An important comment on the bug from a Chromium employee [0]
Hacker News crowd, let's please stop the "me too" party
here, and please file separate bugs for separate issues
(even if they're similar). Keeping the signal-to-noise
ratio sane on this one raises the chances that it gets
addressed :)
So you can help by only commenting if you have technical
comments on how to fix the problem in Chrome. It'd be a
shame if we had to lock this bug to prevent further
useless comments.
You can always tell if something is garbage on here by looking at the average length of the comments. Almost every single comment on this link is an inane one-liner that adds nothing to any meaningful discussion. And lo and behold, it's the same sort of shitty discussion as on the bug report itself.
Reminds me of all the +1 comments on GitHub issues. They add nothing to the conversation and you can easily subscribe to an issue by clicking the "watch" button.
Why O(log n)? Is there a binary search involved somewhere (for example)? All you have got to do to find out how many people voted for it is to look at the vote count and this seems like an O(1) operation doesn't it?
I run into similar situations whenever I restart my browser. All of the YouTube tabs I had open from before start playing simultaneously (at any given time I often have some tabs with videos paused, ready for me to watch later). It's quite distracting and takes some effort to find and stop them all.
I think a good solution for both of our problems would be to not load any of the Flash content in a particular tab if the tab hasn't received focus since the application was restarted. Once I open that tab, the plugin can load at that point and then the video can start playing.
Even this becomes annoying when you have to wait for the page to load to see it's content and is heavy but not media content heavy. Something like Google+ or coursera pages.
Safari implements your solution. Though I wonder if it would even help if their Netflix tab was the focused one; for that case, it would also have to wait for some user interaction or something, which seems messier.
My solution to this is just to go into the Task Manager and kill the Flash plugin about 30 seconds after every restart (This saves a load of memory too). When I actually want to watch one of the videos, just reloading the page is enough to kick Flash back into gear.
I absolutely despise this trend of having software open stuff up automatically as if it's somehow helping. OS X is the biggest offender, for example; when Photoshop decides to just freak out opening a file, so you close photoshop, then reopen and it tries to reopen all your old files, including the one that's causing the problems. What sort of sadist wants 10 PSDs to open all at once?
I miss the good old days when you could reboot your machine and everything was fresh and pristine and yours to mess up.
Yeah, totally. Not to mention that you basically can't leave your machine powered on and unattended anymore, lest the operating system decides to get frisky and update itself without asking first. And still worse are the times when you're right in the middle of something and the machine declares that it WILL reboot on you, and there's no two ways about it. You are on the way to destruction. You have no chance to survive make your time.
I've never selected that option in Chrome, and yet when my computer restarts from Windows Updates it displays the behaviour mentioned in the bug report. When I start Chrome normally, I get a blank tab, but when my computer is forcibly restarted with Chrome running, it tries to take me back to where I was.
I'm just speculating here, but it might be playing nice with Windows, since Windows does have this habit of restarting at night on certain days (patch Tuesday, is it?). For those who leave their computers on at all times, it would be a terrible thing indeed to lose their active pages.
I know this now, but like most people, I learned the hard way. And for some reasons, Pages, Numbers and Keynote seem to ignore this setting and continue to open up every file they can get their grubby little mitts on with gay abandon.
"This is serious. Though it never occurred on my computer because I use neither Windows nor Chrome but I support this anyway in the name of humanity."
In the name of humanity, wouldn't it be nice if people were in the habit of shutting their computers down, rather than letting them burn through electricity all night long?
I hope google, facebook, hacker news and other web sites would start shutting down at least half of their servers during the night. And, when I say night, I mean night anywhere on this platnet, not just night in some particular time zone. That would help.
It doesn't work for me on my year-old thinkpad, or on my desktop, or on my server, and it is broken on two other computers I know of. Hibernation issues in Ubuntu aren't exactly an uncommon problem: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/hibernate
I am using 12.04.1, but I made a mistake, in that I confused hibernate with suspend. Suspend works for me; I've never tried hibernate. The link you provide mentions only hibernate in the title but seems to be talking about suspend as well. Strange, since suspend works for me and I didn't do anything to enable it.
I don't dispute that suspend and/or hibernate is broken on many machines using some recent versions of Ubuntu. But it still "works for me": just another datapoint.
It's worse if you've encrypted your hard drive. After a 3am windows update, my Sony laptop reboots and stops at the Truecrypt 'enter your password' boot prompt. But at this pre-boot point, there's no OS power-saving. So the CPU is at 100%, the laptop fan spins up to hurricane levels, and the dumb thing just sits there for the rest of the night like an overpriced fan heater.
