15 ms·

Chrome 110 will automatically discard background tabs

70 points by el_duderino 4y ago

davidgerard 4y ago
Chromebooks have long done this, but then they have a lot less memory.
MuffinFlavored 4y ago
https://github.com/richtr/NoSleep.js/ https://github.com/richtr/NoSleep.js/ I wonder if something like this will get "extended" to work for desktop browsers now if this needs to become more popular? I think something simple like looping an empty audio or video file will suffice. Not that I agree with that from a "hijack the user's browser without their consent" perspective. Just spitballing workarounds.
- StillBored 4y ago
  The firefox "Auto Tab Discard" I have is pretty aggressive in that it has a user selected list of conditions that allow an inactive tab to avoid being discarded (media playing/etc). So if the user hasn't explicitly allowed media playback to keep the tab from being discarded, if its in a background tab it gets discarded too. Hence why I put a media player I want to run in the background in its own tab and whitelist it.
firebaze 4y ago
To be frank, this sounds like the feature I'd like to avoid most. I'd rather accept an OOM warning instead of dropping background tabs. I don't even use that much tabs, around 30 at most, but this is the thing I use them for: to keep the current state.
- jrumbut 4y ago
  I just wish they would get rid of tab groups, what a pain those are!
  - baal80spam 4y ago
    Why would you say that? For me it's one of the best Chrome features.
    - jrumbut 4y ago
      It's extra clicks when navigating between tabs.
- hinkley 4y ago
  Half of what I use tabs for are for fan-out on research. I think the main problem here is the lack of user studies. I think if you watch a hundred people to see how they are using tabs, you'll find a couple of patterns and that the right solution is to do something else with the middle mouse click, such as creating a new reading list, or opening tabs but either not loading them at all, loading them at low priority, or reducing the priority by 15% for each successive tab you've opened from the current page. If I open 6 tabs from google, I'm most likely going to click on the one that ends up next to my current tab. That one is the priority. Everything else is best effort.
  - rhaway84773 4y ago
    Even easier. Give folks an option to turn this off.
    - JonathonW 4y ago
      There is an option to turn this off, both globally and on a site-by-site basis (if there's a page or site that you never want to be discarded, you can tell Chrome not to).
- Salgat 4y ago
  I use tabs a lot but at least in my case all this feature means is that the page refreshes when I go back to the tab, and for tabs I rarely access that's not a huge deal. Most sites where this would be an issue have session tokens anyways that automatically kick you off their page after a certain duration.
ant6n 4y ago
Time for a switch back to Firedox?
- komali2 4y ago
  Firefox for everything but localhost on my machines. Chrome dev tools still win out.
- Someone1234 4y ago
  Firefox is great. However, an optional feature you can disable, and one that even prompts you to review the setting the first time you access a discarded tab, hardly seems like a good argument to do so. Like, sure, go to Firefox for their stance of privacy and keeping a user in control. Don't go to Firefox because changing a setting is too difficult.
jmclnx 4y ago
> Chrome has a reputation for gobbling up RAM, and Google seems to think the best way to combat that is to automatically shut down your tabs when they are "inactive." Nothing like replacing a real problem with another potential problem.
- baal80spam 4y ago
  I feel it's more like: $BROWSER has a reputation for gobbling up RAM. Really, Firefox is no better in this regard IME.
  - Y_Y 4y ago
    Why guess? According to e.g. https://www.makeuseof.com/browser-windows-macos-chromeos-uses-least-ram-cpu/ https://www.makeuseof.com/browser-windows-macos-chromeos-use... Firefox, Opera, Chrome and Edge are all within about 10% of each other.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Lammy 4y ago
Good feature. This has been one of my must-have Firefox extensions for years https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-discard/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc...
warent 4y ago
I'm missing something... why is this an "all or nothing" deal? Like, can't you just leave people with their tabs and not store a shitload of data in memory?
abledon 4y ago
WHAT? doesn't every developer have like 50+ tabs open?
- ramesh31 4y ago
  It's just doing the thing Safari has done forever. Taking a snapshot of idle tabs and reloading on focus.
  - whstl 4y ago
    Does Safari freeze/reloads pages? As far as I can tell, at least to me it just slows down Javascript execution but keeps them open, to the point it messes up with some websites, like this: https://www.vitling.xyz/toys/acid-banger/ https://www.vitling.xyz/toys/acid-banger/ . I never "caught" it reloading pages like the old Chrome Sleeping Tabs extension did. Or do you mean Safari for iOS? I'm thinking of macOS Safari here.
  - deleted 4y ago
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- deleted 4y ago
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- saghm 4y ago
  I assume this is rhetorical, but in case it's not: I don't think I've ever had more than 10-15 tabs open at a time, and even that is pretty rare for me. I generally have maybe five or six, and that's counting pinned tabs like Slack if I'm on my work computer or Spotify if I'm on my personal computer. I've never found it useful to have so many tabs that I'd need to use some sort of search functionality to actually find the one I'm looking for because I can already do that with my browser history without needing to make the half dozen tabs I'm actively using impossible to scan visually. I'm sure my preferred way of working seems as bizarre to some people as having dozens of tabs open at once does to me, but...that's exactly my point; no workflow, including having 50+ tabs open, is going to be universal.
