6 ms·

Chrome extension to indicate background network activity per tab

149 points by dwc 10y ago

baby 10y ago
Something nice would be to see, next to the tab title, the CPU resource taken by that tab. I don't mind pages loading a lot of resources, I mind pages killing my CPU.
- cocotino 10y ago
  You can use Shift+Escape for that
  - baby 10y ago
    doesn't seem to work for Firefox :/
  - mcescalante 10y ago
    Shift + Esc doesn't seem work for me (Chrome 53 dev), and there are a few open bugs about the shortcut not working. Opening Task Manager from the menus works fine though :)
    - mschuster91 10y ago
      Yeah I often fail to open the TM in Chrome/OSX. This should be trivial to catch with CI tests...wonder what went wrong there.
    - cocotino 10y ago
      That's true, for some reason the shortcut does not always work for me either on Windows and on OS X.
  - awalGarg 10y ago
    (Un)Fortunately, that, along with a couple other things were removed from chrome 51. See https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=588790 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=588790
    - Noseshine 10y ago
      It has? I have Chrome version 51.0.2704.106 m (64-bit) and I do get the task manager with SHIFT+ESC, with numbers for each tab and GPU and for some extensions for CPU, network and memory. What you link talks about chrome://memory, which was indeed removed, but the parent post only says > You can use Shift+Escape for that
      - awalGarg 10y ago
        Whoops, sorry, my bad. It seems the "Stats for nerds" link (and the page it linked to) accessible via the task manager was removed, not the task manager itself. Apologies for the misinformation!
  - rmsaksida 10y ago
    Shift+Escape made me realize HTTPS Everywhere[0] is by far my most resource intensive extension. Most extensions sit around the 20MB range (of memory usage). uBlock is in the 50MB range. HTTPS Everywhere is in the 100MB range and goes to 150MB sometimes. I love the extension but I do wonder how it manages to use so much memory... [0] https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
    - deno 10y ago
      They load the entire rule dataset into memory. https://github.com/EFForg/https-everywhere/issues/1775 https://github.com/EFForg/https-everywhere/issues/1775
Usu 10y ago
This looks really interesting, is there a reason why it hasn't been uploaded to the Chrome Store? It would be much easier to install and keep updated.
- awalGarg 10y ago
  Author here. I think it involves some payment (IIRC) or some other stupid barrier. If someone is kind enough to take care of that for me, I'd be happy to publish it. I have a couple other extensions which I'd like to publish as well but wasn't able to do so in the past, so I have just stopped trying.
  - RKoutnik 10y ago
    Go check SO chat or read my sibling message, lemme send you that so we can get this up proper.
  - Usu 10y ago
    I didn't know that, thank you for clarifying, I would be glad to pay for the fee for you, you may contact me using my twitter username @gmail.com
    - awalGarg 10y ago
      No worries! Thank you for offering to pay the fee! Randall has humbly taken care of it this time though :) (Thanks RKoutnik!)
      - chris_wot 10y ago
        Whoa - when I browsed to the GitHub project I was expecting to see something I needed to compile, but this is all in JavaScript! Which shows how little I know about Chrome extension writing. Where did you learn how to write extensions Awal? Oh, and let me express my appreciation for you taking the time to write this and put it on GitHub :-)
        10y ago
EugeneOZ 10y ago
> A lot of web pages use background network requests for tracking user actions and sending data to remote servers, lazily loading heavy assets etc., and all that goes unnoticed by the user. And there is nothing wrong with it.
- Cybiote 10y ago
  It depends. There are situations when a user is heavily constrained by both data and charge (Amp hr) limits. In those situations, heavy background loading is a measurable source of headaches and annoyance.
- bhauer 10y ago
  There's also nothing wrong with wanting to know about it. So I applaud the creation of this extension. Though he does go on to say: > Ideally, the browsers "loading icon" should spin for those requests as well On that point, I don't agree, since it would give the misleading appearance—at least to me—that the page wasn't even done with its initial rendering. But perhaps he is suggesting the standard loading icon should switch to a sort of unobtrusive network in/out indicator after the initial rendering. That I would like.
  - awalGarg 10y ago
    Author here. > perhaps he is suggesting the standard loading icon should switch to a sort of unobtrusive network in/out indicator after the initial rendering yes, that was what I implied, which is why I wrapped "\"loading icon\"" in quotes :) I agree though that the wording isn't very clear, my bad!
- __a__ 10y ago
  And there is nothing wrong with blocking these transfers either. It is the user's own computer and the user's own network subscription after all. User pays for these resources. As for the software, users get to choose the software. They might prefer software that does not use so much bandwidth. And there's nothing wrong with that.
- userbinator 10y ago
agumonkey 10y ago
How hard is it to hook into tab icon / label ? I'd love to see it blink when something is moving. Reminds me of the audio icon when audio is sent.
qntmfred 10y ago
nice idea. I would prefer if it reset to 0 on page load though. I used it for a few minutes and after a few pages the count was already in the hundreds, at which point I've lost my sense of whether the count was increasing for this current page or if it was already high from previous pages
yoasif_ 10y ago
FWIW, this works fine in Firefox as well -- I used https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/chrome-store-foxified/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/chrome-store-... for the first time today, and it works great on the extension published on the Chrome store.
- r00fus 10y ago
  Must've missed where I could use Chrome extensions on FF - thanks!
basemntunivrse 10y ago
I really like this, it's an excellent idea. This might be quite useful for developers as well, just as a quick indicator instead of having the Developer Tools Network tab open all the time. One thing that might be quite useful (though it would probably be beyond the scope of this project and perhaps hard to implement) would be the ability to block any further requests made by the tab. A sort of per-tab 'offline mode'. Perhaps as a context menu option when clicking on the icon. Also, it would be very interesting to see statistics on which popular websites tend to do the most user-activity tracking, lazy loading etc. - but, in order to collect and collate these statistics your extension would itself have to send background requests to some central API. That'd be quite ironic... Anyway, nice work!
andersonmvd 10y ago
The license (WTFPL – Do What the Fuck You Want to Public License) grabbed my attention. Seems to be even more permissive than MIT and BSD? At least the name suggests.
- fsck--off 10y ago
  Unless something has changed in the past 3 years, it's not a good license. See DannyBee's comments about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5733050 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5733050
TempleOS 10y ago
God talks from a random number generator.
zappo2938 10y ago
For curiosity I turned off the ad blocker and head over to the Huffington Post. Every mouse click triggers an XHR event and there is constant communication on top of that. It reached over 1000 requests after 3 quick page views.
p1mrx 10y ago
My IPvFoo extension has a similar ability: https://github.com/pmarks-net/ipvfoo https://github.com/pmarks-net/ipvfoo When viewing the popup window, each domain gets a yellow highlight if a connection is currently open. The feature was introduced in 2012: https://github.com/pmarks-net/ipvfoo/commit/d09c68219cb970c1b6cc9e953482a717a37f55f1 https://github.com/pmarks-net/ipvfoo/commit/d09c68219cb970c1...
aleem 10y ago
A few chrome extensions no Chrome should be without. uBlock and/or Ghostery, needs no introduction. FlashControl disables flash and allows selective enabling on components, pages or domains. Quick Javascript Switcher let's you selectively disable JS on individual pages, handy sometimes for badly behaving pages. Tab Suspender suspends unused tabs, useful if you have dozens of open tabs not otherwise.
cardamomo 10y ago
Is there any Firefox extension that provides comparable functionality?
- gpm 10y ago
  You can install it directly via this addon: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/chrome-store-foxified/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/chrome-store-... yoasif_ has confirmed that it works. Firefox has implemented some but not all of chrome's webextension API, so this isn't guaranteed to work for all addons (yet).

