Browser aggressively unloads background tabs, breaks popup-opening sites

[Michael Zanetti]

today I wanted to configure a WiFi router with the Ubuntu browser. Turns out that's not possible because the router's webinterface uses popups to ask the user for selecting something. The popups are opened as new tabs. When I switch to them, and then click on the selection the popup closes again and I end up on the original page, however, the page reloads and all the previous state is lost.

=> The webbrowser should not reload the page when switching to a tab.

(I presume the reason is that it actually unloads the page as soon as one switches away in order to save some memory, but still this is too intrusive. It will break too much and needs to be turned off again - It kinda makes the webbrowser useless as it is right now.)

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

The current implementation has a simple memory pressure monitor that starts unloading background tabs when under pressure, to try and prevent the entire browser app from being killed by the system. That implementation is pretty simplistic and can certainly be fine-tuned, but at least it’s not so dumb as to unload a tab as soon as it goes to the background ;)

It would be very helpful if you could provide a bit more context: on what device is that? Did you have other (older) tabs open in the browser when it happened? Other apps running and/or paused in the background? Can you reproduce, and paste the corresponding browser app’s logs?

Thanks!

[Michael Zanetti (mzanetti)]

I'm currently travelling and don't have the device with me. However,
this happened on the Meizu Pro 5 which is quite a memory biest and I did
not have any other tabs open. I most likely did have some other apps
running, but unlikely the 3GB of memory were completely filled up already.

I'll test again when I'm back home and have access to this AP again.

[jEzEk (jezek)]

Hello. I have bq Aquaris E5 HD Ubuntu Edition OTA-12.
I have opened only a browser app with 3 tabs.
1) this launchpad page
2) http://jisho.org/search/bug
3) https://translate.google.com/m/translate#en/sk/insect%3B bug%3B cricket%3B moth%3B worm
and when I switch between the opened tabs, they are mostly reloaded, like every second tab switch. One time (when I counted the reload ratio) the browser even froze and a relaunch (close, open) was needed. I hope this helps a little, cause the reloads are annoying (even more if on slow bandwidth). thanks