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  Use the bookmarks, Luke. Really, no, not every developer has 50+ tabs open. And it is very easy to avoid having them without losing anything if you want. Life gets much simpler when you can just alternate between every active thing on your current desktop area.
metadat 4y ago
Why is it not feasible to store and later rebuild the page DOM and view state? This is an annoyance across all browsers; there's no built-in way to bottle up the current state except by printing to PDF, which then becomes unclickable. I spent time one summer playing around building a capturing system addon for Firefox which bottles a browser page DOM state, all assets, and necessary CSS styles inline into one single blob of HTML for long-term preservation. There were a lot of subtle gotchas to work out (which made for a stimulating exercise) but after some time it worked just fine, so it's 100% totally achievable. I'd like to understand why this functionality isn't provided with every tier-1 browser.
- Salgat 4y ago
  Saving state is probably pretty involved once you factor in Javascript.
  - mixedCase 4y ago
    Given that they already have coroutine support... how hard could it really be? Honest question for people familiar with V8/complex JIT compilers .
    - fathyb 4y ago
      Saving the VM state is not hard at all, the feature already exists (v8 snapshot) and is used in Chrome and Node.js to initialize the JS standard library. The problem is native handles. The DOM is easy to restore, but how do you restore a WebSocket connection? An IndexedDB transaction? A `Blob`, a stream, or a WebAssembly module that JavaScript assumes to be initiated? There are solutions to each one of these, but there are still a lot of remaining pieces that are stateful and not easy to restore or gracefully close. It's possible, but it requires a lot of work.
      - vlovich123 4y ago
        I could be mistaken but I don’t believe that v8 snapshots support saving the vm in an arbitrary state. The snapshot is created after the script is compiled and that’s about all you can use to restore (it’s for speeding up loading the JS only).
saurik 4y ago
Every implementation I have ever seen of this concept has correctly avoided dropping tabs with dirty state in text boxes, so I think this article is freaking out and causing panic in these comments about a scenario that almost certainly will never happen. Also: I bet you'll be able to turn it off. But, as someone who actively uses a billion tabs and also cares deeply about state, I have 1) always used various versions of this feature when available in browsers or via extensions and 2) I don't think I have ever seen one lose state I cared about. The real hilarity to me is merely how Google has taken so long to enable this use case by default in the core, and I will claim it is due to their anti-user pro-surveillance business models that enjoy having code sitting around running occasionally in a number of what should have long since become static renderings of pages I have open.
- Y_Y 4y ago
  I've been caught by this on mobile Firefox lots of times. And Chrome isn't known for letting users opt-out of decisions they've made (based on their great telemetry no doubt).
  - upon_drumhead 4y ago
    Under the bold heading "How to turn it off" with a large picture of the ui telling you how to turn it off has this > The consumer controls for Memory Saver live at 'chrome://settings/performance,' or, for the UI-inclined, hit the menu, then "More tools," then "Performance." You can turn off the feature entirely or add sites to a list called "always keep these sites active." so it seems like turning it off is in the cards for this feature
    - Y_Y 4y ago
      That's good. I'll bet you a WinZip license that the option to turn it off has been sunsut within two years though.
- shortcake27 4y ago
  > Every implementation I have ever seen of this concept has correctly avoided dropping tabs with dirty state in text boxes Have you used iOS Safari? I use it because of private relay and extensions (I’ve written a few for myself that “clean up” websites I frequent). However, the dropping is atrocious. Because my phone is 4 years old it can barely keep 1 tab in memory. Sometimes the tab is even dropped even if I simply lock my phone and come back to it a few hours later without even opening any other apps. All state is lost. Worse, as I exclusively use private mode, when the tab is dropped the cookies are dropped too. So I can’t even stay logged in to anything. It’s a terrible experience.
superkuh 4y ago
This is a symptom of multi-process browser auto-immune disease.
ronsor 4y ago
Ah yes, the thing I hate most about mobile browsers is now coming to my desktop browsing experience.
crmd 4y ago
If they’re trying to reduce Chrome’s memory footprint, why not page/swap out inactive tab states to the filesystem instead of deleting? This feature is going to cause a lot of unexpected data loss.
Someone1234 4y ago
- It won't discard background tabs with: Active Audio/Video, Screen Share, Page Notification, Active Downloads, partially filled forms, or connected devices. - It can be disabled via chrome://settings/performance - Installing browser updates, like 110, may lose tab state anyway. The only potential "sin" they made here is enabled by default. However, users also dislike being prompted with new choices when an update installs. They want updates to be "invisible." It also seems like the first time it discards a background tab, it does warn you that this can be turned off in Settings, which is maybe a fair middle ground.