149 points by dwc 10y ago

baby 10y ago

Something nice would be to see, next to the tab title, the CPU resource taken by that tab. I don't mind pages loading a lot of resources, I mind pages killing my CPU.

cocotino 10y ago
You can use Shift+Escape for that
- baby 10y ago
  doesn't seem to work for Firefox :/
- mcescalante 10y ago
  Shift + Esc doesn't seem work for me (Chrome 53 dev), and there are a few open bugs about the shortcut not working. Opening Task Manager from the menus works fine though :)
  - mschuster91 10y ago
    Yeah I often fail to open the TM in Chrome/OSX. This should be trivial to catch with CI tests...wonder what went wrong there.
  - cocotino 10y ago
    That's true, for some reason the shortcut does not always work for me either on Windows and on OS X.
- awalGarg 10y ago
  (Un)Fortunately, that, along with a couple other things were removed from chrome 51. See https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=588790 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=588790
  - Noseshine 10y ago
    It has? I have Chrome version 51.0.2704.106 m (64-bit) and I do get the task manager with SHIFT+ESC, with numbers for each tab and GPU and for some extensions for CPU, network and memory. What you link talks about chrome://memory, which was indeed removed, but the parent post only says > You can use Shift+Escape for that
    - awalGarg 10y ago
      Whoops, sorry, my bad. It seems the "Stats for nerds" link (and the page it linked to) accessible via the task manager was removed, not the task manager itself. Apologies for the misinformation!
- rmsaksida 10y ago
  Shift+Escape made me realize HTTPS Everywhere[0] is by far my most resource intensive extension. Most extensions sit around the 20MB range (of memory usage). uBlock is in the 50MB range. HTTPS Everywhere is in the 100MB range and goes to 150MB sometimes. I love the extension but I do wonder how it manages to use so much memory... [0] https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
  - deno 10y ago
    They load the entire rule dataset into memory. https://github.com/EFForg/https-everywhere/issues/1775 https://github.com/EFForg/https-everywhere/issues/1775

Usu 10y ago

This looks really interesting, is there a reason why it hasn't been uploaded to the Chrome Store? It would be much easier to install and keep updated.

