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Chrome To Introduce Timer To Throttle Background Pages (ghacks.net)

Posted by msmash on from the shape-of-things-to-come dept.

Google plans to roll out a change in Chrome Stable soon that will have the browser throttle timers in background tabs to improve battery life and browsing performance. From a report: The motivation behind the chance is that some pages consume a lot of CPU when they are in the background. Google mentions JavaScript advertisements and analytics scripts explicitly but it is not limited to that. The core idea is to limit the processing power that background tabs get in Chrome once the feature lands. (1) Each WebView has a budget (in seconds) for running timers in background. (2) A timer task is only allowed to run when the budget is non-negative. (3) After a timer has executed, its run time is subtracted from the budget. (4) The budget regenerates with time (at rate of 0.01 seconds per second). (5) The only pages that appear to be exempt from the throttling are those that play audio.

2 of 122 comments (clear)

  1. Two tab uses that aren't bookmark substitutes by tepples · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Almost all tab use is, unfortunately, a lazy substitute for bookmarking, of pages that don't need to update when not viewed.

    Key words: "Almost all". I can think of a couple exceptions that aren't "a lazy substitute for bookmarking":

    • I'm opening a bunch of documents in the background while I read a different document in the foreground on a computer that's not quite the fastest, and I'm reading the present document to give the browser time to load and render the other documents. These other documents need CPU time so that they aren't blank once I get around to them. Using bookmarks instead would produce a blank screen for several seconds while the document loads and renders. Even reading the first part before the rest has finished loading often isn't possible because of anti-FOUC measures that web sites are using nowadays.
    • I'm opening a bunch of documents in tabs so that I can put my laptop to sleep and then read them later while I'm offline riding the bus to or from work. These other documents need the network, but they don't need CPU time unless they use the abomination known as "lazy loading". Using bookmarks instead would produce the error message "You are offline".
  2. ^W stops css popups by tepples · · Score: 4, Insightful

    To block sponsor and mailing list pop-overs, just press Ctrl+W (Command-W on macOS).