- From: David Young <dyoung@pobox.com>
- Date: Thu, 20 Feb 2014 15:43:38 -0600
- To: whatwg@lists.whatwg.org, "whatwg@whatwg.org" <whatwg@whatwg.org>
On Thu, Feb 20, 2014 at 03:25:56PM +0000, Ashley Gullen wrote: > Users regularly switch tabs and probably don't expect that this hangs the > game for everyone. To prevent multiplayer games commonly hanging, perhaps > there could be a new API to request that a page can keep running at full > capacity even in the background, such as > window.requestBackgroundProcessing(). This could show a permission prompt > like 'Do you want to allow this page to run in the background? Allow / > Deny' to help protect against abuse. Hi Ashley, I have some concerns about this as a user of browsers. I strongly prefer that when a tab is not displayed, it's not running down my battery, causing a cooling fan to spin, making my computer sluggish, or otherwise making a nuisance of itself. I also dislike being forced into any dialog, such as Allow/Deny, with the system. I also strongly prefer not to be a part of the browser's or operating system's CPU/RAM/power/bandwidth-arbitration loop, however, I will accept granting or adjusting a share of some resource to some tab if the trade-offs are fairly clear. For example, I'm happy to let a tab draw down the battery a little faster or to run the CPU a little hotter in order for it to have more up-to-date information (most current weather report, for example) when I revisit it: more energy in exchange for lower average latency in the display. If I grant a program a share of a resource, I would like to be able to claw that share back at a later time. I think that if I was going to make engineering suggestions, they would be for the browser makers, not for you, Ashley. Dave -- David Young dyoung@pobox.com Urbana, IL (217) 721-9981
Received on Thursday, 20 February 2014 21:44:06 UTC