Google Tests Battery-Conserving Feature Perfect for Hoarding Tabs (arstechnica.com) 20
Google is testing a method to boost the battery life of Chromebooks by changing how they work with the Chrome web browser. It's shaping up to be a potentially attractive update for users who leave a lot of tabs open on their Chromebooks. From a report: Google Chrome currently cuts the CPU time and throttles the CPU load for any tab you haven't touched or looked at for five minutes. Google calls this "intensive throttling of JavaScript timer wake up," and it's supposed to help conserve system battery life. The feature also makes the page wake up once every 60 seconds to check if you're actively using the tab again. It seems Google is interested in pushing the idea even further, at least for Chromebook users. About Chromebooks this week spotted a new flag in Chrome OS 105, currently being tested in the dev channel, that changes this five-minute period to 10 seconds.
Edge Does This (Score:2)
This is one of the major improvements Microsoft made to Edge. Tabs you haven't touched grey out, and if you hover you get a leaf icon that tells how much resources you are saving with the tab sleeping.
what about ram? can it have an swap to disk option (Score:2)
what about ram? can it have an swap to disk option for them as well?
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That's just handled by the hardware and OS.
Tabs are another type of bookmark (Score:4)
Really, if they just took the slightest look at somebody who does this, they would know it would work perfectly if an unused tab was exactly the same as a bookmark, or "reopen closed tab". They should be using almost zero resources. My SO keeps several hundreds of tabs, but the entire purpose is to get back to them later. This should be exactly as expensive as adding hundreds of bookmarks, not the machine-killing perfomance it has now.
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Actually the reason tabs are useful is because they also preserve the back/forward list of other pages. That is why she does not use bookmarks. In most cases the saved tab is some search result but what she is really interested in is returning to the main page of that site.
A possible solution is to just have bookmarks do this? But I am still a bit stumped why tabs don't just do nothing, as it is pretty obvious this is what users expect.
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Thanks, that was uncalled for.
I have ADHD. One of the consequences of it is that if I don't keep some visible reminder of something around, it'll fall out of my brain and never come back. Those tabs are reminders about things I wanted or needed to do, and if I close the tabs then I know full well I won't ever get around to them. Shuffling them off into bookmarks is the equivalent of putting them into a drawer, which is another good place to put things if I want to forget about them.
Having ADHD also mean
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The entire point of tabs stops being useful after that, because there isn't even enough space for them to say what they are.
Chrome's Tab Groups allows you to collapse a group of related tabs into a single group. You can then have several collapsed groups on the tab bar and click a group to expand the tabs within it, then click again to collapse the group back to the tab. It works nicely and gives you rapid access to tabs you open frequently.
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Idle games gonna get throttled hard (Score:3)
The only downside to this that I see is that anyone who plays "idle" games in their web browser and runs them in the background while waiting for the next upgrade to become available is going to have problems. Firefox already throttles inactive tabs but doesn't throttle the active tab across multiple windows. Hopefully Chrome opts to do something similar rather than only running code in just the focused window. Also, hopefully Chrome won't throttle service workers too or a lot people who use Slack for web are going to be unhappy campers.
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I use a lot of tabs... (Score:2)
One of the real features Google / chrome need to add: "don't sleep this tab" (usually for email, but others too)....
A key problem {bug} with a lot of tabs open: loss of internet (with browsers). Not just 'timeout'
Neither fish nor fowl (Score:2)
As regards the story, it sounds too bloody obvious. Someone needs to remind the googlers how bloody smart they are supposed to be.
But it's still an open sore for me. I bought a Chromebook a while back and I have yet to find a purpose for which it is the best tool. If you have a Chromebook, what are you using it for? Seriously. I'm getting pretty much nothing out of mine. And I'm deliberately keeping it in an extra convenient location where it's very often the easiest computer to reach. Also carry it with me
WHY are background tabs allowed to run javascript? (Score:1)
Background tabs should be *dormant*. They should sit there in (probably virtual) memory, doing NOTHING, waiting for the user to return to them. Under no circumstances should background tabs EVER be running active Javascript.
Even foreground tabs should really only run client-side scripts on sites the user has approved for it, but we have NoScript for that. The list of sites that are completely unusable if you let them run client-side Javascript is long and storied (and has included Slashdot for years, inc