- qwertox 4y ago
  I got that popup after it put a background page into low-mem state. It told me that it had done it and that I can disable it. I think it gave me a link to the settings location. Most of the people who don't care about browsers will be accustomed to having their state erased anyway when something like a page-reload or a navigation-action has been made, so I think it's fair to enable it by default. The benefit they get by it outweighs the side-effects, specially if you consider your first point.
- dspillett 4y ago
  > It won't discard background tabs with … Active Audio/Video … partially filled forms … Thus begins a new arms race, as people who don't want their tabs discarded add hidden forms which are later modified by JS to look like they have useful new state, or adding silent single-pixel auto-playing videos, and the browser try to detect those tricks, so further tricks are devised.
- xboxnolifes 4y ago
  HN has way too much of a hate boner for enabled by default. If things didn't have any features enabled by default, 95% of people would never know they existed. Hell, why have the ability to have multiple tabs enabled by default? For invasive things like data collection, sure. For what amounts to garbage collection, does it really matter?
VLM 4y ago
I look forward to infinite user tickets reporting "Apache Guacamole server has crashed" because they lose their session, and closing them with "user advised to upgrade to Edge browser"
- easton 4y ago
  Unless you're overriding with GPO, Edge does this too? https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2020/12/09/sleeping-tabs-beta-performance/ https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2020/12/09/sleeping-tabs...
neilv 4y ago
Will this tend to increase ad impressions, with some ad systems?
hawski 4y ago
Remember: discard, not close. So it is like Auto Tab Discard [1], but built-in. I would say: finally. I use the extension also on Firefox [2]. [1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/auto-tab-discard/jhnleheckmknfcgijgkadoemagpecfol https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/auto-tab-discard/j... [2] https://addons.mozilla.org/pl/firefox/addon/auto-tab-discard/ https://addons.mozilla.org/pl/firefox/addon/auto-tab-discard...
PrimeMcFly 4y ago
I always have to end up getting some kind of extension to circumvent this behavior. Just make it an easy option and stop trying to know whats best for users, please.
surfsvammel 4y ago
I don’t understand people who use a gazillion tabs. How do you do it? How do you find what tab is which? Isn’t it as hard to find the tab as it is to actually find the page, when you need it again? I honestly don’t get it, but it intrigues me.
- pmontra 4y ago
  Not a gazillion tabs but about:telemetry#scalars-tab_search=tab tells me that I have 102 open tabs in Firefox. I have five virtual desktops, two for me and three for my current three customers. One Firefox window per desktop. The windows in the three customers' desktops have the tabs to the web apps (prod, preprod, dev) I'm working on plus documentation sites, CI, cards, administration sites, etc. That's 10 to 20 tabs per customer. Some of them are pinned. The two windows in mine desktops have some pinned tabs and some stuff that keeps there maybe for a long time until I finally close it. Not a big deal, but 102 tabs in one window would be challenging. I bet somebody has 1,000 of them in one window and will write that it's not a big deal too :-)
  - herewulf 4y ago
    I have had close to 1000 but not in one window. I have several clients who regularly ask me to do random things that necessitate a lot of tabs, so that all adds up. A lot of times it is unclear when that project or task is actually "done" (I wait on feedback or requests further work) so they accumulate. I eventually got smart and put the tabs for one project/task in a new window. Then I can just close the window to get rid of those tabs. Then I also have the problem of finding links relating to my personal computing interests, so those build up also until I read them in my free time or reorganize them. To answer the original question, tab search is entirely necessary.
- eviks 4y ago
  Finding the tab is easier due to "spatial" memory Also, tabs are co-located in related "sessions", that helps as well Also, you can easily not know the website, that's just one of 5 results you opened from google on this topic And with vertical tab list you're not limited to just the icon, but can scroll& read The bookmarks lack the convenience and immediacy of this even though you can save groups of tabs there as well, but then access is slower/less convenient
Lindby 4y ago
Will this cause the Teams notifications to be delayed even further than they already are?
bdcravens 4y ago
Been using The Great Suspender / The Marvelous Suspender for years on Chrome. I feel like it maintains state when reloading a tab but I could be wrong.
phendrenad2 4y ago
Well, everyone I know uses tabs as bookmarks anyway. Because Chrome "improved" the concept of bookmarks to the point where they're barely usable. Thanks, UX designers! And fuck you.
eviks 4y ago
About time, though was hoping the native solution would be smarter than existing extensions and more advanced into trying to avoid data loss and instead of completely discarding a tab would save some state
mrjin 4y ago
More and more user hostile moves. Whether to close a tab, it never a decision for the browser to make.
ravagat 4y ago
Funny how browsers have gone from single window to tabs in window and now, in a sense, back to single purpose window with tab optionality

