Issue 224182 - chromium - Chrome wakes me up in the middle of the night | Hacker News Reader

Issue 224182 - chromium - Chrome wakes me up in the middle of the night

code.google.com

281 pointsmayop100123 comments

An important comment on the bug from a Chromium employee [0]

    Hacker News crowd, let's please stop the "me too" party 
    here, and please file separate bugs for separate issues 
    (even if they're similar). Keeping the signal-to-noise 
    ratio sane on this one raises the chances that it gets 
    addressed :)
    So you can help by only commenting if you have technical    
    comments on how to fix the problem in Chrome. It'd be a 
    shame if we had to lock this bug to prevent further 
    useless comments.

[0] https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=224182#c...

You can always tell if something is garbage on here by looking at the average length of the comments. Almost every single comment on this link is an inane one-liner that adds nothing to any meaningful discussion. And lo and behold, it's the same sort of shitty discussion as on the bug report itself.

Compare this with the comments on the 21 Nested Callbacks link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5447287

Agreed. I'd pay for a Chrome extension that would score HN stories by this metric.

Reminds me of all the +1 comments on GitHub issues. They add nothing to the conversation and you can easily subscribe to an issue by clicking the "watch" button.

Your comment is no better.

Isn't it nice to know that there really are a bunch of other people who:

1. Have the problem

2. Take the time to voice their wish for a fix

Even the coolest bug will remain unfixed if only one person reports it.

> Even the coolest bug will remain unfixed if only one person reports it.

Is that true? The priority of the bug should depend on the properties of the bug and not on the number of bug reporters.

One rather important property is how many people are suffering from it.

You can star it. That would tell the developers how many people care about it in O(1) time, without having to wade through O(n) comments.

Alright, O(log n) time.

Why O(log n)? Is there a binary search involved somewhere (for example)? All you have got to do to find out how many people voted for it is to look at the vote count and this seems like an O(1) operation doesn't it?

The number n has log(n)/log(10) digits so it technically take log(n) time to read it.

only if log(n) > 7. Otherwise, subitization gives constant time reading of the magnitude of n.

Technically, O(log(n) <= 7 ? 1 : log(n)) is still O(log(n)) ... :)

I run into similar situations whenever I restart my browser. All of the YouTube tabs I had open from before start playing simultaneously (at any given time I often have some tabs with videos paused, ready for me to watch later). It's quite distracting and takes some effort to find and stop them all.

I think a good solution for both of our problems would be to not load any of the Flash content in a particular tab if the tab hasn't received focus since the application was restarted. Once I open that tab, the plugin can load at that point and then the video can start playing.

Safari implements your solution. Though I wonder if it would even help if their Netflix tab was the focused one; for that case, it would also have to wait for some user interaction or something, which seems messier.

My solution was to switch to YouTube's HTML5 player. No more tabs crashing left and right.

And the YouTube Options extension is great, and solves the problem of auto play (besides adding a ton of extra features; downloads included).

Firefox does something like this. It doesn't load tab content on restart until the tab gains focus.

Even this becomes annoying when you have to wait for the page to load to see it's content and is heavy but not media content heavy. Something like Google+ or coursera pages.

I think it's a setting - maybe "browser.sessionstore.restore_hidden_tabs" ?

Except for the tab that was active.

is it the default? I thought you had to explictly enable that

I had the same problem, now I use https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stop-autoplay-for-... so that if I open a tab in the background I don't have to manually pause the Youtube video or I if restore a chrome session like you said.

My solution to this is just to go into the Task Manager and kill the Flash plugin about 30 seconds after every restart (This saves a load of memory too). When I actually want to watch one of the videos, just reloading the page is enough to kick Flash back into gear.

I use Flashblock in FF. You click on the flash then it starts to load.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/flashblock/

I absolutely despise this trend of having software open stuff up automatically as if it's somehow helping. OS X is the biggest offender, for example; when Photoshop decides to just freak out opening a file, so you close photoshop, then reopen and it tries to reopen all your old files, including the one that's causing the problems. What sort of sadist wants 10 PSDs to open all at once?

