Firefox - Enhanced Tab Management
I’m a big fan of opening things in new tabs - I find this doing this helps me keep context when reviewing lists of things(say, search results), allows me to “save things I want to read, but can’t right now” and if the process of opening/closing tabs generally seems faster than using the back button a lot (no need to reload pages).
This said, I’m up against a wall with this technique - At some point one of the tabs will have a JS or SWF script that starts to consumes more and more cycles of the CPU, and as the number of tabs grows, so does the chance of having “a few bad apples”.
While browsing this way might be non-standard, I’m certainly not alone in the practice and suspect more people would browse this way if given the choice.
Possible solutions:
Session Manager enhancement or new “Tab State” (Active or Inactive).
Open but inactive tabs cease execution of any/all clientside scripts or embeds. Users can specify triggers (haven’t viewed in 4 hours?), and these tabs are marked “open but inactive”. Screen shots could be taken prior to stopping clientside execution so users can nearly instantly switch back to these tabs, viewing the cached rendering prior to resuming clientside execution.
Process monitor for clientside scripts
This may well already exist (Greasemonkey?) but it’d be nice to see a list of all clientside JS/SWF processes and have the ability to end specific processes.
I’d argue that there is an environmental impact at stake here (laptop runs hotter, consuming more electricity), not to mention productivity gains. Any thoughts or recommendations?
- Lou
