Does anyone actually care about loading speeds (apart from the necessary ad blocking)?
It's kinda like money imo: You think you don't care about it until you don't have it. The only time I've ever cared about loading speeds was when I stayed on LTS Firefox for 2 years to avoid switching to WebExtensions, because I wanted to keep using several addons that were discontinued in Quantum. And near the end...yeah I cared about loading time. Felt amazing when I finally did upgrade (although I'm still pissed af that they never re-added the ability for extensions to access tab-specific history & will never get over this unless they do one day add it).
So I do think it's important to pay attention to even when no one cares, just to make sure that no one starts caring.
Curious, what was the use case for this?
I still actively get mad that I can't use this shortcut every single time I have to go to the physical buttons.
It’s rarely ever mentioned though and not something that significant gains are regularly made in, which is a bit strange to me. Browsers across the board have crossed the threshold of diminishing returns when it comes to speed, I’d personally rather they shift focus towards battery friendliness.
Personally I don't see why Firefox can't just stop JavaScript execution on tabs that aren't visible after say 5 seconds, unless the user has enabled background execution.
Stopping it entirely and then suddenly restarting on foreground would be probably too much of a breaking change for the websites' developers. I mean, I guess it could be possible but would require properly thinking it through. Some browsers aggressively freeze background tabs but AFAIR they do full reload on unfreeze.
The breakage area of shipping that kind of change into the web ecosystem of a major browser is huge.
Fortunately it never affected any need to switch to another browser since I'm plugged in 95% of the time.
Anyway, it was a rhetorical question, not one that needed an answer.