I miss the good old days when you could reboot your machine and everything was fresh and pristine and yours to mess up.

You can configure this on OS X. In the General preferences, there is an option 'Close windows when quitting an application'.

I know this now, but like most people, I learned the hard way. And for some reasons, Pages, Numbers and Keynote seem to ignore this setting and continue to open up every file they can get their grubby little mitts on with gay abandon.

I just looked--this is checked by default on my installation of Mountain Lion.

In Chrome, this is optional, by default it just opens a blank tab. The user in the bug report chose the option "Continue where I left off".

I've never selected that option in Chrome, and yet when my computer restarts from Windows Updates it displays the behaviour mentioned in the bug report. When I start Chrome normally, I get a blank tab, but when my computer is forcibly restarted with Chrome running, it tries to take me back to where I was.

I'm just speculating here, but it might be playing nice with Windows, since Windows does have this habit of restarting at night on certain days (patch Tuesday, is it?). For those who leave their computers on at all times, it would be a terrible thing indeed to lose their active pages.

Don't even get me started on what they did to Textedit. Apparently there's no such thing as saving anymore - it does it for you automatically.

That one has bit me quite a few times...

Yeah, totally. Not to mention that you basically can't leave your machine powered on and unattended anymore, lest the operating system decides to get frisky and update itself without asking first. And still worse are the times when you're right in the middle of something and the machine declares that it WILL reboot on you, and there's no two ways about it. You are on the way to destruction. You have no chance to survive make your time.

"This is serious. Though it never occurred on my computer because I use neither Windows nor Chrome but I support this anyway in the name of humanity."

In the name of humanity, wouldn't it be nice if people were in the habit of shutting their computers down, rather than letting them burn through electricity all night long?

Yeah well, we don't!

Excuse me, I couldn't hear you over my own goddamn tree-hugging self-righteousness! ^_^

IIRC Windows turns itself on to install updates and then shuts down.

It will actually restart after installing updates and make you wonder why none of your programs from the night before are still running.

It's worse if you've encrypted your hard drive. After a 3am windows update, my Sony laptop reboots and stops at the Truecrypt 'enter your password' boot prompt. But at this pre-boot point, there's no OS power-saving. So the CPU is at 100%, the laptop fan spins up to hurricane levels, and the dumb thing just sits there for the rest of the night like an overpriced fan heater.

In this usage scenario, it would probably be a better option to disable automatic updates and be vigilant about updates "manually". Windows will still notify you about updates, and it will be a bit of a hassle... but not a space heater kind of issue at least. :)

I have found most humans to not care about their energy consumption. So in the name of humanity, I have at least one computer on 24 hours a day.

I hope google, facebook, hacker news and other web sites would start shutting down at least half of their servers during the night. And, when I say night, I mean night anywhere on this platnet, not just night in some particular time zone. That would help.

Ok, forgive me if I'm missing some sarcasm here but... you realize that about half the planet is in darkness at any given time, right?

I think you're missing some sarcasm here. It's OK, I forgive you.

Thank you. I should not respond to things at 4:00 in the morning.

Yes and all websites should have a black background ;)

I have electric heating, so the difference between using the baseboard heaters exclusively and using computers with the baseboard for supplemental heating is nil.

It's 2013, I haven't shut a computer down in 4 years. Hibernate everything.

It's 2013, and hibernation is broken in Ubuntu! :(

Works for me on my seven year old Thinkpad.

It doesn't work for me on my year-old thinkpad, or on my desktop, or on my server, and it is broken on two other computers I know of. Hibernation issues in Ubuntu aren't exactly an uncommon problem: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/hibernate

Additionally, it is disabled by policykit in releases past 12.04: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/policykit-desktop-...

So yeah, Hibernate is broken in Ubuntu in 2013, and your downvote doesn't change that

I didn't downvote you.

