trackers.

Still hasn't been released as a Safari extension and that's an absolute must since other browsers murder macOS battery life, often cutting it short by 2-4 hours.

Re: Reducing power consumption for background tabs

#55

Post by overcast »

yladiz wrote: post #52
overcast wrote: post #28

Not sure if any of you use "okcupid.com", but a single tab of that site will consume 4-5GB of RAM in a matter of an hour. Eventually grinding the entire browser to a halt, and nearly killing the OS in the process. There is a SERIOUS memory issue on that site, and it's always been that way for me. Safari, Chrome, Firefox on a Mac.

Maybe Safari handles it differently, but I've left Okcupid on accidentally for hours at a time in the background and I've never noticed anything specifically memory hungry with it.

Safari seems to be the worst affected for me. I thought maybe it was adblockers or something, disabled all plugins, and still persists.

Re: Reducing power consumption for background tabs

#56

Post by apetresc »

kalleboo wrote: post #45
apetresc wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those notification APIs still get triggered by Javascript running in those tabs. As far as I know, there's no equivalent to the mobile notification APIs where there's a single dedicated socket listening to a central server.

Safari's notifications can use the Apple push notifications server the same way iOS apps do.

Ah, that's pretty cool. Still, I don't think any of the other browsers have it that way, and Safari's desktop market share is ~2%.

Re: Reducing power consumption for background tabs

#57

Post by joshstrange »

erikdesjardins wrote: post #25
vdnkh wrote: post #3

I wish this could be (maybe it already can be?) disabled for environments where I don't care about battery life/power consumption. This change probably saves me a fraction of a cent per month at the cost of a worse web experience (I'm a bit of a tab hoarder).

Seems that it can be turned off at: chrome://flags/#expensive-background-timer-throttling ...though they may eventually remove the flag.

Good for debugging an issue for sure but if you do any web-dev I'd shy away from disabling it for fear you might miss something that breaks on one of your sites because of it.

Re: Reducing power consumption for background tabs

#58

Post by mdpopescu »

alkonaut wrote: post #12

How much benefit is there in doing anything at all on a background tab? Would there be many use cases where simply suspending the background tab threads would lead to a much worse user experience? I wouldn't mind having my background Netflix just stop, or having to wait a few secs for an interval refresh after bringing a tab to front. But seeing as this seems an active area of research and debate I have a feeling tha…

During competitions I sometimes watch two twitch streams in two different tabs, turning just the sound on and off depending on which one is more interesting. (I had up to four open at the same time.)

Re: Reducing power consumption for background tabs

#59

Post by joe_the_user »

aeontech wrote: post #47
joe_the_user wrote: post #19

I'd honestly like to be able to "freeze" a page entirely once it fully appeared in the browser window. A good percentage of web pages both take all my CPU and become unreadable halfway through the page. A big factors seems to be that the pages that are built out of layers of active advertising devices - a given advertiser isn't concerned that they're one of ten monetizing devices pasted onto a gvien page. And there's…

Check out The Great Suspender [1] - not quite what you mean, but it basically unloads the tab and replaces it with a bare bones placeholder after it's been inactive for a bit. When you come back to it, you just click the link and it reloads the url that it had. Super handy if you're in the habit of leaving a few windows with a few dozen tabs each laying around, as I do. [1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/…

Yeah no,

That just replaces the page with blank placeholder. How hard would it be to replace the page with an image of it's contents?

I was thinking about a plugin.

Re: Reducing power consumption for background tabs

#60

Post by jplayer01 »

aeontech wrote: post #47
joe_the_user wrote: post #19

I'd honestly like to be able to "freeze" a page entirely once it fully appeared in the browser window. A good percentage of web pages both take all my CPU and become unreadable halfway through the page. A big factors seems to be that the pages that are built out of layers of active advertising devices - a given advertiser isn't concerned that they're one of ten monetizing devices pasted onto a gvien page. And there's…

Check out The Great Suspender [1] - not quite what you mean, but it basically unloads the tab and replaces it with a bare bones placeholder after it's been inactive for a bit. When you come back to it, you just click the link and it reloads the url that it had. Super handy if you're in the habit of leaving a few windows with a few dozen tabs each laying around, as I do. [1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/…

Just curious - I wonder why this hasn't been updated since 2015.
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