"Don't load tabs until selected" does not work?

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Geert
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"Don't load tabs until selected" does not work?

Unread post by Geert » 2023-02-08, 16:09

In the Tools-menu > Preferences, I have checked the option: "Don't load tabs until selected". But when scrolling through a list of links (e.g. in search results) and opening pages in new tabs in the *background* by middle-clicking, these pages do load immediately in the background. They do not wait until they are selected, as desired. This seems to contradict the setting? Seems to be a bug?

After opening and parking a lot of pages in this way, Pale Moon slows down and hangs up. Probably running out of memory? I am using it in a virtual machine, as the host machine is reserved for 3D-editing and graphics software only, and I do not want to cause any conflicts there. Any other software such as mail, browsers, or office, is run in a virtual machine.

So I have to kill Pale Moon when it gets too slow. Then, after restarting Pale Moon, it restores the session (which is a good thing!), and only the selected tab is loaded. Other tabs are not loaded until I select them. Which is the desired behaviour I think. But this only works after killing and restarting Pale Moon, not when opening pages in the background by "middle clicking", nor by right-clicking and then chosing "open page in new tab".

Could you have a look into this? If pages would not load until selected indeed, as per the setting, then Pale Moon would not slow down and not hang up due to too much open tabs. Thanks.

This happens in the latest Pale Moon version, and in all previous versions as long as I remember. (It is the same in Firefox by the way.)

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Moonchild
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Re: "Don't load tabs until selected" does not work?

Unread post by Moonchild » 2023-02-08, 20:08

Geert wrote:
2023-02-08, 16:09
This seems to contradict the setting? Seems to be a bug?
Nope, that's not a bug. Since you are actively opening new tabs, they will load. This setting has to do with tabs that are loaded from a (previous) browsing session, i.e. restored tabs.
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Geert
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Re: "Don't load tabs until selected" does not work?

Unread post by Geert » 2023-02-10, 18:43

Thanks for the clarification, I had not understood it that way.

What would you think of renaming that option into: "On session restore, don't load tabs until selected." This might be more clear for people like me who don't know the internal mechanics?

And what would you think of adding an extra option: "When opening tabs in the background (e.g. via middle-clicking), do not load them until selected"? Which would have my originally desired function?

Could that be a solution? Then a newly opened tab would consume no memory as long as it is not brought to the foreground.

When people are "middle clicking" through a list of links, they soon end up with a zillion open pages in the background. This is not only true for me; I also see it among my collegues, and even way worse among our students. After a while, the students have 75000 pages open, and then their whole system crashes including their classroom tasks and exams... This happens with all other browsers too, as our classroom-computers do not have Pale Moon installed, only Google (which appears to be CIA-spyware and censorware, but nobody wants to see that). This method of "page parking" while surfing, as Jacob Nielsen calls it, seems to have become the normal behaviour for most people now.

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Re: "Don't load tabs until selected" does not work?

Unread post by Moonchild » 2023-02-10, 19:12

While I understand the user-pov desire to do this, it's technically a lot more difficult. Stored pages in a stored session have meta-data attached to them (i.e. title, icon, etc.) and have been resolved to their final URL. When creating new tabs from links, that data isn't available, so it's not possible to "park" these links without doing at least some lookup, loading, parsing and storage, at which point one may as well load the page in question.
Tabs, in addition, are not bookmarks -- no matter how many people want them to "kindof" act that way. Tabs are, by definition, open documents. I've warned users many times already that using open tabs as bookmarks (or parked pages or whatever you want to call them) is dangerous because they are transitional/volatile in nature. If students abuse tabs to have literally 75000 web pages open at once, then yes, they will experience memory exhaustion and crashes, with the likely additional result that recently opened tabs are lost entirely. It should also be noted that a huge number of open tabs is completely outside of the design scope of any browser (not just us).

The only real option for what you want would be to bookmark links (this is part of the context menu on anchors, "Bookmark this link"). If you want to have a shortcut for that, then one of the available shortcut extensions might help you out to streamline it. So yes, that will mean people need to be instructed in how best to use a web browser instead of just winging it and making assumptions. There are considerable limits to what any web browser can do -- they are not operating systems, they are not content management systems. Your use of them should align at least somewhat with the technical capabilities of the application. Workflows may need to be adjusted (that's hard, I know.)
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Re: "Don't load tabs until selected" does not work?

Unread post by Galaxy » 2023-02-11, 04:26

I have tried out the following three extensions to keep background tabs from loading until selected:

Load Tab on select 0.5.8.1-signed
BarTab Tycho 4.0
BarTab Plus 3.2.8

Load Tab on select 0.5.8.1-signed is the most basic (has no other features) and has no settings to choose from. The tabs are always unloaded in the background until you click on them.

BarTab Tycho 4.0 is different from the other two. The tab does not load when selected. You have to click on the arrow in the location bar before the tab would load.

BarTab Tycho 4.0 can be installed from https://addons.palemoon.org/addon/bartab-tycho/

The other two can be found in the Classic Add-ons Archive 2.0.3 extension. This extension can be found at
https://github.com/JustOff/ca-archive/releases

You will most likely need the Palefill 1.26 extension to access the Classic Add-ons Archive 2.0.3 extension when using Pale Moon. The Palefill 1.26 extension can be found at https://martok.github.io/palefill/. Click on the Install button in the upper right part of the web page to install the extension.

Otherwise use Chrome or Firefox to download the extension from github.com so you can install it in Pale Moon.

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Re: "Don't load tabs until selected" does not work?

Unread post by Konrad » 2023-02-12, 07:53

Geert wrote:
2023-02-08, 16:09
If pages would not load until selected indeed, as per the setting, then Pale Moon would not slow down and not hang up due to too much open tabs.

Lull the Tabs provides the required option: it doesn’t load tabs when you open them in the background.
https://github.com/JustOff/lull-the-tabs/releases

Screenshot

To load xpi-files from GitHub, you need to have Palefill Web Technologies Polyfill installed.
https://martok.github.io/palefill/

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Geert
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Re: "Don't load tabs until selected" does not work?

Unread post by Geert » 2023-04-03, 18:23

Thanks, when I have a bit more time after completing a project, I will have a look at that lull-the-tabs thing.

The desired behavious is already in Pale Moon, after killing PM with Sysinternals Process Explorer, and restarting it: then it does only open new empty tabs, remembers the previous urls, but this time it does not load these tabs until we go to them. Could that behaviour be copied or used as standard?

So, for now the fastest way of browsing is to right-click a lot of sites open in the background (all sites I want to visit in a listing of urls), until Pale Moon hangs up, then kill PM and restart it, and then it works as desired. :-)

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Re: "Don't load tabs until selected" does not work?

Unread post by Nigaikaze » 2023-04-03, 18:45

Konrad wrote:
2023-02-12, 07:53
Lull the Tabs provides the required option: it doesn’t load tabs when you open them in the background.
And here's a fork of Lull the Tabs on the Pale Moon add-ons site that was created by Moonchild:
https://addons.palemoon.org/addon/suspender/
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