Chrome's Tab Discarding "feature"
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I'm generally slow to let chrome update itself so I just encountered this yesterday. The short of it is chrome will trash tab contents if it decides you should have more free memory while you're looking at another tab. Their approach is basically "fuck whatever you might have been doing over there".
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@fwd You can at least turn it off in chrome://flags/:
Edit: Sanitiser broked my link
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@RaceProUK I'm pretty sure you can't link to
chrome://
URLs from a website anyway.
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@ben_lubar Probably not, and quite rightly so
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@ben_lubar only if you're an extension: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/chromium-extensions/Nk5Pj7yrsmQ
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@swayde said in Chrome's Tab Discarding "feature":
@ben_lubar only if you're an extension: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/chromium-extensions/Nk5Pj7yrsmQ
It seems something eats my link...
https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/chromium-extensions/Nk5Pj7yrsmQ
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@swayde The iFramely plugin strips the fragment from the URL
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@RaceProUK said in Chrome's Tab Discarding "feature":
@swayde The iFramely plugin strips the fragment from the URL
I presume it's a bug, and i'll need to report that somewhere ?
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@fwd hmm.... so it looks like chrome figures out what tabs are "interesting" probably by figuring out what ones you switch to frequently or are playing audio... and it only discards the least "interesting" ones when the memory used goes over a threshold.... so presumably the most likely victims are those tabs you backgrounded hours ago because you want to read them eventually but will probably not switch back to for a long time.
Interesting idea, but i think i'll wait till they have some time to refine their "interesting" algorithm for a couple of versions before i enable that experiment.
if they do a decent enough job with determining which tabs are interesting it could be a good thing....
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@fwd Well that's allowed by the HTTP "contract" if there is such a thing.
Does Chrome save form content first? If it doesn't, that's pretty WTF.
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@swayde said in Chrome's Tab Discarding "feature":
I presume it's a bug, and i'll need to report that somewhere ?
I really wish we'd turn it off. It's broken in about a million ways and causes more jellypotato which I thought they'd mostly solved.
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@accalia said in Chrome's Tab Discarding "feature":
if they do a decent enough job with determining which tabs are interesting it could be a good thing....
If the page is cached properly it shouldn't matter that much anyway. When it reloads the cached page it should be pretty much as you left it (including DOM manipulations that had been done by JS and anything you'd entered in any forms).
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@anotherusername still that's a lot of ifs. i'll let others work out the worst of the bugs before i enable that feature.
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@accalia said in Chrome's Tab Discarding "feature":
so presumably the most likely victims are those tabs you backgrounded hours ago
Not necessarily. I rarely have tabs that live for hours - I've had it "discard" tabs after minutes. On a machine with plenty of memory free.
That's what got it turned off for me.
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@accalia What it really needs is a whitelist or training feature. My gmail tab is still important even if I haven't clicked on it in three hours, because when I get a hangouts message I want to know right away.
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@Yamikuronue agreed.
that's why i'm letting others be the vanguard in this feature.
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@anotherusername said in Chrome's Tab Discarding "feature":
If the page is cached properly it shouldn't matter that much anyway
I know from first-hand experience that expecting a page to be cached properly is pretty much a lost cause with any SPA-style website; DOM manipulations tend to be ignored
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@Yamikuronue said in Chrome's Tab Discarding "feature":
My gmail tab is still important even if I haven't clicked on it in three hours, because when I get a hangouts message I want to know right away.
Have you given Gmail permission to show desktop notifications? If it's killing tabs that you've explicitly allowed to display notifications even when they're running in the background, then I'd call that a bug.
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@anotherusername no, I don't use notifications. Maybe that'd help? I also could switch to the extension.
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@anotherusername said in Chrome's Tab Discarding "feature":
@accalia said in Chrome's Tab Discarding "feature":
if they do a decent enough job with determining which tabs are interesting it could be a good thing....
If the page is cached properly it shouldn't matter that much anyway. When it reloads the cached page it should be pretty much as you left it (including DOM manipulations that had been done by JS and anything you'd entered in any forms).
That was not my experience, at least with respect to dom stuff. I have a page running basically always with all content generated via js, and everything on the page vanished. That's what tipped me off to this thing, as there's no situation where the page should be empty after initial load.
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@Yamikuronue said in Chrome's Tab Discarding "feature":
Maybe that'd help?
You'll notice I didn't say whether or not such a bug existed, only that I'd call it one if it did.
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@fwd said in Chrome's Tab Discarding "feature":
@anotherusername said in Chrome's Tab Discarding "feature":
@accalia said in Chrome's Tab Discarding "feature":
if they do a decent enough job with determining which tabs are interesting it could be a good thing....
If the page is cached properly it shouldn't matter that much anyway. When it reloads the cached page it should be pretty much as you left it (including DOM manipulations that had been done by JS and anything you'd entered in any forms).
That was not my experience, at least with respect to dom stuff. I have a page running basically always with all content generated via js, and everything on the page vanished. That's what tipped me off to this thing, as there's no situation where the page should be empty after initial load.
