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Chrome 57 Limits Background Tabs Usage To 1% Per CPU Core (bleepingcomputer.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: Starting with Chrome 57, released last week, Google has put a muzzle on the amount of resources background tabs can use. According to Google engineers, Chrome 57 will temporarily delay a background tab's JavaScript timers if that tab is using more than 1% of a CPU core. Further, all background timers are suspended automatically after five minutes on mobile devices. The delay/suspension will halt resource consumption and cut down on battery usage, something that laptop, tablet, and smartphone owners can all relate. Google hinted in late January that it would limit JavaScript timers in background tabs, but nobody expected it to happen as soon as last week's Chrome release. By 2020, Google hopes to pause JavaScript operations in all background pages.
Web developers who write javascript that just keeps chewing up resources are why we have to resort to this.... You have no one to blame but yourselves for abusing the privilege of having active content that just sucks resources to get more add revenue....
I know some of you developers actually think about such stuff and care about the end user's experience, but there are a few of you out there that are messing stuff up for all of us, so now the browser has to throttle you.. Thank You for nothing (from the rest of us).
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
something that laptop, tablet, and smartphone owners can all relate.
Unless you mean that those people will all testify to the aforementioned something, you're missing either a "to" or a "to which" depending on how pedantic you want to be. Those people don't relate it; they relate to it. It is something they can relate to, or if you want to be fancy, it is something to which they can relate.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
I used to wish browsers would do this. But now I know that there are good uses for background processes, even though limiting them to 1% seems fine to me.
For example, slack changes the tab title and icon when an event happens, like a new message. Gmail updates the title to show how many messages you have. These are reasonable use cases.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Has anyone found a simple way to disable autoplay withing post-Chrome 55?
I'm using facebook and google hangouts to communicate with people. Since I don't want to install applications, I use them as browser tabs. Does this mean I will no longer get noticed when someone messages me?
Avantgarde Hebrew science fiction
Pretty sure Firefox already does something very similar to this. The mobile version does, anyway.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Because making a web app in JavaScript is cheaper than making five native apps, one each for Windows, macOS, GNU/Linux, iOS, and Android.
Is Microsoft going to stop spamming me with notifications to use Edge on my laptop because my battery will last 30% longer when ever I open Chrome?
Why would a web-based frontend to chat use more than 1 percent of CPU time on a desktop or full-size laptop? I could see a problem on a compact laptop with an Atom or ARM CPU, which is designed to sip power rather than run fast.
sometimes I'll listen to a podcast/music in a another tab
Then this does not affect you. From the featured article:
But nobody does that. They make ordinary webpages that use 500KB of javascript code to make something that looks (and feels) like a cheap 40KB HTML page based on iframes from back in 1996. Big static posters with HD stock images, 3 lines of text, and a download/email button. Why do these pages need javascript at all? What is javascript for?!
No wonder 17 tabs of web comics were taking so long to load.
A step in the right direction. Next they'll be limiting chome.exe processes to only 80% of installed RAM!
Microsoft engineers would do the same for Windows..
folks that want to abuse it will use a web socket or silent audio to hack around it and sites that weren't abusing it get throttled? I guess it'll help with some poorly optimized sites though...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
How ironic, posting this on slashdot when I find it's one of the worst CPU users to leave open thanks to allowing its ads to run. I want to do the right thing but the slashdot ads are surprisingly heavy CPU users. I find myself hitting escape as soon as the news articles have loaded to prevent the ads from loading since it always winds my laptop CPU fan up.
you know what the joke is?
it's that they keep adding background stuff and webrtc and PUSH notifications that cause js to run and shit.
and then they add this.
is this going to leave the push stuff working? OR is this a ploy to make us enable the bg push stuff? I mean.. just give the option to shut them off with a timer or not.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Ads and trackers
Bleh, big whoop. I've been using the Great Suspender extension to do something similar for quite a while now. After x number of minutes, background tabs are suspended unless I exempt (whitelist) them. The tab is blanked, which frees up ram, and with a mouse click I can reload the page right where I was.
I've seen a few comments after something like this:
I use The Great Suspender extension for Chrome. It can kill tabs after a certain period of time and also delays loading them on a Chrome restart (essential for 100+ open tabs) -- you can also whitelist sites.
https://chrome.google.com/webs...
1% is still a huge amount because how absurdly fast our processors have become. Do you know how much you can do with 45MHz? Javascript is being dynamically translated into machine code, so you can still do a LOT. The only thing this addresses is sites that hog the CPU, not any of the nefarious bullshit that sites do to track you every 7 seconds.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
I apologize for not having the domain expertise to follow up on the WebSocket hack, but here's what I have for the other.
