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by dspillett 3439 days ago
> We will also consider more signals to use in exempting a page from this throttling

The main problems I have with background tabs and resource use is advertising iframes on otherwise inert pages. iflscience.com and sometimes imgur.com are two notable offenders here in my experience.

Advertisers will opt of anything that might throttle their content whether they need to or not, without testing if they need to, just in case. so if there is an opt out I expect it to be abused such that this pain point will not go away.

As well as asking if a particular domain should be allowed to unthrottle itself as others have suggested (or instead of if there is a fear that extra UI interactions will confuse the user) perhaps you could only allow it if the top level frame also opts out? This would give control back to the main page maintainer and if used in combination with the prompts could confuse less technical users less (the request for unthrottling comes from a recognised name like iflscience.com not content.idofmachineinfarm.r438957432t43.somecompanyyouveneverheardof.com)

> disable aggressive throttling when active websocket connection is present.

How is "active" defined here? I foresee advertisers opening a websocket that does as little as possible in order to get a prompt-less lifting of the throttle...

> Tabs playing audio are already unthrottled

I'd love to reverse this and punish tabs that play audio in the background! (or to allow for genuinely useful uses, such as message alerts, punish those that play more then 5 seconds of audio in a minute, unless tey are whitelisted).

2 comments

I think the heart of it is that "using my resources in the background" needs to be 100% opt-in. All webpages should be frozen and use 0 CPU/RAM unless the user grants them permission. I can think of only a handful of sites I would grant this permission to - mainly "apps" such as Google Inbox, Slack etc.
Tabs playing audio will include a lot of people listening to music on youtube.
Exactly. There are a few obvious things that want to be allowed and many others (sites playing adverts and such) that don't.

White-listing youtube would be one click for ever (potentially) and the same for other similar sites (vimeo, maybe facebook, ...) - in fact not even that as common sites like that could be on the list by default (as long as there is an easy way to de-list them).