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Comment by mjburgess | Hacker News Reader

Pinning a tab should disable throttling. Gives user straightforward control over which tabs are important.

I second this. I'm generally a fan of efforts to reduce the CPU usage of background tabs (as one who constantly finds himself with an embarrassing number of open tabs), but I need to be able to control which tabs I absolutely don't want throttled.

Not the greatest solution, considering Pinning isn't documented anywhere and most Chrome users have no idea it exists. Which is a shame, as pinning is probably my favorite browser feature.

Including me, thanks for the tip! First time I've ever heard of this feature.

>Not the greatest solution, considering Pinning isn't documented anywhere and most Chrome users have no idea it exists. -- I might say this is precisely why it'd be smart mode of control: Tying a power user-ish granular feature (throttling) to another power user feature (pinning) seems like a bit of self-selective optimization, while being quite elegant in its simplicity.

So, for me, +1 for pinned tabs != throttled.

I'd use Pinning a lot more if it didn't shrink the tab down to its Favicon size. Wish it would also prevent you from closing the tab.

Interestingly, I'd never use pinning if it didn't shrink the tab down. I never have any trouble with keeping my tabs ordered, so the main value pinning gives me is the shrinking.

Same here. The shrinking keeps my tabs so much more organized.

+1. I just now found out about it. Tried it, saw the tab reduced to a favicon, and will probably never use it till that's fixed. Especially with how a Gmail Tab blinks when I get a hangout message.

> Especially with how a Gmail Tab blinks when I get a hangout message.

The pinned tab for GMail has a blue dot for "attention needed". Though this is suboptimal because I think it represents both IMs and new mail.

Are you sure that's not an extension? On macOS, at least, it's a very subtle gradient color change animation that's hard to notice.

I get a blue dot on my mac

The "reduce to favicon" is my favorite part of pinned tabs: I pin all my slack tabs and other messaging tabs and just watch for the blue dot indicating activity and/or the red circle that indicates a private message (on slack)

FYI: You can still close the tab, just not by clicking the (no longer visible) X. This may not fit your use case, but then again it might (I can't remember the last time I closed a tab by clicking instead of with ctrl+w).

he is saying that he wishing pinning tabs _prevented_ the tab from being closed (as opera does). I have closed pinned tabs my mistake before (ctrl+w too many times) and I agree.

Oh, my mistake

Also there are some sites that don't work well with pinning, including G Suite. I'd love to have pinned tabs for work email, work calendar, personal email, and personal calendar. But every time my session expires, they all get redirected to login pages.

I like the idea of pinned tab, but since they cannot be moved freely it is only halfway useful for me.

Am I the only one who uses pinning as pseudo-bookmarks? I would rather my pinned tabs be throttled more rather than less.

That's funny... for me the pinned tabs are the ones that are always open (email, Slack, Spotify).

I do that too, sort of. My pinned tabs are either VK/Facebook messenger, or things I plan on getting to later (interesting software to install, movies to watch, ...)

Am I the only one that finds pinning extremely buggy? I try it every year or two and always have the same result: pinned tabs work great at first, but eventually enter a state where tabs cannot be completely unpinned.

Unpinning and restarting my browser brings them right back in pinned state, and it seems like nothing I do short of reinstalling my browser profile corrects this.

I've seen this happen on multiple machines, so I feel like it can't just be me.

Pinned tabs definitely should be excluded from throttling. Pinning tab for me usually means that I want to keep track of something, which usually is my email, chat client, etc. I don't want to be notified about new email on my phone before I get that notification on PC, which is already happening too often. That's just unnecessary hassle.

Though I'm not sure how popular this feature is and I would vote for other ways to turn throttling off, especially for those which prompt user about it.

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