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Comment by skrowl | Hacker News Reader

Just sent him this email:

Saw your article via HN.

As an easier permanent fix, just uninstall The Great Suspender and install Auto Tab Discard (https://add0n.com/tab-discard.html). It does the same thing.

It's available on:

Firefox - Auto Tab Discard – Get this Extension for Firefox (en-US)(https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc...)

Edge - Auto Tab Discard - Microsoft Edge Addons (https://microsoftedge.microsoft.com/addons/detail/auto-tab-d...)

or even if you're still using Chrome - Auto Tab Discard - Chrome Web Store (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/auto-tab-discard/j...)

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Discarding inactive tabs is not what I use The Great Suspender for. I use it to... suspend tabs. Auto Tab Discard doesn't seem to do that.

Ah damn, I was about to try it to see if it actually discarded or suspended tabs.

What is the difference?

From the website it sounds like the favicon is changed. So the tab doesn’t go away it’s just on pause

Google: “ a discarded tab doesn't go anywhere. We kill it but it's still visible on the Chrome tab strip. If you navigate back to a tab that's been discarded, it'll reload when clicked. Form content, scroll position and so on are saved and restored the same way they would be during forward/backward tab navigation.”

In the future this will be updated to also use a serializer for discarded tabs.

Discarding the tab is superior to what Great Suspender used to do. Why would you want the old behaviour?

Tab discarding is just a more efficient, native implementation of what Great Suspender aimed to do in the first place.

I don't use Chrome so I have no idea what either of these extensions did, but FF's implementation of tab discarding causes it to reload the page when I switch to the tab, which means I have to wait for the page to load before I can do whatever I wanted to do.

I'd much rather have a way to just stop all JS on a "suspended" tab so that FF doesn't burn 20% CPU on tabs that aren't even visible. (Yes I'm aware that JS timers, etc operate at reduced frequency for unfocused tabs. I'm talking about stopping them entirely.) Discarding may be more efficient for the browser but it's less efficient for me the user, so I don't use it.

Fair enough, although that is not what Great Suspender did. Great Suspender also causes the page to be reloaded on resumption, just like an early version of tab discarding.

Tab discarding does have the slight advantage that it remembers what you typed in on the page and where you were scrolled (but nonetheless still causes a reload).

What you are asking for regarding slowing the performance of background JS is something browsers already do: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15871942/how-do-browsers...

Making that behaviour more aggressive seems like it is liable to cause significant problems to the user experience with minimal benefits. E.g. background media playback would likely be broken, notifications, etc. Whereas you could simply use bookmarks instead of open tabs to get the same effect (EDIT: actually tab discarding would already be better than that method as you note).

>What you are asking for regarding slowing the performance of background JS is something browsers already do

As I wrote:

>>(Yes I'm aware that JS timers, etc operate at reduced frequency for unfocused tabs. I'm talking about stopping them entirely.)

>Making that behaviour more aggressive seems like it is liable to cause significant problems to the user experience with minimal benefits. E.g. background media playback would likely be broken, notifications, etc.

I want none of those things from the "suspended" tabs.

>Whereas you could simply use bookmarks instead of open tabs to get the same effect

How? Do you mean I would load the bookmark into a new tab when I wanted to visit it? That not only has the same problem that I described for discarded tabs (have to wait for a page load), but is even worse because it loses all the context that discarded tabs do retain. Not to mention the annoyance of maintaining bookmarks for arbitrary tab groups that I just happen to have open.

Discard doesn't mean "remove" in this context. It will unload the tab, but still keep the state for when you switch back to it. E.g. suspend it.

I wish they had one that would do that based on memory or CPU usage of a tab.

Auto Tab Discard has a setting, "Discard a background tab if its memory usage (totalJSHeapSize) exceeds (in MB)"

Greyed out for me in FF. =\

Edge (dev) has built-in sleep tabs. It work quite good

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