Upcoming Chrome Version will Aggressively Throttle Background Tabs

[Qub3d]

http://blog.strml.net/2017/01/chrome-56-now-aggressively-throttles.html

https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/blink-dev/-dmrNAFHd-4/discussion

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13471543

 

In layman's terms, this can be summarized as:

• Tabs in the foreground run as normal
• Tabs in the background have a computing "budget" for how many seconds of compute time they use
• Once a background tab budget is zero or negative, it is suspended and has to wait for more budget to accumulate 
• Tabs that play audio are exempt from this

There are two thoughts in response to this. Everyone on hacker news is pretty gung-ho about it, but some developers are concerned about how this will "break the internet".

Personally, I'm for it. Background music play isn't affected, and if I need something running in the background, I can make it a new window.

[ivan134]

I'm all for it since I always have like 50 porn tabs I don't wanna close.

[Curufinwe_wins]

Hey as long as it's a toggle I can turn off if I need to, this is a fantastic idea.

[Guest]

Does that mean Chrome eats less RAM now? FINALLY?

[79wjd]

While this is great, please also fix the memory leak in Chrome for OSX. Thanks. 

[Wolther]

I hope there is a way to make it so that you can toggle the tab to have this feature or not. I know theres a lot of games that people play on websites, and wouldn't want their game to be throttled while they wait for something to happen 

[arcwindz]

I already use the great suspender since i have 20-30 tabs open most of the time

 

Not even throttling lol, i prefer to cut them all together

[Doobeedoo]

Hmm, will see how it performs. I tend to have so many tabs open pretty much all the time though. I hate if background tabs don't load or take long to load.
Mind you I use Opera as a main web browser, works excellent.

[ChickenCake248]

This is great! I use a Windows tablet for school and it only has 2gb of RAM, so if Chrome does this then that's free performance for me.

[Guest Kloaked]

1 hour ago, djdwosk97 said:

While this is great, please also fix the memory leak in Chrome for OSX. Thanks. 

B-b-but you shouldn't be using MacOS you pleb!!1

[zMeul]

1 hour ago, deXxterlab97 said:

Does that mean Chrome eats less RAM now? FINALLY?

I don't quite agree with this

I'd rather have the browser use more RAM than having thousands cache hits on the drive (SSD) - wasn't Chrome and / or FireFox already guilty of this?

[AlexGoesHigh]

inb4 pages uses silent audio to cheat out of this.

[Guest]

1 minute ago, zMeul said:

I don't quite agree with this

I'd rather have the browser use more RAM than having thousands cache hits on the drive (SSD) - wasn't Chrome and / or FireFox already guilty of this?

It was a question, not a statement. I would not mind Chrome eating RAM, people are just exagerating tbh. An 8GB stick doesn't exceed for my use 50%

[79wjd]

4 minutes ago, Kloaked said:

B-b-but you shouldn't be using MacOS you pleb!!1

That's why I use OSX. 

[Qub3d]

1 minute ago, AlexGoesHigh said:

inb4 pages uses silent audio to cheat out of this.

Yeah, I will be interested in how people get around this. The first link in the OP questions just that.

[Qub3d]

1 minute ago, djdwosk97 said:

That's why I use OSX. 

Wait, are you refusing to update or something? Because as of Sierra it is, in fact, MacOS (again).

[zMeul]

2 minutes ago, AlexGoesHigh said:

inb4 pages uses silent audio to cheat out of this.

next thing is Google muting by default all sites unless white listed, and of course YT is on it by default

[Qub3d]

Just now, zMeul said:

next thing is Google muting by default all sites unless white listed, and of course YT is on it by default

That, or "to enable background play in your browser, please buy YouTube Red"...

[Guest Kloaked]

1 minute ago, djdwosk97 said:

That's why I use OSX. 

Don't they call it MacOS now though?

[79wjd]

3 minutes ago, Qub3d said:

Wait, are you refusing to update or something? Because as of Sierra it is, in fact, MacOS (again).

I'm on El Capitan because I never want to restart my laptop. And the last time I had a chance to (which was like October)  there were reports that "optimized storage" might turn itself back on after certain updates, and well...fuck that. 

 

2 minutes ago, Kloaked said:

Don't they call it MacOS now though?

OS X El Capitan

Mac OS Sierra

[zMeul]

2 minutes ago, Qub3d said:

That, or "to enable background play in your browser, please buy YouTube Red"...

then I'll ditch Chrome for WaterFox  I already use it as my 2ndary browser

[Guest Kloaked]

1 minute ago, djdwosk97 said:

I'm on El Capitan because I never want to restart my laptop. And the last time I had a chance to (which was like October)  there were reports that "optimized storage" might turn itself back on after certain updates, and well...fuck that. 

 

OS X El Capitan

Mac OS Sierra

What's up the the "optimized storage" thing?

[79wjd]

1 minute ago, Kloaked said:

What's up the the "optimized storage" thing?

If you CHOOSE to enable it (it's disabled by default iirc), it automatically deletes rarely accessed files and uploads them to iCloud in order to save space locally.

[Guest Kloaked]

1 minute ago, djdwosk97 said:

If you CHOOSE to enable it (it's disabled by default iirc), it automatically deletes rarely accessed files and uploads them to iCloud in order to save space locally.

yeah fuck that noise

[tlink]

would love it if you can whitelist a tab or create exempt tabs from this functionality.