70 points by el_duderino 4y ago

Chromebooks have long done this, but then they have a lot less memory.

https://github.com/richtr/NoSleep.js/ https://github.com/richtr/NoSleep.js/ I wonder if something like this will get "extended" to work for desktop browsers now if this needs to become more popular? I think something simple like looping an empty audio or video file will suffice. Not that I agree with that from a "hijack the user's browser without their consent" perspective. Just spitballing workarounds.

StillBored 4y ago
The firefox "Auto Tab Discard" I have is pretty aggressive in that it has a user selected list of conditions that allow an inactive tab to avoid being discarded (media playing/etc). So if the user hasn't explicitly allowed media playback to keep the tab from being discarded, if its in a background tab it gets discarded too. Hence why I put a media player I want to run in the background in its own tab and whitelist it.

firebaze 4y ago

To be frank, this sounds like the feature I'd like to avoid most. I'd rather accept an OOM warning instead of dropping background tabs. I don't even use that much tabs, around 30 at most, but this is the thing I use them for: to keep the current state.

jrumbut 4y ago
I just wish they would get rid of tab groups, what a pain those are!
- baal80spam 4y ago
  Why would you say that? For me it's one of the best Chrome features.
  - jrumbut 4y ago
    It's extra clicks when navigating between tabs.
hinkley 4y ago
Half of what I use tabs for are for fan-out on research. I think the main problem here is the lack of user studies. I think if you watch a hundred people to see how they are using tabs, you'll find a couple of patterns and that the right solution is to do something else with the middle mouse click, such as creating a new reading list, or opening tabs but either not loading them at all, loading them at low priority, or reducing the priority by 15% for each successive tab you've opened from the current page. If I open 6 tabs from google, I'm most likely going to click on the one that ends up next to my current tab. That one is the priority. Everything else is best effort.
- rhaway84773 4y ago
  Even easier. Give folks an option to turn this off.
  - JonathonW 4y ago
    There is an option to turn this off, both globally and on a site-by-site basis (if there's a page or site that you never want to be discarded, you can tell Chrome not to).
Salgat 4y ago
I use tabs a lot but at least in my case all this feature means is that the page refreshes when I go back to the tab, and for tabs I rarely access that's not a huge deal. Most sites where this would be an issue have session tokens anyways that automatically kick you off their page after a certain duration.

