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by mjevans 3439 days ago
I'd like to see the user better informed of hot (active) tabs. Just like there's an audio icon to help the user track down which tab is making noise, there should also be some mechanism to let the user know that a tab is more active than usual.

I'd recommend a different background color for the tab, except that I'd also like to see (sign in) profiles have distinct background colors to aid the user in keeping their profiles straight.

6 comments

Color change on the tab would be nice - maybe have it slowly grow more red (and perhaps add an option to change the color as well - for colorblind folks) - then start blinking - then burst into flame...
I think Samsung tried that approach
While I've only seen it once, when I looked at it upon learning of its existence- the Chrome 'task manager' might show CPU usage of each tab. When I look at all the chrome.exe processes in the Windows Task Manager, the CPU usage is clear, but I can never tell which process is which tab. Something like a glowing tab coloration animation would be an unobtrusive informational thing, that would work even when tabs are pinned & too tiny to display a meter type thing inside them. Maybe if there could be a 'pause' button that appears on hover to allow this throttling to be engaged or not. Sounds like something to this extent might be a successful extension, then maybe if it sees broad adoption it could be implemented permanently.
No: the Chrome task manager shows activity per process, not per tab; processes typically have many many tabs lumped together (which undermines the security advantage, particularly as commonly-opened tabs like e-mail tend to end up having at least one instance open in every single process). You can't use this feature to figure out which tabs are using CPU unless you are barely using the web browser in the first place.
Whether or not tabs are in a new process depends on how it was opened. For example, opening a new tab with a control-click or middle-click will result in the new tab share a process with the original, however, right-clicking and selecting "Open in new tab" will result in the new tab having its own process.
I know this, and have even complained about it in the past to Chrome engineers (as it allows an attacker way too much control over getting security sensitive tabs into the same process, further weakening the way overstated security benefits of having separate renderer processes, which is often muddled together with the actual/real benefit of separating processes by capability, as with rendering, networking, windowing, plugins, etc.), but there is also a limited number of processes: as I believe the default is 35, if you have more than 35 tabs open across all windows you are guaranteed to have some tabs sharing a process (by pidgeon hole principle).

Realistically, you just can't use the Chrome task manager to find slow tabs :/. I'd argue that Firefox's recent work in about:performance is actually more useful for this purpose (though isn't very good at dealing with large numbers of tabs that are each using only a small amount of CPU; the real solution to that, though, should just be tab suspension).

This made me picture one of the old school nintendo games where your character starts sprouting flames when on a hot streak. There are times I would like to see flames flying off tabs that are pegging my cpu.
Perhaps the icon could be a spinning fan?
This would be great - and the measurements used to do this throttling could be used to populate that data!
Two outstanding suggestions