The "silent audio" you mention probably won't work. I started chasing links from the featured article, "Background tabs & offscreen frames: further plans":
"here" links to "Background Tabs in Chrome 57" stating:
So there'd have to be actual audio. I have not read Chromium's source code to determine whether it detects the further workaround of inaudibly high frequencies or inaudibly low volumes.
sometimes I'll listen to a podcast/music in a another tab while surfing in the visible table. This is my biggest beef with firefox on android, background tasks are stopped
You can blame that in part on streaming providers' freemium model of requiring a paid subscription for background listening, particularly YouTube.
I run hundreds of tabs, I use noscript to whitelist all the good stuff. Adservers almost always run stuff on thier own domain so its easy to blacklist. Now I just want this feature for firefox
And don't forget my epic cookie clicker run, which I've left in some background tab somewhere for well over a year now!
Is that literally just clicking a cookie over and over?
No. Cookie Clicker by Orteil is sort of like a distilled version of an RTS tech tree: you spend cookies to buy buildings and upgrades that produce cookies over time.
is going to fuck all kinds of software up.
Non sequitur: Your facts are uncoordinated.
The featured article states that background audio still plays.
A laptop connected to mains power through a transformer still draws power through the transformer, which still counts against your subscription to electric power. In addition, you may want other tasks running on your computer to have priority over ad exchanges' real-time bidding scripts.
the whole internet runs on javascript, just saying
Actually, it is Numerically 2017, literally it would be twenty seventeen.
If my comment didn't sound as good in your head as it did in mine, then I guess we all know who's to blame
I use a different method of blocking ads: Firefox with Tracking Protection enabled globally. It blocks only those ad networks and exchanges known to track viewers from one site to another to display interest-based ads, but that's pretty much all of them. Running a tracking blocker rather than an ad blocker also provides plausible deniability against those who claim that ad blockers take food out of writers' children's mouths, as a publisher could in theory instead sell ad space directly to advertisers without such a network.
Other people use tools to configure an operating system's built-in DNS blacklist. But that doesn't work quite so well on mobile operating systems, where only the device manufacturer ordinarily has privileges to modify the device-wide DNS blacklist.
Javascript image transforms are still grossly inefficient compared to any native image tool.
Is it substantially less efficient than running a native image tool in a Vagrant box and using an X server on your machine to view the Vagrant box?
Free web hosting services insert advertisements into HTML documents hosted thereon. GeoCities died long ago, but Tripod appears to be still around.
You get what you pay for.
Or, in the case of a business limited by its finances, what its customers are willing to pay for.
So would it be a good idea to make a web application available without charge but put corresponding native applications behind a paywall?
the whole internet runs on javascript, just saying
The web isn't the internet, just saying.
So much for JSMESS, jor1k, v86, em-dosbox and friends...
Thankfully that isn't even close to true. The vast majority of the internet "runs on" C. Now there is a lot of JavaScript on the World Wide Web, but you still couldn't say that it runs on it, as that honour goes to protocols like TCP/IP and HTTP(S) as well as HTML.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
You could start by telling your prices to play nice :-)
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Do background tabs really need to eat a quarter-gig?
Hah! Now that's some sweet pedantry!
I once made a file uploader that used a new window/tab as a upload queue so people can queue up files to be uploaded in sequence in order to get a better experience than uploading 10-20-100 files simultaneously. That window/tab is supposed to be left alone in the background to do its thing while you go on the main site to queue up more uploads.
I was moving a "file" element from the main site to the queue window and then just looped and told blueimp/jQuery-File-Upload to upload each file in turn.
With this queued upload mechanism were built into browsers so I don't have to do crazy stuff like the one described.
"Everybody's naked underneath" -- The Doctor
Lets start this off correctly. MOST of the internet runs on Linux(i can see the windows/osx noobs festering their incorrect responses now) :o
EXACTLY. If we talk about what RUNS the internet it is Linux, and thus C not JavaScript. Client side it is Windows / C++
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Edge saves you 30% of battery time b/c Windows does not insist on checking and notifying you to switch browser when you are using it.
If I am a web-developer (I am not), I would like to know the exact amount of processing power I am allowed to use when the tab of my page goes on the background, not a percentage. This way I can guarantee a uniform user experience. 1% could be a lot of processing power for some users, making the fix useless, but too little for others, which may lead to some functionalities to be disabled.
It's funny that "tech nerds" don't realize that http traffic is a rather small portion of the overall Internet. But I guess if you're never on the backside it's hard to tell.
It's about time. I've been whining about this for 2 years now. To hell with winning the fastest script prize when you grind everything to a halt. (This is the fault of terrible testing mags/sites who weight shit wrongly.)