ant6n 4y ago

Time for a switch back to Firedox?

komali2 4y ago
Firefox for everything but localhost on my machines. Chrome dev tools still win out.
Someone1234 4y ago
Firefox is great. However, an optional feature you can disable, and one that even prompts you to review the setting the first time you access a discarded tab, hardly seems like a good argument to do so. Like, sure, go to Firefox for their stance of privacy and keeping a user in control. Don't go to Firefox because changing a setting is too difficult.

jmclnx 4y ago

> Chrome has a reputation for gobbling up RAM, and Google seems to think the best way to combat that is to automatically shut down your tabs when they are "inactive." Nothing like replacing a real problem with another potential problem.

baal80spam 4y ago
I feel it's more like: $BROWSER has a reputation for gobbling up RAM. Really, Firefox is no better in this regard IME.
- Y_Y 4y ago
  Why guess? According to e.g. https://www.makeuseof.com/browser-windows-macos-chromeos-uses-least-ram-cpu/ https://www.makeuseof.com/browser-windows-macos-chromeos-use... Firefox, Opera, Chrome and Edge are all within about 10% of each other.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Lammy 4y ago

Good feature. This has been one of my must-have Firefox extensions for years https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-discard/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc...

warent 4y ago

I'm missing something... why is this an "all or nothing" deal? Like, can't you just leave people with their tabs and not store a shitload of data in memory?

abledon 4y ago

WHAT? doesn't every developer have like 50+ tabs open?

ramesh31 4y ago
It's just doing the thing Safari has done forever. Taking a snapshot of idle tabs and reloading on focus.
- whstl 4y ago
  Does Safari freeze/reloads pages? As far as I can tell, at least to me it just slows down Javascript execution but keeps them open, to the point it messes up with some websites, like this: https://www.vitling.xyz/toys/acid-banger/ https://www.vitling.xyz/toys/acid-banger/ . I never "caught" it reloading pages like the old Chrome Sleeping Tabs extension did. Or do you mean Safari for iOS? I'm thinking of macOS Safari here.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
saghm 4y ago
I assume this is rhetorical, but in case it's not: I don't think I've ever had more than 10-15 tabs open at a time, and even that is pretty rare for me. I generally have maybe five or six, and that's counting pinned tabs like Slack if I'm on my work computer or Spotify if I'm on my personal computer. I've never found it useful to have so many tabs that I'd need to use some sort of search functionality to actually find the one I'm looking for because I can already do that with my browser history without needing to make the half dozen tabs I'm actively using impossible to scan visually. I'm sure my preferred way of working seems as bizarre to some people as having dozens of tabs open at once does to me, but...that's exactly my point; no workflow, including having 50+ tabs open, is going to be universal.
marcosdumay 4y ago
Use the bookmarks, Luke. Really, no, not every developer has 50+ tabs open. And it is very easy to avoid having them without losing anything if you want. Life gets much simpler when you can just alternate between every active thing on your current desktop area.

metadat 4y ago

Why is it not feasible to store and later rebuild the page DOM and view state? This is an annoyance across all browsers; there's no built-in way to bottle up the current state except by printing to PDF, which then becomes unclickable. I spent time one summer playing around building a capturing system addon for Firefox which bottles a browser page DOM state, all assets, and necessary CSS styles inline into one single blob of HTML for long-term preservation. There were a lot of subtle gotchas to work out (which made for a stimulating exercise) but after some time it worked just fine, so it's 100% totally achievable. I'd like to understand why this functionality isn't provided with every tier-1 browser.

