When you have too many tabs open in Firefox, its possible that overall browser experience
is not smooth. There is a couple of reasons for that of which one is
Background tasks. Just to clarify that background tasks are those which
takes place at a certain interval of time and not always. So if you are
downloading a file, it is not a background process but the email account
which polls for new email every few minutes is a background process.
It’s
quite possible that you might have one or few such background process
that is taking place on one of the tabs and due to which you might not
be able to switch tabs
at all, or the other tabs are not closing, or just the whole thing is
not working. This kind of processs are sometimes taken care by the
browser itself by notifying but when it is not, you need an extension
named as Suspend Background Tabs.
Features :
Suspend
Background Tabs is an experimental extension for Firefox which tries to
make Firefox more responsive by suspending such tabs and hence saving
CPU Time. SO now any program which uses Javascript or Ajax to pull
information, will not work. To test, load Facebook on one of the tabs
and switch to another tab. You would notice that you will not see any
new notification unless you switch and wait for few seconds.
Now
many of you might prefer to have background process working for some of
the websites. So for such websites, you can pin them by making a right
click over the tab and then choose Option of Pin as App Tab. Then under Extension Option, you can choose to enable background process for such tabs.
What is not suspended :
Tabs which are downloading a file or have videos which you are buffering, remain unaffected by this extension.
Suggestions :
- A white list of websites which the extension can skip automatically.
- Allow user to choose if they want to buffer videos or suspend that too.
Overall
my experience using this was pretty smooth. I have loads of tabs open
all the time, for which, I prefer using all three browsers but with this
at least one can be skipped. However I have to be smart enough to
always remember that I dont forget to pin websites which I need the
background task to work.
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