It works in mobile chrome. I assumed they used the same mechanism on desktop.
I wonder if this fucks with w10s/OSXs memory compression algorithms.
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@swayde said in Chrome's Tab Discarding "feature":
I wonder if this fucks with w10s/OSXs memory compression algorithms.
*shrug*
It's irritating either way. It's my computer and my browser. When I want to discard tabs I'll close them.
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This explains things.
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@anotherusername said in Chrome's Tab Discarding "feature":
Have you given Gmail permission to show desktop notifications?
Of course not, Chrome used to really fuck up the implementation of that to the point where it would, for example, minimize your multiplayer game EVEN THOUGH THE NOTIFICATION WAS ON A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT MONITOR.
I don't trust those idiots to get notifications right.
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Huh, so they're porting pieces of Chrome Mobile to the Desktop? (pre-edit: 'd by @swayde )
We'll see if that's a good thing or not. Pretty sure Discourse would get killed as soon as you left it.
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Maybe it should be terminating other memory hungry programs too?
It wouldn't be a stretch.
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@CreatedToDislikeThis said in Chrome's Tab Discarding "feature":
Maybe it should be terminating other memory hungry programs too?
It wouldn't be a stretch.Nah, that's the OS's job.
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@Tsaukpaetra The Chrome devs think Chrome is the OS.
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@flabdablet said in Chrome's Tab Discarding "feature":
Chrome is the OS.
Inversion of paradigm: The web browser is the OS, everything else is just a plugin or extension, including things like Games and Office Suites.
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@Tsaukpaetra Oh great, then all the node hipsters can try and reinvent OS features as well.
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@loopback0 said in Chrome's Tab Discarding "feature":
reinvent OS features as well.
Remember when the OS's only responsibility was to load programs and shove the next instruction pointer to the beginning of the program?
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@Tsaukpaetra said in Chrome's Tab Discarding "feature":
Inversion of paradigm: The web browser is the OS, everything else is just a plugin or extension, including things like Games and Office Suites.
It's like they thought the GNOME guys had an interesting idea by making the entire graphical shell a plugin for the window manager, but just didn't push it quite far enough.
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@loopback0 said in Chrome's Tab Discarding "feature":
Not necessarily. I rarely have tabs that live for hours - I've had it "discard" tabs after minutes. On a machine with plenty of memory free.
Whereas I've got it turned on in a browser that's been up for a few days, and nothing has been discarded at all. So I don't know what's going on there…
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@Tsaukpaetra said in Chrome's Tab Discarding "feature":
Remember when the OS's only responsibility was to load programs and shove the next instruction pointer to the beginning of the program?
No.
My first computer was a Commodore 64. That concept was already long-dead by then.
EDIT: I suppose I also had an Atari 2600 which fits that model pretty well.
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@RaceProUK said in Chrome's Tab Discarding "feature":
@fwd You can at least turn it off in chrome://flags/:
At the moment. The interface for disabling/muting the SSL interstitial for an "invalid" SSL cert keeps changing for example (Three that I know of: 'Proceed anyway' > typing "danger" > typing "badidea")
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@PJH the "proceed anyway" thing and "badidea" thing are two different situations - the former is regular invalid certificate, the latter is HSTS error that should be impossible to bypass at all.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in Chrome's Tab Discarding "feature":
Remember when the OS's only responsibility was to load programs and shove the next instruction pointer to the beginning of the program?
Ah yes... i remember it well... course there wasn't much to the GameBoy Colour without the cartridges...
i miss that purple bastard. sure he ate batteries like there was no tomorrow but we had a lot of fun doing it.
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@accalia said in Chrome's Tab Discarding "feature":
GameBoy Colour
@accalia said in Chrome's Tab Discarding "feature":
purple
My Game Boy Colour is purple... it's a sign! :)
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This post is deleted!
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@accalia said in Chrome's Tab Discarding "feature":
Ah yes... i remember it well... course there wasn't much to the GameBoy Colour without the cartridges...
GameBoy had a character set or two in its ROMs. It also had Nintendo's security software to prevent third-party releases.
AFAIK, the Atari 2600 is the only "computer" people commonly owned that had absolutely no OS services at all. A cartridge was just wired directly into the chips on the motherboard.
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@blakeyrat said in Chrome's Tab Discarding "feature":
absolutely no OS services
INB4 this devolves into the next "Everything is Hardware" flamewar.
Note: I didn't say the OS had no services. What would be the point of calling it an Operating system if it had no functions?
I said that the OS's responsibility was loading programs and kicking them off.Obviously OSs have come a long way since then, and do more (now), but that's my point, isn't it?
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@Tsaukpaetra said in Chrome's Tab Discarding "feature":
I said that the OS's responsibility was loading programs and kicking them off.
In the C-64, the operating system also provided disk functions (formatting, saving, loading files etc), several character sets, a bit of abstraction of the sound chip and the hardware sprites, etc. (And the BASIC interpreter, of course, not sure whether to count that.) Those were all its responsibility.