Firefox Tabs response slow ? Suspend Background Tabs can help

 

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.

Download

Download the extension from here via TechDows <  GHacks