I am using 12.04.1, but I made a mistake, in that I confused hibernate with suspend. Suspend works for me; I've never tried hibernate. The link you provide mentions only hibernate in the title but seems to be talking about suspend as well. Strange, since suspend works for me and I didn't do anything to enable it.

I don't dispute that suspend and/or hibernate is broken on many machines using some recent versions of Ubuntu. But it still "works for me": just another datapoint.

or I mean just take charge of your technology instead of expecting it to babysit you through the night. Seriously, this is a ridiculous demand. It's impossible for a browser to manage every plug-in it has if you're not going to oversee your operating system.

One sort-of-workaround is to enable plugin click-to-play. It's less convenient, but it has other advantages. It prevents Flash content from annoying you unexpectedly (such as on every band website ever). It also adds a small bit of safety if there's ever a 0-day for Flash. Instead of getting exploited as soon as you visit any infected page, you'd at least have to click on an embed that you wanted to watch or play.

Unfortunately, this doesn't help for sites that use HTML5 for media. As more sites start using HTML5, I think demand for a ClickToHTML5 option/extension will rise.

I always do this in all my browsers (I use Flashblock or similar extensions). I have no idea why people need plugin content to start immediately. This also blocks most of the annoying ads.

I forgot this setting existed. Just turned it on... much, much better.

Firefox 'solves' this by only loading tabs that have been given the focus upon auto-restart.

So, if you have 10 tabs opened, and your computer restarts and Firefox is opened, the only tab that will actually load is the one that was last active.

>> "by only loading tabs" and then "the only tab"

So, Firefox opens tabs or tab (as in juts one tab or many/all tabs)?

Because in my case it opens all the tabs and if there were 20, it opens all. Even though the last time I opened them was 3-4 hours before the browser was closed/crashed.

update: I had missed the point. Thanks @thirtian for clearing up.

Firefox displays the tabs in the tab-bar, but it doesn't bother loading the page until the first time you switch to the tab.

Also, pinned tabs are always loaded at startup.

There is an option in the settings to load tabs automatically or when clicked on, upon browser restart.

I don't like this. It just feels like Firefox is being lazy to me.

I notice I have to wait a second or two when I switch to another tab. This is annoying because I remember seeing the page load before I restarted. My subconscious doesn't realize that it was a different process.

I'd rather my browser and everything else involved work a little harder to give me the illusion that nothing has changed after I restart.

The described behavior is the default behavior. You can change it to load all tabs after restart in the options†.

To always load all tabs after (re)start, go to Preferences > Tabs and uncheck "Don't load tabs until selected". ("Preferences" may be called Options or something on Windows or Linux, I can't recall right now.)

I would argue this is a sane default setting (it trades some waiting time when switching to a different tab for snappier start-up). Regardless, Firefox gives you the option to choose your behavior, which I would argue is the non-lazy thing to do (however simple).

† Note I am on Nightly, so it's possible this preference is not yet visible in the release version. It probably is, but just to be clear.

Yes, it is visible in the release version.

I much prefer this solution. As someone who can have over 100 tabs open with potentially a dozen YouTube tabs amongst them, having to hunt down all the YouTube tabs after a browser restart is a serious pain!

Also frequently FireFox crashes for me are due to it hitting the 4GB memory limit (well closer to 2GB obviously), so restoring all tabs would just result in Firefox crashing again. Restoring them piece meal lets me close down ones I do not need, thus allowing me to get FF's memory usage down to acceptable size.

No, Firefox 'solves' this by giving it 'WONTFIX'. Lately, it seems sucking is a feature, not a bug. ;)

This is a indeed a feature. It is a boon for people living with low data speeds and/or limited-data plans. I can wait for 5 seconds for each tab to load, rather than all 10 tabs loading simultaneously and freezing the browser. It also gives me a chance to close off those tabs (without loading the page) which I don't need.