In this usage scenario, it would probably be a better option to disable automatic updates and be vigilant about updates "manually". Windows will still notify you about updates, and it will be a bit of a hassle... but not a space heater kind of issue at least. :)
I have electric heating, so the difference between using the baseboard heaters exclusively and using computers with the baseboard for supplemental heating is nil.
or I mean just take charge of your technology instead of expecting it to babysit you through the night. Seriously, this is a ridiculous demand. It's impossible for a browser to manage every plug-in it has if you're not going to oversee your operating system.
One sort-of-workaround is to enable plugin click-to-play. It's less convenient, but it has other advantages. It prevents Flash content from annoying you unexpectedly (such as on every band website ever). It also adds a small bit of safety if there's ever a 0-day for Flash. Instead of getting exploited as soon as you visit any infected page, you'd at least have to click on an embed that you wanted to watch or play.
Unfortunately, this doesn't help for sites that use HTML5 for media. As more sites start using HTML5, I think demand for a ClickToHTML5 option/extension will rise.
I always do this in all my browsers (I use Flashblock or similar extensions). I have no idea why people need plugin content to start immediately. This also blocks most of the annoying ads.
Firefox 'solves' this by only loading tabs that have been given the focus upon auto-restart.
So, if you have 10 tabs opened, and your computer restarts and Firefox is opened, the only tab that will actually load is the one that was last active.
I don't like this. It just feels like Firefox is being lazy to me.
I notice I have to wait a second or two when I switch to another tab. This is annoying because I remember seeing the page load before I restarted. My subconscious doesn't realize that it was a different process.
I'd rather my browser and everything else involved work a little harder to give me the illusion that nothing has changed after I restart.
The described behavior is the default behavior. You can change it to load all tabs after restart in the options†.
To always load all tabs after (re)start, go to Preferences > Tabs and uncheck "Don't load tabs until selected". ("Preferences" may be called Options or something on Windows or Linux, I can't recall right now.)
I would argue this is a sane default setting (it trades some waiting time when switching to a different tab for snappier start-up). Regardless, Firefox gives you the option to choose your behavior, which I would argue is the non-lazy thing to do (however simple).
† Note I am on Nightly, so it's possible this preference is not yet visible in the release version. It probably is, but just to be clear.
I much prefer this solution. As someone who can have over 100 tabs open with potentially a dozen YouTube tabs amongst them, having to hunt down all the YouTube tabs after a browser restart is a serious pain!
Also frequently FireFox crashes for me are due to it hitting the 4GB memory limit (well closer to 2GB obviously), so restoring all tabs would just result in Firefox crashing again. Restoring them piece meal lets me close down ones I do not need, thus allowing me to get FF's memory usage down to acceptable size.
This would be so great. Unfortunately the Chrome developers didn't like it. I can't find the bug now, but they don't want to add this and also don't allow any user options so that people can configure it :-(
One guy in that bug even wrote he patched that part out, but that's not a solution for me, I don't have time to compile Chronium myself.
Turning off wifi or configuring (in IE!) a fake proxy is the only remedy.
This is a indeed a feature. It is a boon for people living with low data speeds and/or limited-data plans. I can wait for 5 seconds for each tab to load, rather than all 10 tabs loading simultaneously and freezing the browser. It also gives me a chance to close off those tabs (without loading the page) which I don't need.
So, Firefox opens tabs or tab (as in juts one tab or many/all tabs)?
Because in my case it opens all the tabs and if there were 20, it opens all. Even though the last time I opened them was 3-4 hours before the browser was closed/crashed.
update: I had missed the point. Thanks @thirtian for clearing up.
Last year I was woken up in the middle of the night by my girlfriend, who was terrified by a voice that seems to come from the lounge. I got up, opened the door, and there was a bright white light. My girlfriend was even more terrified since she could only see me and the light shining on me from the lounge. It was the television. It turns out that when we were channel surfing earlier in the evening, we switched to a channel that wasn't broadcasting anything, got distracted, and the television goes into sleep mode after a while when it's on such a channel. At 3am they started broadcasting some video loop, basically of a white background with a little text, and a woman's voice announcing something.
I watched The Ring once and must have left the TV on, because later that night I woke up to a light coming from the living room. I went in and the TV was doing the "white noise / static" thing exactly like in the movie.
