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Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

hacks.mozilla.org

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Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#51

Post by karlding »

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,…

Chromium has "Paint Preview" (aka "Freeze-Dried Tabs") [0] which does something similar. Basically it consists of a capture (Skia Picture and links in a proto), compositing the capture into bitmap tiles, and then playback to play the page using the native UI.

I think it's only supported on Chrome for Android right now.

[0] https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/refs/heads/...

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#53

Post by csdvrx »

godshatter wrote: post #42
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…

Bookmarking systems are completely outdated, but I'm not sure what they should be replaced with. What would help you in this case so you didn't have to worry about losing the tabs if you closed them?

> I'm not sure what they should be replaced with

Try Edge, the collection feature is a game changer.

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#54

Post by asdff »

joemi wrote: post #44
stan_rogers wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...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.

I can't speak for the person you're replying too, but I have somewhat similar use cases sometimes, and what you propose isn't really a fix. For instance, when programming, the documentation could be spread out amongst many webpages (like each chapter or each section in a chapter is a separate page). And that might not be the only reference I'm using. And then add in separate pages for examples, too. It's not always p…

If the documentation site is worth its salt it will allow you to download a local html copy or even pdf. I personally haven't seen a documentation site that doesn't let you do this, since its important to store your documentation locally in the event the website goes down (happened to me so its not out of the question).

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#55

Post by loufe »

throwaway123x2 wrote: post #38
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.

I don't know if I've experienced a crash in Firefox in years. I would really suggest taking a look at the crash logs and maybe do a checkup on your machine's health.

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#56

Post by parhamn »

nvrspyx wrote: post #30
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

Good Q! It is something we are looking at/trying. It's a bit more complex as you have to have a pool of suspended renderers to swap the html into as the user switches tabs (the HTML still needs to be properly sandboxed). Then you include static asset loads, etc it becomes less 'instant'.

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#58

Post by okasaki »

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,…

One way to fix this is to buy more memory (if possible). Then your tabs will be much less likely to be unloaded.

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#60

Post by pps »

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…

Opera has a nice way to deal with this problem - contexts (similar to tabs groups in other browsers, but it completely removes unneeded stuff from tab bar) and recently they also introduced pinboards. I recently came back to Opera and I'm quite impressed of how this works https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2FbCCCmV9U

Oh, and "Flow" which is something like personal chat app, you can send links and notes and have access to them from Opera on mobile too. It's achievable in other ways obviously, but the workflow here is smoother, because it's built in and sharing link to website is done with one click.

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