Also useful for the people who use the tab bar as a favourites bar and have several hundred tabs open regularly.

that wouldnt keep the monsters away in this case though :)

This would be so great. Unfortunately the Chrome developers didn't like it. I can't find the bug now, but they don't want to add this and also don't allow any user options so that people can configure it :-(

One guy in that bug even wrote he patched that part out, but that's not a solution for me, I don't have time to compile Chronium myself.

Turning off wifi or configuring (in IE!) a fake proxy is the only remedy.

I think you mean this one: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=105666

Oh that's why Firefox does this, I find this very annoying and tried to turn it off in about:config to no avail...

There is a "Don't load tabs until selected" option in the tabs submenu, in preferences. Ensure it is not ticked for your desired behaviour.

Last year I was woken up in the middle of the night by my girlfriend, who was terrified by a voice that seems to come from the lounge. I got up, opened the door, and there was a bright white light. My girlfriend was even more terrified since she could only see me and the light shining on me from the lounge. It was the television. It turns out that when we were channel surfing earlier in the evening, we switched to a channel that wasn't broadcasting anything, got distracted, and the television goes into sleep mode after a while when it's on such a channel. At 3am they started broadcasting some video loop, basically of a white background with a little text, and a woman's voice announcing something.

I watched The Ring once and must have left the TV on, because later that night I woke up to a light coming from the living room. I went in and the TV was doing the "white noise / static" thing exactly like in the movie.

I turned it off, unplugged it from the wall and thought, "ok, if that happens again I can officially shit myself."

I blame this 'issue' on the op. True there are many potential paths that the Chrome/chromium developers can take with this, but they've chosen a different path from Firefox and others and as a user of Chrome that's what we have to stick with now.

If you don't like the behavior, there are ways to change it yourself:

* Install flash blocking plugin * Enable click-to-play * Install a plugin that disabled auto-play (at least for youtube, don't know about a netflix one) * Put the computer to sleep/hibernate * Turn off speakers * Turn off the computer ... * Close the netflix tab

There are many many options. If you don't like closing out chrome because you'll be missing your tabs, then use a plugin like "Session Manager" and then save your currently open tabs, and then close Chrome.

I don't think this is a bug. I think it works just fine.

Heck, I don't know which setting I have but if chrome crashes or if I restart my computer without nicely closing chrome, Chrome will re-open upon boot BUT it'll open a new blank tab with a bar at the top that says something like "Chrome didn't shut down properly. Do you want to restore your old tabs?" ... that works extremely well.

You don't even need a session manager. Much like Firefox it has the option to reopen the tabs from your previous session, right there in the settings!

The biggest issue I have with Chrome restoring tabs is that it completely hogs my computer and internet connection while requesting, downloading and rendering all the pages.

To solve it, I simply turn off wi-fi when restarting Chrome, so that all the tabs reopen, but are not reloaded. The URLs are restored, and I can reload them exactly when I want to.

Hello fellow tab addict! I must have about 30-40 tabs I restore every day out of laziness and fear of bookmarking and never reading again. Someone posted to HN an extension to help with this but I forget what it's called. Also Firefox has a nice solution to your problem in that it only loads the tabs once you click on them.

It's called OneTab (http://www.one-tab.com/)

I think it is already a option in the settings in the default installation of FF. Load upon selection.

In fifty years we'll tell to our grandchildren: "Back in my day, we had to turn WiFi off before starting our browser after a crash, because it would not load when connected to the inter(galactic)net". They'll pity us I'm sure!

I like that :-)

That's a bug, report it. Chrome makes an effort to queue the tab-loads gracefully.

Anyone care to guess what kind of creative "Closed:..." tag this bug gets?

"Closed: User told to watch something less scary"

Good bug to address but who allows Windows to power itself up and install updates unsupervised?

Not a good idea.

I'm not sure whether it's a good idea, but it's the default.

Why not? Do you manually install the patches coming down every month? Do you put all of them through some validation? On your home machine? How are you doing this validation? I mean aside of installing a patch and uninstalling it when you come across an issue?