Salgat 4y ago
Saving state is probably pretty involved once you factor in Javascript.
- mixedCase 4y ago
  Given that they already have coroutine support... how hard could it really be? Honest question for people familiar with V8/complex JIT compilers .
  - fathyb 4y ago
    Saving the VM state is not hard at all, the feature already exists (v8 snapshot) and is used in Chrome and Node.js to initialize the JS standard library. The problem is native handles. The DOM is easy to restore, but how do you restore a WebSocket connection? An IndexedDB transaction? A `Blob`, a stream, or a WebAssembly module that JavaScript assumes to be initiated? There are solutions to each one of these, but there are still a lot of remaining pieces that are stateful and not easy to restore or gracefully close. It's possible, but it requires a lot of work.
    - vlovich123 4y ago
      I could be mistaken but I don’t believe that v8 snapshots support saving the vm in an arbitrary state. The snapshot is created after the script is compiled and that’s about all you can use to restore (it’s for speeding up loading the JS only).

saurik 4y ago

Every implementation I have ever seen of this concept has correctly avoided dropping tabs with dirty state in text boxes, so I think this article is freaking out and causing panic in these comments about a scenario that almost certainly will never happen. Also: I bet you'll be able to turn it off. But, as someone who actively uses a billion tabs and also cares deeply about state, I have 1) always used various versions of this feature when available in browsers or via extensions and 2) I don't think I have ever seen one lose state I cared about. The real hilarity to me is merely how Google has taken so long to enable this use case by default in the core, and I will claim it is due to their anti-user pro-surveillance business models that enjoy having code sitting around running occasionally in a number of what should have long since become static renderings of pages I have open.

Y_Y 4y ago
I've been caught by this on mobile Firefox lots of times. And Chrome isn't known for letting users opt-out of decisions they've made (based on their great telemetry no doubt).
- upon_drumhead 4y ago
  Under the bold heading "How to turn it off" with a large picture of the ui telling you how to turn it off has this > The consumer controls for Memory Saver live at 'chrome://settings/performance,' or, for the UI-inclined, hit the menu, then "More tools," then "Performance." You can turn off the feature entirely or add sites to a list called "always keep these sites active." so it seems like turning it off is in the cards for this feature
  - Y_Y 4y ago
    That's good. I'll bet you a WinZip license that the option to turn it off has been sunsut within two years though.
shortcake27 4y ago
> Every implementation I have ever seen of this concept has correctly avoided dropping tabs with dirty state in text boxes Have you used iOS Safari? I use it because of private relay and extensions (I’ve written a few for myself that “clean up” websites I frequent). However, the dropping is atrocious. Because my phone is 4 years old it can barely keep 1 tab in memory. Sometimes the tab is even dropped even if I simply lock my phone and come back to it a few hours later without even opening any other apps. All state is lost. Worse, as I exclusively use private mode, when the tab is dropped the cookies are dropped too. So I can’t even stay logged in to anything. It’s a terrible experience.

superkuh 4y ago

This is a symptom of multi-process browser auto-immune disease.

ronsor 4y ago

Ah yes, the thing I hate most about mobile browsers is now coming to my desktop browsing experience.

crmd 4y ago

If they’re trying to reduce Chrome’s memory footprint, why not page/swap out inactive tab states to the filesystem instead of deleting? This feature is going to cause a lot of unexpected data loss.

Someone1234 4y ago

- It won't discard background tabs with: Active Audio/Video, Screen Share, Page Notification, Active Downloads, partially filled forms, or connected devices. - It can be disabled via chrome://settings/performance - Installing browser updates, like 110, may lose tab state anyway. The only potential "sin" they made here is enabled by default. However, users also dislike being prompted with new choices when an update installs. They want updates to be "invisible." It also seems like the first time it discards a background tab, it does warn you that this can be turned off in Settings, which is maybe a fair middle ground.

qwertox 4y ago
I got that popup after it put a background page into low-mem state. It told me that it had done it and that I can disable it. I think it gave me a link to the settings location. Most of the people who don't care about browsers will be accustomed to having their state erased anyway when something like a page-reload or a navigation-action has been made, so I think it's fair to enable it by default. The benefit they get by it outweighs the side-effects, specially if you consider your first point.
dspillett 4y ago
> It won't discard background tabs with … Active Audio/Video … partially filled forms … Thus begins a new arms race, as people who don't want their tabs discarded add hidden forms which are later modified by JS to look like they have useful new state, or adding silent single-pixel auto-playing videos, and the browser try to detect those tricks, so further tricks are devised.
xboxnolifes 4y ago
HN has way too much of a hate boner for enabled by default. If things didn't have any features enabled by default, 95% of people would never know they existed. Hell, why have the ability to have multiple tabs enabled by default? For invasive things like data collection, sure. For what amounts to garbage collection, does it really matter?

