Comment 26 for bug 1600622

This bug has been driving me crazy for a while. I've spent a lot of my time investigating it. I don't use laptops much, so the primary issue I run into is that none of my screens go into suspend, so sometimes I'll find all my screens were on for hours without me realizing it. This wastes a lot of power and is not good for my screens.

There are definitely certain sites that are more aggressive than others.

HomeDepot.com is one that'll open WebRTC workers that will inhibit PM, even with the latest Chromium WebRTC PM policy changes.

Facebook may or may not inhibit power management -- it depends on what is displayed in the tab and (fortunately) whether the tab is in the foreground or background of the Chrome/Chromium window. However, it often does not care if you are on a different desktop. Videos and animated GIFs are two of the major culprits.

Sometimes Google Hangouts on the GMail page decides to launch some WebRTC stuff and totally inhibit PM as well. The only fix for this is to just close the tab -- for WebRTC it doesn't seem to matter if it's in the foreground or not.

I can go on, but it's lame that web developers are so easily able to screw with our power management. And I guarantee you that this is not something that is typically tested in web development. I don't believe Firefox has these issues.

The funny thing is that, years ago, I did wish web browsers inhibited the screensaver while I was watching videos. Now they've gone way too far. Without the "Inhibit" applet showing me a red "X", I have no idea if my screens are going to go to sleep or not. I often just run `xset dpms force suspend && cinnamon-screensaver-command -l` when walking away to be safe.

One solution that kind of sucks but works 100% of the time is just to killall chrome before walking away. You'll have to go through and restore all your windows, but at least it's something.

Something to simply block an application from inhibiting power management would be a nice first step. If it were a panel applet or something, one could easily re-enable power management inhibition for watching videos.

I think that Chromium needs to do better, but I think that it exposes an obvious weakness that should be resolved in the GNOME end as well.