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Keeping tabs without refresh in Android? (lemm.ee)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I swear I saw something like this here on Lemmy but I can't find it.

I know android manages the RAM very differently than any desktop OS as it frees up RAM in order to have it available for other processes being third party or core ones.

I remember I saw something that you could fiddle with within the Firefox config page.

Or is it not possible on Android?

I'm using Firefox Nightly, because I think it is the only version that has a working pull to refresh.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You mean you want to avoid FF flushing your tabs?

Um, I don't know if stock FF has that, but in IceRaven there's an option for the exact opposite - to flush the content of tabs so that when the browser is minimised, Android is less likely to kill it outright. I assume it's just some config option being exposed as a menu item.

But note the meaning of the feature - if your tabs stay active, they take up resources and so it's more likely Android will kill the entire browser process.

IR also has pull to refresh btw, as do other forks.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You mean you want to avoid FF flushing your tabs?

Yeah well not permanently, as I recently moved from Chrome I think Chrome holds them on the RAM a longer time, so you can be multitasking within the browser and other apps.

I don't understand why IceRaven would do that, why kill the tabs to have a browser without content running in the background?

But if it is an option as you said, maaaaybe that is what I saw here on the wild 🤷🏻

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

why kill the tabs to have a browser without content running in the background?

It doesn't kill the tabs, just removes their content from active memory.

If you have private tabs open and the fucking OS kills the browser, then those tabs are gone and you need to reopen them from scratch, log in again etc. With this option enabled, the browser can free up more memory so the OS is less likely to kill the browser.

Now, with some phone brands it might not matter as their background process culling is more aggressive, but with default Android there's a difference.

But it's just an option, idk if it's disabled by default. Maybe there's an extra config option for it somewhere.

Yea FF on Android does take up more memory than Chromium, maybe because Chromium can share more Android core things, idk. Either way, if you run out of memory, the browser will start flushing things regardless, so it doesn't crash.

Chromium also does a different thing where it still shows the unloaded website but in "preview" mode and you need to refresh it anyway, which I find even more annoying.