Mozilla Tests Firefox 'Tab Warming' (bleepingcomputer.com)

Catalin Cimpanu, reporting for BleepingComputer: Mozilla is currently testing a new feature called "Tab Warming" that engineers hope will improve the tab switching process. According to a description of the feature, Tab Warming will watch the user's mouse cursor and start "painting" content inside a tab whenever the user hovers his mouse over one. Firefox will do this on the assumption the user wants to click and switch to view that tab and will want to keep a pre-rendered tab on hand if this occurs. "Those precious milliseconds are used to do the rendering and uploading, so that when the click event finally comes, the [tab] is ready and waiting for you," said Mike Conley, one of the Firefox engineers who worked on this feature.

Comments

Speculative execution...

[srl100]

... what could possibly go wrong?

We brought it on ourselves

[eddeye]

For decades, browser scientists warned us this was coming. We had simple static pages, but no that wasn't enough for us. We needed dynamic content. We needed javascript.

Suddenly we had all this free computation. It was exhilirating. We could make hampsters dance and punch the monkey to win. But that computation had a cost. We kept burning more and more CPU cycles.

Browser scientists raised the alarm. All those cycles produced heat. At first our fans dissipated it, but they couldn't keep it. Eventually the heat crept into the rest of the system. They told us it would lead to tab warming. We just laughed and loaded more instagram kittens.

Who's laughing now? Our tabs are getting so hot they overflow into other programs. Their behavior is increasingly erratic and unpredictable. Now we have rogue sites mining cryptocurrency in them. Face it, our tabs are damaged beyond repair, unable to sustain simple online email anymore.

Like Icarus, we flew too close to the sun. We have no one to blame but ourselves.