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Comment by reflexive | Hacker News Reader

A modern browser crawls on my old iBook G3

OK I agree in the browser space (as opposed to the processor space) the past 5 years have been a lot of churn and flabby software.

It's a hard problem as web developers have incentive to use all the horsepower available to them. The only way forward I can imagine, is if everybody sandboxes their browser tabs to limit the resources available to them (e.g. using Linux cgroups), and web developers know they are forced to live in those constraints.

"cgroups in the browser" turned up this proposal (March 2016) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11998210

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> It's a hard problem as web developers have incentive to use all the horsepower available to them.

Although it's not only the fault of the browser devs, but probably mainly of JS/frontend devs... the result is that leaving a browser window open easily halves battery time, because even innocuous sites eat half a core of CPU. Also, fan's always whirling.

Qubes OS is quite nice here. Just pause the VM with the browser in it -> 0 % CPU, but can still read what's on the display.

> Just pause the VM with the browser in it -> 0 % CPU, but can still read what's on the display.

On a related note, how is "halt all execution and scheduled future execution of scripts in the current tab" not a solved problem for mainstream browsers? Or maybe it is and somehow I missed it?

I'd be happy with "tabs not visible go into stasis".

Vivaldi hibernates background tabs natively. Can't remember the details. There are extensions, but they just swap the site with static page.

There are some FF extensions that do just that, but some sites break as they're not expecting it.

Wouldn't those same sites break in exactly the same way if you were browsing them on a mobile browser and switched temporarily away to another app? Or suspended/resumed your desktop?

Not exactly that, but with Firefox you can tweak dom.min_background_timeout_value so scripts in the background tabs could be invoked even less often than they already are. (Chrome does the same, but its minimal timeout value is, unfortunately, hard-coded.)

Fantastic; thanks!

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