It has reached critical mass -- CNN.com takes forever due to massive advertising overlays and chatty stuff. You click the close box, irritated, and it takes 5s to close.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Good question. It's one of the reasons why I hate slack - the web frontend for it causes Firefox to consume a good 30% CPU! Yes, I've diagnosed it - close the tab, it drops to 0%. Reopen it, back to 30%.
Who knows what crap Slack is running... I gave up and tried their app version, and had to disable every "prettyifying" option to get its usage down. Seems like it displays the text first, then scans it via Javascript seeing if it can search and replace it with some graphics or something. Except, instead of running everytime someone said something, it ran continually.
AMD-K6 3D (90 bogoids)
<=
Intel Core i7-4771 @ 3.50GHz (9940 bogoids) * 1%
<=
Via C3 Ezra (100 bogoids)
<=
Intel Pentium III Mobile 750MHz (103 bogoids)
<=
AMD Athlon 64 2000+ (116 bogoids)
<=
Intel Pentium 4 1300MHz (119 bogoids)
Wow, a couple of clown chips, and a searing indictment of Passmark, all rolled up together.
You can really see how Passmark should have been properly named Parkay Malarkey Spinmark.
Parkay Pentium 4, you are so busted.
[*] Cooking instructions: apply Parkay to soggy white bread, wait five minutes, LET THERE BE TOAST.
Source.
—
In the least surprise ever, turns out pajamas man-child develops tight-loop benchmark suites for the trade press. Normally. Except for this one time.
—
Setting: One unusual sunny morning.
Right at the crack of too-damn-early, there's a loud, surprising knock on the door. Curious, he shambles in sloppy slippers to the front door, where he's greeted by a slight man in a slick seersucker suit, who warmly extends a cold hand, and exclaims "my good man, you are just who we need".
"And who are you, again," asks pajamas man-child, with maximal crack of too-damn-early rhetorical sarcasm.
"I'm from Butler, Shine & White, department of Natural Born Unusual Suspects."
He lavishes upon his smooth introductory move a practiced pump on each of 'Butler', 'Shine', and 'White', Vaseline vise-grip apexing right on the 'na' in 'natural', relaxing on 'orn', then releasing precisely on second 'su'.
"Me?" pyjamas man-child replies meekly, meaty ham agog and drifting.
"True to form, true to form. Ewww, what's that sooty smell?"
"Shit, you caught me mid-spread. Must have left a large, hot lump."
"Well that's just the thing we'll be speaking about."
"What is?"
"Here's the thing. Here's the thing. We have it on good local authority that you're the king of shinola soliloquy."
"Local authority? Man, I'm so going to sue that pesky early-bird arborist."
"Don't be hasty. Let me tell you what we have in mind."
Pajamas man-child scratches behind his hairy pinna for a moment. "Sure, okay, fire away. Do tell me about this soliloquy shinola business."
"No, no, no! You've got that bass ackwards. Trust me, we've got all the soliloquy shinola money can buy. What we don't have ... yet ... is the natural born shinola soliloquy."
"Uh, if I catch your drift ... what I mean is ... uh ... you know ... the spread ... it answers back."
"For sure, we'll dub that in. Now how about let's discuss terms."
"Really?"
"In all high-margin, commodity seriousness."
"Okay then, come on in. Want some toast?"
"Uh, thanks but no thanks. Just in case, I brought us some fresh croissants." BS&W holds up large brown bag with hand-lettered accent marks on every vowel.
"Looks like you brought the entire continental buffet."
"Truth is, I'm here to see you spread."
"That's going to take a lot of spread."
"We'll use the big tub."
"Uh ... you just said 'tub' right? Not, uh, 'tooh' as in 'toothbr—'."
"—aw shucks, just between us, what's the big difference?"
"Uh, tubes come with a screw top ... or so I've heard."
"Yes, we did consider novel packaging, but it just doesn't say 'butter'."
You have to opt in / give permission, for the stuff you mention. So if you have background stuff going on in 2020, you have yourself to blame.
Because starting a war with Russia like the other party wanted is a better idea!
This will surely break the ability to use things like plex web-app or streaming media without plugins... hope it can be turned off for sites you wish to allow...
120 characters ought to be enough for anyone
And there was much rejoicing.
What an incredibly good idea. Explorer so desperately needs this. - I know I'm an idiot for using Explorer - couldn't even really say why I ended up then kept using it. Should switch to Chrome - seems much better now than when I last tried it.. Used Netscape for decades until a year after it finally closed - then used Sea Monkey for a while, then somehow found myself using Explorer - despite all its flaws.
Fixing the resource stealing by malware adds and poorly written web sites would fix most of Explorers worst flaws..
Below the speed of light Special Relativity is one of the most accurate theories in physics - above the speed of light..