requesting a feature - Suspend and unload, but keep cached data
Categories
(Firefox :: Tabbed Browser, enhancement)
Tracking
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People
(Reporter: tmah75, Unassigned)
Details
User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:78.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/78.0
Steps to reproduce:
Nothing, just wanted to request a feature.
I'm one of those messy guys that keep tons of tabs open, resulting in loads of RAM being used.
I'm an electronics enthusiast and I tend to hang a lot on sites like google and I prefer to open the results in new tabs. I'm also using Ali Express a lot when hunting down components and such.
This means that I have a ton of active tabs, apart from when restarting the browser, then they're not loaded.
This function I'd like to see; An option to suspend/unload from RAM for each tab so that I can save memory.
Although I have 32 GB, that's not the main issue, but the performance takes a toll as well.
Usually a restart takes care of that, but as I said, a function that can unload pages (but still keep the data, just like after a restart) would make my day.
I mean, FB alone can swallow quite a lot of juice, and when scrolling it only takes up more and more RAM/CPU, not to mention how sluggish something like writing gets from time to time.
I'm not running a normal PC, in fact it's a Dell server with 8 cores E5345 Xeon, 32 GB RAM, Windows 19 Server, and it's not a particularly slow thing, but not super fast either, but the browser is what consumes the most resources.
I keep these tabs open because I frequently uses them, and I have the server on 24/7, and I don't want to fiddle with bookmarks either. I wasn't too happy either when you began using separate instances of firefox.exe for each tab. Seem to me that it steals resources (and adds to the processes count in task-manager too!).
So, I think other might find this useful too, and I hope that you take this into account. Thank you.
Actual results:
Too many tabs makes computer a dull boy
Expected results:
Not much.
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Comment 1•4 years ago
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Hi,
I'm setting component to Firefox - Tabbed browser for someone to take a look at this enhancement.
So... Any updates about this? Nothing has happened as far as I can see.
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Comment 4•1 year ago
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Redirect a needinfo that is pending on an inactive user to the triage owner.
:dao, since the bug doesn't have a severity set, could you please set the severity or close the bug?
For more information, please visit BugBot documentation.
Wow, talk about making a hen out of a single feather...
I tried changing the "severity", but it's dashed out (No drop-down menu), and looking at the options when editing I'm almost afraid to change anything. It's like a freaking airplane cockpit in there.
I noticed, i believe, MS Edge (Don't ask, Win 7 on my laptop I use to experiment on, nothing installed on it) having this feature and I do miss this function still. My only chance of something similar is if I kill the processes and restart it and don't touch the tabs.
Speaking of tabs, I forgot to reply to this thread as I got distracted then forgot about it (Currently 7 opened windows, all with multiple tabs)...
Sorry for the late reply.
It would also be nice to have a function to exit all processes instead of having to kill them all manually of when exiting/restarting Windows so that they all return when Firefox is started again.
Btw, I don't fully understand what you meant with ":dao", or "Redirect a needinfo" for that matter.
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Comment 6•1 year ago
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Hi tmah75,
We do have automatic tab unloading when your machine is under memory pressure, but it's fairly non-aggressive. We've found that if it's too aggressive, users get annoyed with too many tabs reloading after going into the background.
We have a few options for you here:
- There are various addons that supply this capability. A popular one is Auto Tab Discard. One that I personally use is Discard Tab, which puts a context menu item on a tab to let you discard it if it's in the background. Upon selecting it, it will reload.
- If you visit about:processes, it will list both processes and tabs. Clicking on the "x" next to one of the process entries will shut down that process and unload the associated tabs (but will keep the tabs open for you, putting them in the discarded state).
Do either of those meet your needs?
Yes, this looks promising. I'll try these and see. I ran a quick test on "Discard Tab" and it seemed to do just that. I think this should be implemented as a standard feature or at least linked to as a suggestion (Like tip of the day-pop-up thing).
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Updated•1 year ago
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Wow... I'm amazed. I posted this in 2020-07-02 (Has been rounded up to 4 years, strange math), and this past couple of weeks I finally got signs of life, response and a resolve to my request, and just now it's apparently a duplicate. I'm at a loss for words, but I'll say this:
Great work guys. Took you a while, but you did it. Thanks.
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