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Comment by chrissnell | Hacker News Reader

If a page signals it's desire to opt-out of aggressive throttling, the user should be notified of this, perhaps by an icon in the tab, so that we can either close it or force the throttling.

I'm a laptop user and CPU-hungry background tabs are a huge drain on my battery life. If something is opting out of or otherwise excluded from throttling, I want to know about it.

Thanks.

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I agree. I prefer it throttle everything but ask me if a page is important enough. A news site isn't important enough to ask for this but Slack is.

To be honest neither is slack. They've got push notifications through web service workers. What for would they need aggressive background activity?

I'm not saying this to be pedantic, just trying to nip this entitled vendor mentality in the bud. "We're important so give give give without asking." It's a bit what you see with permissions on mobile: the more famous a company is, the more brazen a permission policy they can get away with. It's only tangentially related actual functionality of the app.

This is not about you personally, by the way, but about vendors. You just shouldn't let them get away with it. Even if they're slack :)

Bingo.

The user ultimately needs to retain control. And I'm especially interested in the exception for audio - that really should be user-controllable, otherwise it just encourages annoying page authors to be even more annoying.

Note that you can always mute a tab in Chrome, which I suspect would remove the exemption as well.

I wouldn't be so sure. I'd be interested in a definitive answer.

Yes, muting a page means that this page is throttled again.

The audio thing works because there is an obvious icon in the tab bar that shows the source of audio, so if developers use it in an annoying way the user can easily respond appropriately.

Just wait until background junk audio is included in a framework. We'll never be rid of it.

I already stopped visiting sites that had background audio autoplay. I don't think sites will get more traffic if they pick that up.

I think you'll have to wait a long time. I doubt it'll ever happen.

There is now an incentive to do this, so it will happen. Same as "with popup blockers everywhere, popups are now replaced with HTML5 above-content layers."

I don't want to switch to slack and wait several seconds before messages update. I'd rather the state be updated beforehand asynchronously.

While I agree with you in theory, this will only help a small fraction of us techie users. The average user is going to see a new, weird icon on their eBay Auction tab and call their computer company to ask them what it is and if they're being hacked.

When I did support for Apple Care, every single update if it had new or extra icons we always got lots of calls like this.

I'm sure some good UX could alleviate this. Maybe a spinning gear icon? Maybe a battery draining animation? Something to signify, 'this tab is doing some heavy lifting right now'.

It's actually a pretty rational response for someone who is only moderately aware of what is going on in their computer. If they are aware that malware and adware can cause unwanted changes on their computer, perhaps because they've been bitten before, then a new icon -- even one that is easily interpreted (which this one would not be) -- looks scary.

Icon: "speaker" for audio sites, icon: "Power cable" for background power usage?

Lightning bolt / Zap icon

Already used for amp pages, would be confusing. The power cord is probably the right symbol, probably with an explanation if you hover over it.

Then you have a fav icon, the page title, possibly a mute icon, a close icon and a throttle icon? The mute icon and page title aren't visible anymore as it is with many tabs open, so adding another icon doesn't sound like a good idea, especially if visibility is important.

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