Having an unpatched windows machine is a way bigger risk than some patch not quite working right and by installing the updates when you are not in front of your machine, you don't risk either interrupting your work for the reboot or remain being unpatched pending the reboot you are postponing.

As the bug report makes a reference to both Netflix and sleeping, I would assume this is a home user, not a corporate one where the patches get reviewed quickly.

> Why not? Do you manually install the patches coming down every month?

yes, but that's so I control the moment of restart since I always have a bunch of transient stuff running, once I get the update alerts I can download & install then slowly wind down transient state until I'm ready to reboot the machine. That may take a day or 2.

Even if so, what would change about it if you were watching it? If the patch goes boom, does it matter if you were watching the process?

Yes, because the little warning pops up asking if you want to postpone restart.

Ok, but why does it matter? If it fails, restore from your backup and move on with life. Having to babysit patches makes me think of the late 90's not 2013.

Definitely not. Especially since updates aren't 100% error free all the time and unless you set it to install when you want it to, you don't control it. I can understand that they want to make sure patches are applied ASAP, but I prefer to keep an eye on it myself.

Not too much of a problem for me since I'm up at 3:00AM anyway. In fact, it's 3:09AM right now.

Windows did not "power itself up" - the person specified that he turned off the monitor, not the computer.

But windows did powered itself off and on again by itself, after it finished downloading updates.

The amount of 3D rendering jobs I've lost due to automatic restarts in the middle of the night. My personal preference is to no install updates at night, partly because I power off my machine and when I leave it on, I need it on.

The other problem is windows getting out of sleep mode to install updates without even asking.

Youtube is harmless. Have three different porn sites open when restarting Chrome after a power loss and then listening to three porns at once... ouch.

Incognito mode.

Feels like amateur hour!

I think the problem is that the user has set Chrome to run on boot. If he removed Chrome from the startup list this problem would not occur.

I think the problem is that the user still had his/her speakers turned on. They should've been turned off or muted, same with his/her cellphone (if any).

I can confirm this solution works for me.

I switch off my computer before going to bed. Never wakes me up.

I don't think it's necessary to set Chrome to run on every boot, I think it's registering to be restarted once after the unattended reboot that Windows Update is doing.

edit: Yep, it's calling RegisterApplicationRestart: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/codesearch#search/&q=...

well, it would still restart all his plugin-based media streams when he reopened chrome, which is the underlying bug. but yeah, it would be a decidedly less monsterful experience.

I donot really understand why Chrome needs to be on startup. Can we not click a taskbar icon and start it whenever we want?

I'm confused, does windows update restore previously running applications after restarting windows to install updates? Or do those affected have chrome set to run at startup?

A Windows Update restart will restore applications running at the time of the restart. It generally does a pretty good job of it too.

I use external speakers. They have a power button. I turn them off when I'm away.

I don't use external speakers, that also solves the problem

This is a perfect bug report. Humor, steps to reproduce, a real world problem... This would be a bug I chose to work on as soon as possible (if it turns out it is something that can be fixed in this project alone).

Just close the Netflix tab before you sleep. I hate my generation.

You can set Chrome to not restore tabs when restarted

This has happened to me multiple times.

Stop using Windows. Problem solved.

Would not have downvoted if it weren't for your username.

Good point :)

Cute. One "solution" of course is to set the 'On startup' setting to anything other than 'continue where I left off.'.

Well, I go to a lot of the same pages every day, so I very much want to continue whee I left off, but not necessarily to start playing media at once.

you know what I'd love (all you enterprising Chrome plugin developers): let me view and manage my open tabs through the same sort of large icon interface that appears on the New Tab page. I wouldn't mind being able to organize my bookmarks that way either. I can't understand why nobody has attempted to do anything different with the bookmark interface for years now.

You could also choose to make your plugins "click to play": chrome://settings/content#plug

I could, but would rather not have it like that all the time. Good point though.

It's not the setting. Chrome automatically continues there when it's closed by Windows restarting. The idea is that applications that are open will return to the same state when the computer restarts. This is separate from the user closing the program and launching it again.

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