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Reviews for Dont Load Background Tabs

Dont Load Background Tabs by igorlogius

4 Stars out of 5
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1 review
  • by Miguel, 15 days ago
    It is supposed to do exactly what I needed on Firefox for Android. But the background tab is not automatically opened why switching to it, and the Reload button does not work either, I have to tap on the address bar and type Enter, so I cannot say that it really works, but it is an excellent try.

    Another remark: the option window is accessible through the plugin manager, but not directly by clicking on the plugin name in the plugin list, which works with other plugins. And the title "blacklist" is not obvious, it could be "apply only to URL matching on of these patterns" or "do not apply to URL matching...".

    Edit after your answer: it does works in some cases, in contrast to my first tests. According to my tests, it works even when Firefox is killed and its memory released. But sometimes not: I have the feeling that it fails when Firefox itself decides to discard a tab, maybe because there are too much of them or because if was not used for some time. Firefox for Android may not have the "discard" function, it obviously has some internal way to keep a tab discarded and to refresh it when selected. But possibly there is no way to do it from Javascript in an addon. I am afraid I cannot help.

    Sorry, I am not adventurous enough to play with "modern" Javascript (too abstract: for me, bare-metal C and VHDL already are high-level languages, and 10 kB is a big executable).

    Developer response

    posted 15 days ago
    Thanks for the feedback. This addon was meant as a drop-in replacement for my other addon "Load Background tabs on select" which could not work on android since firefox is missing the essential tab.discard function there.

    The automatic loading on switching focus works as long as the app is not closed/suspended and its memory released and the reload does not work because canceling request leave the tabs in an unreloadable state. Funny enough this doenst prevent the addressbar from getting the URL and commit/enter to still work. But there is not much i can do about that since its firefox internal behaviour i cant influence/change.

    In case you are adventurous,
    a fellow addon developer tried his hand at a version which tries to fix some of these issues: https://github.com/eight04/load-background-tabs-on-select/tree/dev-webrequest

    The modifications basically keep the request waiting forever and from eight04's tests it looks like there are no immediate drawbacks and reload and switch works as expected, but i did not feel comfortable with this method since i suspected that leaving requests open would still draw resources so i decided to stick with the canceling of the request since i was sure that would not cause any extra resources to be used up.

    The options are reallly not very mobile friendly ... as i said this addon hasn't gotton much love for a while ... but i might have to come back to it and see if there are new ways to improve stuff. ... mobile development just isnt exactly my speciality so yeah ... dont hold your breath.