zlacker

> I've seen mobile browsers handle many tabs better.

It's my understanding that on mobile, tabs are unloaded from memory nearly instantly. You lose state but they use almost no resources. (I wish this was an option out of the box on Desktop. I've had extensions that do this and it's a godsend)

>>andyba+(OP)
Chrome already does that by default: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/02/chrome-110-will-auto...

>>NavinF+0c
Firefox did for about two years now: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/unload-inactive-tabs-sa...

>>NavinF+0c
That seems like a good way to lose work if you're not careful. Although I would also argue that any well-designed web app should be able to handle this gracefully so maybe it will lead to better web apps.

Infinite scroll is an especially bad offender here. If I'm 50 screens down on an infinite scroll that is work and a page refresh losing my place should be treated as a data-loss bug.

(an even better idea is not to use infinite scroll at all)

>>andyba+ph
I've never lost any unfinished messages due to this. I'm pretty sure Chrome prioritizes tabs where you've typed in text. Link in that other comment suggests that Firefox does something similar: "This is a smart process that avoids unloading tabs that are playing media, using Picture-in-Picture, or WebRTC. For more technical information, see this blog post"

And yeah fuck infinite scroll. I usually interact with such sites via their API or data export. Eg searching my YouTube Likes playlist is impossible on the web because I'd have to spend an hour scrolling before I can Ctrl+F

>>andyba+(OP)
Huh. And I actually had to play around in Android settings to exempt Firefox from regular memory management, so it stops unloading tabs so aggressively. Not only this was a huge annoyance when browsing[0][1], it actually prevented me from using the one PWA I cared about[2] - it would literally blank out every time I switched away from and back to it, while having as much as a single trivial other app open, forcing me to kill and relaunch it.

It's not that my phone was memory-constrained, we're talking a recent Samsung Galaxy flagship[3] - it's purely overly aggressive memory management on part of Firefox.

--

[0] - Have 5 tabs open, all something trivial like HN, put away phone, grab it 5 minutes later, switch to other HN tab, ... wait half a minute for it to reload on a spotty connection at my in-laws' countryside home.

[1] - Talking with others about how we experience technology, I'm starting to feel that I'm abnormally annoyed by large or unpredictable UI latency.

[2] - TypingMind.

[3] - I learned to save up and only buy high-end, thanks to the experience with my first smartphone, that turned out to be underspecced for its own functionality. It's probably a case of [1], but one time I deviated from this rule and got my wife a mid-range phone, we both started to regret it in a few months, so it's not only me who has low tolerance for jank.