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jklinger410

Pinned tabs would be an easy solution for this.

"Don't throttle pinned tabs"

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A common use-case is tabs that are streaming music. I'm not sure if most users are even aware of pinned tabs.

They are making an exception for tabs that are playing audio.

You can see the discussion back and forth, here: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/blink...

I can see where that will end up though. Everyone who's app was broken by this change will start playing zero volume audio, then the exception will be yanked back.

With the web poised to be the new platform for applications, there really needs to be some more thought put into how to accomplish that goal. The chrome devs already sunset some solutions in that space, like the HTML5 app cache. Now this. Nobody likes a constantly moving target.

No tab should get the audio exception unless it started playing audio while I was looking at it. (reopen yesterdays tabs counts as looking at it...) If you play audio to get around throttling - you should get zero CPU, not just throttled. If you have work to do in the background that is fine - there is legitimate work to do. However once you are playing audio it must mean the other work is done.

What do I know though? I don't normally listen to audio on the web...

I think they are somewhat stuck with conflicting goals. Online games, for example, play audio while doing other work. But it's probably reasonable to pause everything, including the audio, if you move away from the tab.

On the other hand, if they are using Pandora or similar, the end user probably wants the background tab playing and doing other work (showing current album cover art or whatever so it's there if you switch back to that tab).

allow_exception = volume < audible_threshold

Super high pitch noise would get through?

I use pinned tabs extensively and I prefer that they are throttled even more aggressively than standard open tabs. As long as streaming doesn't break.

I have an option set in FF's about:config that disables loading of my pinned tabs on startup, so I regularly keep 200-300 tabs open and only activate the ones I need.

Sometimes it takes weeks to clear my tabs because I barely see a performance hit from having so many open.

Unfortunately this doesn't seem to be the way most users are using pinned tabs. Check out the great suspender. The only tabs it does not freeze are the pinned tabs.

Extending that functionality to throttling seems natural to me.

It looks cool. Browser memory isn't too much of an issue for me because I run NoScript and uMatrix and thus most of the tabs I have open aren't each running an instance of Google Analytics and stuff like that.

It still drives me nuts there's no keyboard shortcut for it. `Command + Shift + P` would be sweeeeeeet.

It is silly to need an extension for this, but I don't know what I would do without `Command + Shift + X`

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-pinner-keyboar...

Awesome. Thanks!

I was not, what a great feature!

didn't they remove pinned tabs a while back, and then re-add them?

While this is elegant, its still dangerous. There are online payments that could check whether your booking is complete in the background by periodically firing ajax calls, bulk updates or uploads, etc.

If those sites are using more than 10% of a CPU to do it, then they've made a catastrophic error, and I'd be glad for Chrome to protect my battery from that.

The business decisions a website makes are none of my business, and if they want to use a polling model for billing because $REASONS then that's their problem.

How is that relevant to throttling?

I don't want to have to pin every single tab I want unthrottled - that's a mixing/piggybacking of otherwise orthogonal concerns. Just make it a separate option I can set per tab.

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