I turned it off, unplugged it from the wall and thought, "ok, if that happens again I can officially shit myself."
I blame this 'issue' on the op. True there are many potential paths that the Chrome/chromium developers can take with this, but they've chosen a different path from Firefox and others and as a user of Chrome that's what we have to stick with now.
If you don't like the behavior, there are ways to change it yourself:
* Install flash blocking plugin
* Enable click-to-play
* Install a plugin that disabled auto-play (at least for youtube, don't know about a netflix one)
* Put the computer to sleep/hibernate
* Turn off speakers
* Turn off the computer ...
* Close the netflix tab
There are many many options. If you don't like closing out chrome because you'll be missing your tabs, then use a plugin like "Session Manager" and then save your currently open tabs, and then close Chrome.
I don't think this is a bug. I think it works just fine.
Heck, I don't know which setting I have but if chrome crashes or if I restart my computer without nicely closing chrome, Chrome will re-open upon boot BUT it'll open a new blank tab with a bar at the top that says something like "Chrome didn't shut down properly. Do you want to restore your old tabs?" ... that works extremely well.
The biggest issue I have with Chrome restoring tabs is that it completely hogs my computer and internet connection while requesting, downloading and rendering all the pages.
To solve it, I simply turn off wi-fi when restarting Chrome, so that all the tabs reopen, but are not reloaded. The URLs are restored, and I can reload them exactly when I want to.
Hello fellow tab addict! I must have about 30-40 tabs I restore every day out of laziness and fear of bookmarking and never reading again. Someone posted to HN an extension to help with this but I forget what it's called. Also Firefox has a nice solution to your problem in that it only loads the tabs once you click on them.
In fifty years we'll tell to our grandchildren: "Back in my day, we had to turn WiFi off before starting our browser after a crash, because it would not load when connected to the inter(galactic)net". They'll pity us I'm sure!
Why not? Do you manually install the patches coming down every month? Do you put all of them through some validation? On your home machine? How are you doing this validation? I mean aside of installing a patch and uninstalling it when you come across an issue?
Having an unpatched windows machine is a way bigger risk than some patch not quite working right and by installing the updates when you are not in front of your machine, you don't risk either interrupting your work for the reboot or remain being unpatched pending the reboot you are postponing.
As the bug report makes a reference to both Netflix and sleeping, I would assume this is a home user, not a corporate one where the patches get reviewed quickly.
> Why not? Do you manually install the patches coming down every month?
yes, but that's so I control the moment of restart since I always have a bunch of transient stuff running, once I get the update alerts I can download & install then slowly wind down transient state until I'm ready to reboot the machine. That may take a day or 2.
The amount of 3D rendering jobs I've lost due to automatic restarts in the middle of the night. My personal preference is to no install updates at night, partly because I power off my machine and when I leave it on, I need it on.
Ok, but why does it matter? If it fails, restore from your backup and move on with life. Having to babysit patches makes me think of the late 90's not 2013.
Definitely not. Especially since updates aren't 100% error free all the time and unless you set it to install when you want it to, you don't control it. I can understand that they want to make sure patches are applied ASAP, but I prefer to keep an eye on it myself.
Not too much of a problem for me since I'm up at 3:00AM anyway. In fact, it's 3:09AM right now.
I don't think it's necessary to set Chrome to run on every boot, I think it's registering to be restarted once after the unattended reboot that Windows Update is doing.
I think the problem is that the user still had his/her speakers turned on. They should've been turned off or muted, same with his/her cellphone (if any).
well, it would still restart all his plugin-based media streams when he reopened chrome, which is the underlying bug. but yeah, it would be a decidedly less monsterful experience.
I'm confused, does windows update restore previously running applications after restarting windows to install updates? Or do those affected have chrome set to run at startup?
This is a perfect bug report. Humor, steps to reproduce, a real world problem... This would be a bug I chose to work on as soon as possible (if it turns out it is something that can be fixed in this project alone).
Well, I go to a lot of the same pages every day, so I very much want to continue whee I left off, but not necessarily to start playing media at once.
you know what I'd love (all you enterprising Chrome plugin developers): let me view and manage my open tabs through the same sort of large icon interface that appears on the New Tab page. I wouldn't mind being able to organize my bookmarks that way either. I can't understand why nobody has attempted to do anything different with the bookmark interface for years now.
It's not the setting. Chrome automatically continues there when it's closed by Windows restarting. The idea is that applications that are open will return to the same state when the computer restarts. This is separate from the user closing the program and launching it again.