awalGarg 10y ago
Author here. I think it involves some payment (IIRC) or some other stupid barrier. If someone is kind enough to take care of that for me, I'd be happy to publish it. I have a couple other extensions which I'd like to publish as well but wasn't able to do so in the past, so I have just stopped trying.
- RKoutnik 10y ago
  Go check SO chat or read my sibling message, lemme send you that so we can get this up proper.
- Usu 10y ago
  I didn't know that, thank you for clarifying, I would be glad to pay for the fee for you, you may contact me using my twitter username @gmail.com
  - awalGarg 10y ago
    No worries! Thank you for offering to pay the fee! Randall has humbly taken care of it this time though :) (Thanks RKoutnik!)
    - chris_wot 10y ago
      Whoa - when I browsed to the GitHub project I was expecting to see something I needed to compile, but this is all in JavaScript! Which shows how little I know about Chrome extension writing. Where did you learn how to write extensions Awal? Oh, and let me express my appreciation for you taking the time to write this and put it on GitHub :-)
      - 10y ago

EugeneOZ 10y ago

> A lot of web pages use background network requests for tracking user actions and sending data to remote servers, lazily loading heavy assets etc., and all that goes unnoticed by the user. And there is nothing wrong with it.

Cybiote 10y ago
It depends. There are situations when a user is heavily constrained by both data and charge (Amp hr) limits. In those situations, heavy background loading is a measurable source of headaches and annoyance.
bhauer 10y ago
There's also nothing wrong with wanting to know about it. So I applaud the creation of this extension. Though he does go on to say: > Ideally, the browsers "loading icon" should spin for those requests as well On that point, I don't agree, since it would give the misleading appearance—at least to me—that the page wasn't even done with its initial rendering. But perhaps he is suggesting the standard loading icon should switch to a sort of unobtrusive network in/out indicator after the initial rendering. That I would like.
- awalGarg 10y ago
  Author here. > perhaps he is suggesting the standard loading icon should switch to a sort of unobtrusive network in/out indicator after the initial rendering yes, that was what I implied, which is why I wrapped "\"loading icon\"" in quotes :) I agree though that the wording isn't very clear, my bad!
__a__ 10y ago
And there is nothing wrong with blocking these transfers either. It is the user's own computer and the user's own network subscription after all. User pays for these resources. As for the software, users get to choose the software. They might prefer software that does not use so much bandwidth. And there's nothing wrong with that.
userbinator 10y ago

agumonkey 10y ago

How hard is it to hook into tab icon / label ? I'd love to see it blink when something is moving. Reminds me of the audio icon when audio is sent.

qntmfred 10y ago

nice idea. I would prefer if it reset to 0 on page load though. I used it for a few minutes and after a few pages the count was already in the hundreds, at which point I've lost my sense of whether the count was increasing for this current page or if it was already high from previous pages

yoasif_ 10y ago

FWIW, this works fine in Firefox as well -- I used https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/chrome-store-foxified/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/chrome-store-... for the first time today, and it works great on the extension published on the Chrome store.

r00fus 10y ago
Must've missed where I could use Chrome extensions on FF - thanks!

basemntunivrse 10y ago

I really like this, it's an excellent idea. This might be quite useful for developers as well, just as a quick indicator instead of having the Developer Tools Network tab open all the time. One thing that might be quite useful (though it would probably be beyond the scope of this project and perhaps hard to implement) would be the ability to block any further requests made by the tab. A sort of per-tab 'offline mode'. Perhaps as a context menu option when clicking on the icon. Also, it would be very interesting to see statistics on which popular websites tend to do the most user-activity tracking, lazy loading etc. - but, in order to collect and collate these statistics your extension would itself have to send background requests to some central API. That'd be quite ironic... Anyway, nice work!

andersonmvd 10y ago

The license (WTFPL – Do What the Fuck You Want to Public License) grabbed my attention. Seems to be even more permissive than MIT and BSD? At least the name suggests.

fsck--off 10y ago
Unless something has changed in the past 3 years, it's not a good license. See DannyBee's comments about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5733050 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5733050

TempleOS 10y ago

God talks from a random number generator.

zappo2938 10y ago

For curiosity I turned off the ad blocker and head over to the Huffington Post. Every mouse click triggers an XHR event and there is constant communication on top of that. It reached over 1000 requests after 3 quick page views.

p1mrx 10y ago

My IPvFoo extension has a similar ability: https://github.com/pmarks-net/ipvfoo https://github.com/pmarks-net/ipvfoo When viewing the popup window, each domain gets a yellow highlight if a connection is currently open. The feature was introduced in 2012: https://github.com/pmarks-net/ipvfoo/commit/d09c68219cb970c1b6cc9e953482a717a37f55f1 https://github.com/pmarks-net/ipvfoo/commit/d09c68219cb970c1...

aleem 10y ago

A few chrome extensions no Chrome should be without. uBlock and/or Ghostery, needs no introduction. FlashControl disables flash and allows selective enabling on components, pages or domains. Quick Javascript Switcher let's you selectively disable JS on individual pages, handy sometimes for badly behaving pages. Tab Suspender suspends unused tabs, useful if you have dozens of open tabs not otherwise.

cardamomo 10y ago

Is there any Firefox extension that provides comparable functionality?

gpm 10y ago
You can install it directly via this addon: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/chrome-store-foxified/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/chrome-store-... yoasif_ has confirmed that it works. Firefox has implemented some but not all of chrome's webextension API, so this isn't guaranteed to work for all addons (yet).