Feature Request: Delay tabs load until selected

[guciokun]

As title say, when starting browser, load only current tab. Afterwards tabs are loaded only when activated.
I have installed Opera 25 and it looks like they have copied that feature from Firefox, but with additional option (which is in experimental flags) to load tabs progressively, few at a time. I prefer only after selection, because it saves more memory and cpu when a bunch of tabs are opened in current session.

Opera has one more interesting feature which I don't think any other browser have ever implemented, there is an option in experimental flags to hibernate tabs. It pauses processes at system level, I'm not sure how it works, but it saves a lot of cpu power, and RAM because processes don't use cpu and are swapped to virtual memory by windows when are inactive.
I don't know if you can implement something like this without drastic chromium's core modifications.
Let me know what you think.

[dev]

Its a option that would better built in but in the mean time try One tab extension https://chrome.google.com/webstore/deta ... ipkdnihall would do a similar thing or The Great Suspender https://chrome.google.com/webstore/deta ... cebajanakg.

[guciokun]

None of the two do it automatically, a better one is "Automatic Tab Cleaner/Suspender" which has auto suspend/resume.

The thing is that all tabs load on browser's startup. So this is my feature request "Delay loading tabs on startup, load when selected".
EDIT: It looks like tabs are kinda loaded and immediately unloaded with Automatic Tab Cleaner/Suspender, only youtube tabs are loaded which is exactly what I want to delay. This must be new since I've tried it with Chrome.

As for suspension Opera's solution is pretty sleek, tabs are not unloaded, just paused, which causes no data loss. I would use just opera if they improved some things, but it doesn't seem so. They made a nice speed dial page which now they will get rid of, their bookmarks manager sucks, their sync doesn't work either. They have a really strange vision of what people want or need.

If you are interested, try Automatic Tab Cleaner/Suspender
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/deta ... bbkilneeeh

[dev]

Tabs can auto-suspend after a configurable period of time or be suspended manually in great suspender, you can also add a whitelist so the auto-suspend functionality is disabled for certain tabs/sites so I'm going to stick with that one for now. I can leave my football results to update without it getting suspended

[LimboSlam]

NIce! I would like to see this one implemented.

[flashpeak]

I think it's a good idea and worthy of investigation.

Actually most tabs should be able to completely unloaded when switched to background. When we activate the tab again, we can quickly load it from cache instead of loading it from the web. That can buy us a lot of memory savings.

If we want to save the CPU, we can freeze the javascript, flash, video and gifs in a tab once it is switched into the background.

But I am not sure if this can be done without too much modification under the Chrome content layer.

[guciokun]

I think it's a good idea and worthy of investigation.

Actually most tabs should be able to completely unloaded when switched to background. When we activate the tab again, we can quickly load it from cache instead of loading it from the web. That can buy us a lot of memory savings.

If we want to save the CPU, we can freeze the javascript, flash, video and gifs in a tab once it is switched into the background.

But I am not sure if this can be done without too much modification under the Chrome content layer.

That would be great, but I would try processes pausing approach, system can handle swapping. This saves both, memory and cpu. Only catch in this approach is to check if page is streaming data, for example buffering a video or downloading/uploading a file. This way you don't have to worry about unloading caching and so on. This is what Opera is doing. If you are interested to investigate, download Opera 24 or higher and set in about:flags #hibernation to true. And to see what is going on, try "process explorer", and see under cpu that processes has Suspended status.

I'm really happy to see that developers are open for suggestions

[flashpeak]

If we only pause the process, the memory is still used. Unless we do a working set compression after suspending the process. That's something interesting to try.
Chrome has some hanging-detection code. Those would have to be disabled when a tab is suspended. As for as video streaming is concerned, it is probably ok. When we resume the process, we will get a time out error. But most video player knows how to try the connection after a timeout.

That would be great, but I would try processes pausing approach, system can handle swapping. This saves both, memory and cpu. Only catch in this approach is to check if page is streaming data, for example buffering a video or downloading/uploading a file. This way you don't have to worry about unloading caching and so on. This is what Opera is doing. If you are interested to investigate, download Opera 24 or higher and set in about:flags #hibernation to true. And to see what is going on, try "process explorer", and see under cpu that processes has Suspended status.

I'm really happy to see that developers are open for suggestions

[guciokun]

If we only pause the process, the memory is still used. Unless we do a working set compression after suspending the process. That's something interesting to try.
Chrome has some hanging-detection code. Those would have to be disabled when a tab is suspended. As for as video streaming is concerned, it is probably ok. When we resume the process, we will get a time out error. But most video player knows how to try the connection after a timeout.

That would be great, but I would try processes pausing approach, system can handle swapping. This saves both, memory and cpu. Only catch in this approach is to check if page is streaming data, for example buffering a video or downloading/uploading a file. This way you don't have to worry about unloading caching and so on. This is what Opera is doing. If you are interested to investigate, download Opera 24 or higher and set in about:flags #hibernation to true. And to see what is going on, try "process explorer", and see under cpu that processes has Suspended status.

I'm really happy to see that developers are open for suggestions

Yeah memory use might be a concern, I've tried it with 3ds max which uses around 3GB of ram when I suspend its process it goes down only to around 2,5GB. But I see no difference when I suspend separated chrome processes, unless windows goes out of ram, when that happens all suspended "tabs" are swapped to pagefile almost immediately. I see that Opera must use some kind of compression because when their processes are paused memory usage drops from 60MB to 25, which is not bad. Anyway I see that my laptop with Windows 8 handles memory much better than my pc with Windows 7. When I run out of ram when I suspend manually all chrome's processes they got swapped really fast, unlike on Windows 7.

[LimboSlam]

Well I found another extension that does what were asking. It's called "Tab Memory Purge" and you can get it here: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/deta ... s?hl=en-US


Note: i have not tested it yet, so plz feel free to test it and report back to me on it