14 ms·

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.

loceng 6y ago
Ah damn, I was about to try it to see if it actually discarded or suspended tabs.
fudged71 6y ago
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.
shawnz 6y ago
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.
- Arnavion 6y ago
  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.
  - shawnz 6y ago
    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-pause-change-javascript-when-tab-or-window-is-not-active#16033979 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).
    - Arnavion 6y ago
      >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.
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kchr 6y ago
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.

loceng 6y ago

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

fudged71 6y ago

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.

shawnz 6y ago

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.

Arnavion 6y ago
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.
- shawnz 6y ago
  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-pause-change-javascript-when-tab-or-window-is-not-active#16033979 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).
  - Arnavion 6y ago
    >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.
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kchr 6y ago

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.