VLM 4y ago

I look forward to infinite user tickets reporting "Apache Guacamole server has crashed" because they lose their session, and closing them with "user advised to upgrade to Edge browser"

easton 4y ago
Unless you're overriding with GPO, Edge does this too? https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2020/12/09/sleeping-tabs-beta-performance/ https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2020/12/09/sleeping-tabs...

neilv 4y ago

Will this tend to increase ad impressions, with some ad systems?

hawski 4y ago

Remember: discard, not close. So it is like Auto Tab Discard [1], but built-in. I would say: finally. I use the extension also on Firefox [2]. [1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/auto-tab-discard/jhnleheckmknfcgijgkadoemagpecfol https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/auto-tab-discard/j... [2] https://addons.mozilla.org/pl/firefox/addon/auto-tab-discard/ https://addons.mozilla.org/pl/firefox/addon/auto-tab-discard...

PrimeMcFly 4y ago

I always have to end up getting some kind of extension to circumvent this behavior. Just make it an easy option and stop trying to know whats best for users, please.

surfsvammel 4y ago

I don’t understand people who use a gazillion tabs. How do you do it? How do you find what tab is which? Isn’t it as hard to find the tab as it is to actually find the page, when you need it again? I honestly don’t get it, but it intrigues me.

pmontra 4y ago
Not a gazillion tabs but about:telemetry#scalars-tab_search=tab tells me that I have 102 open tabs in Firefox. I have five virtual desktops, two for me and three for my current three customers. One Firefox window per desktop. The windows in the three customers' desktops have the tabs to the web apps (prod, preprod, dev) I'm working on plus documentation sites, CI, cards, administration sites, etc. That's 10 to 20 tabs per customer. Some of them are pinned. The two windows in mine desktops have some pinned tabs and some stuff that keeps there maybe for a long time until I finally close it. Not a big deal, but 102 tabs in one window would be challenging. I bet somebody has 1,000 of them in one window and will write that it's not a big deal too :-)
- herewulf 4y ago
  I have had close to 1000 but not in one window. I have several clients who regularly ask me to do random things that necessitate a lot of tabs, so that all adds up. A lot of times it is unclear when that project or task is actually "done" (I wait on feedback or requests further work) so they accumulate. I eventually got smart and put the tabs for one project/task in a new window. Then I can just close the window to get rid of those tabs. Then I also have the problem of finding links relating to my personal computing interests, so those build up also until I read them in my free time or reorganize them. To answer the original question, tab search is entirely necessary.
eviks 4y ago
Finding the tab is easier due to "spatial" memory Also, tabs are co-located in related "sessions", that helps as well Also, you can easily not know the website, that's just one of 5 results you opened from google on this topic And with vertical tab list you're not limited to just the icon, but can scroll& read The bookmarks lack the convenience and immediacy of this even though you can save groups of tabs there as well, but then access is slower/less convenient

Lindby 4y ago

Will this cause the Teams notifications to be delayed even further than they already are?

bdcravens 4y ago

Been using The Great Suspender / The Marvelous Suspender for years on Chrome. I feel like it maintains state when reloading a tab but I could be wrong.

phendrenad2 4y ago

Well, everyone I know uses tabs as bookmarks anyway. Because Chrome "improved" the concept of bookmarks to the point where they're barely usable. Thanks, UX designers! And fuck you.

eviks 4y ago

About time, though was hoping the native solution would be smarter than existing extensions and more advanced into trying to avoid data loss and instead of completely discarding a tab would save some state

mrjin 4y ago

More and more user hostile moves. Whether to close a tab, it never a decision for the browser to make.

ravagat 4y ago

Funny how browsers have gone from single window to tabs in window and now, in a sense, back to single purpose window with tab optionality