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Comment by kogir | Hacker News Reader

This is great, really, but I'd like to see something more aggressive:

Non-foreground tabs should be completely suspended - plugins, JavaScript, media, you name it - unless they specifically request and are granted permission to run in the background.

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We've actually been discussing this recently, especially for mobile Firefox and Boot2Gecko, but also possibly for desktop Firefox:

https://groups.google.com/d/topic/mozilla.dev.platform/jFAOP...

Quite a lot of webpages need js to initialize themselves, these days, and I want them to load in background when I middleclick on a link. You probably want (at least some) websites to perform XHR when not focused (to update a news stream or something). I find an opt-in behavior on such a common feature a bit to hard, as a lot of website rely on that.

setTimout and friends are throttled (at least in Firefox) to fire at most once every second, so you won't burn your battery having a graphic demo in the background.

Actually, I'd only white-list Gmail and maybe Twitter. I'd prefer it if most site just served HTML to begin with.

I run with JavaScript and Cookies disabled unless white-listed, and just leave the majority of pages that won't load. Techcrunch, Engadget, and most news sites are so much faster without JS.

I might be ok with a timeout - after 30 seconds of no interaction from me, suspend the tab. Would that address your objection?

  I might be ok with a timeout - after 30 seconds of no 
  interaction from me, suspend the tab. Would that address
  your objection?

There has been experiments to do that (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=675539), and an (experimental) extension brings you this behavior (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dormancy/), but hasn't been updated in a while.

Actually, this completely unloads the page from memory, which is not exactly what you ask for.

So you're that <1% with their JS turned off. We knew you were out there somewhere.

Eh, that would get annoying if it was the default behavior. I like to think I have self-control and know how to run Chrome without eating up my RAM or CPU. I don't need this sort of moderation. I don't think most do. I think I would hate it if JS stopped running in the background.

Flash files are worth silencing by default because you don't usually come to the website for them. They're largely unwanted web rodents.

I have to say Javascript and Flash are disabled by default on a constant basis on any browser I use, yet I don't have a "rodent" category. I don't "hate" specific categories of content on a random basis either. A lot of end users go to sites for flash content, I don't see how this "rodent" category gets to be made up, is that ads you are referencing in a specific way or do you have a visceral reaction to adobe flash ? Does it induce vomit ?

Kind of annoying for anyone with a lot of screen real estate, I don't want the youtube clip to stop playing just because I'm browsing another site at the same time.

Flash have just finally got (after like a hundred years) the ability to stay in full screen even if you focus another window.

Also, that will break all instant-messaging implementations - at least until you refocus that window. Imagine having to focus a window just to see whether the content has updated?

I'm not sure I'd want that, but I would surely like background tabs getting throttled, similarly to background tasks on Android.

Not sure if that's feasible in firefox.

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