Google Patents a Tab Assassin

[Guest]

Google is working to further improve the tab management in its web browser.

Google Patents a Tab Assassin : Read more

 

[Darkerson]

Mildly more interesting and useful than the new apple sim card holder/ejector thingie patent.

 

[mpdugas]

A solution to a non-existent problem.

 

[EzioAs]

scary name for a patent

 

[Hellbound]

The Tabinator

 

[Guest]

As a software developer myself, I'm dissapointed in Google for patenting something so stupid, trivial and obvious and thereby contributing to the litigation stupidity that's ruining the software industry... but then again it's probably necessary to patent dirt, air and water when your competition includes Microsoft and Apple, so I'll still give Google a pass for all that they contribute to open source.

 

[trumpeter1994]

According to the patent, which was filed in September 2011, the tab assassin would automatically shut down tabs that fall below a certain tab usage threshold. That threshold can be defined via "a period of time or an amount of activity".

Yea I can see that really annoying to me on a secondary monitor If I have something open and I'm just using it for reference as opposed to messing with it.

 

[azraa]

Totally agree with doucheveloper

 

[smuggl3r]

The idea of the patent is stupid. Leave my tabs alone!

 

[in_the_loop]

[citation][nom]mpdugas[/nom]A solution to a non-existent problem.[/citation]

I disagree.
Chrome use an insane amount of memory when you have a lot of tabs open.
Remember that each tab gets its own process and dedicated memory (whcih also makes Chrome more stable since it is the only thing crashing)
It is very easy to exceed 2 GB of memory usage with many tabs open i chrome (especially withy youtube sessions with multiple tabs).
On a laptop with 2-3 Gigs of memory that is making it crawl really slowly.
In fact, it is the reason for me not using chrome at all on my laptop and ujse firefox instead.

(I use Chrome on my desktop though which has plenty of memory).

And there are plugins that adress this problem so there is a demand for it, but these plug-ins work very poorly, so it is a good thing that google is adressing this!

They wouldn't do it if it wasn't needed, and it is, since the plugs works so poorly and many still use computers with too little memory in them!

 

[cTs Corvette]

[citation][nom]in_the_loop[/nom]I disagree. Chrome use an insane amount of memory when you have a lot of tabs open. [/citation]

Then the solution would be "don't open so many tabs." There's this cool feature built into the tabs in Chrome, maybe you've never noticed it, but each open tab has an "x" on the right side of it. If you click it, the tab closes.

Personally, I think they should call it the "Tab Nanny" instead. "Tab assassin" sounds like something cool instead of something to pacify the people who are too lazy to click an x.

 

[Pherule]

If I have tabs open they're open for a reason. If I'm done with them I will manually close them.

I'm sure Firefox already has this functionality with an extension, so Google trying to patent something that already exists is utter crud.

Hey Chrome developers, I have an idea! Make the --single-process command switch work again. Multi-process browsers are no good to me until I get 32GB memory and a 64-bit OS.

 

[blazorthon]

[citation][nom]cTs Corvette[/nom]Then the solution would be "don't open so many tabs." There's this cool feature built into the tabs in Chrome, maybe you've never noticed it, but each open tab has an "x" on the right side of it. If you click it, the tab closes. Personally, I think they should call it the "Tab Nanny" instead. "Tab assassin" sounds like something cool instead of something to pacify the people who are too lazy to click an x.[/citation]

Not everyone always has that option. I often use a few dozen tabs that I have to flip through for some things and on my laptop with only 2GB of RAM, I really have to watch my memory usage. Instead of closing tabs, I even occasionally kill their process through the task manager if I'm not using them now, but will use them soon and need more memory right now.

[citation][nom]Pherule[/nom]If I have tabs open they're open for a reason. If I'm done with them I will manually close them.I'm sure Firefox already has this functionality with an extension, so Google trying to patent something that already exists is utter crud.Hey Chrome developers, I have an idea! Make the --single-process command switch work again. Multi-process browsers are no good to me until I get 32GB memory and a 64-bit OS.[/citation]

I could be wrong, but I don't recall Firefox (even through third party extensions) having this feature. However, Firefox doesn't need it, so that's not a major loss.

[citation][nom]in_the_loop[/nom]I disagree. Chrome use an insane amount of memory when you have a lot of tabs open. Remember that each tab gets its own process and dedicated memory (whcih also makes Chrome more stable since it is the only thing crashing)It is very easy to exceed 2 GB of memory usage with many tabs open i chrome (especially withy youtube sessions with multiple tabs).On a laptop with 2-3 Gigs of memory that is making it crawl really slowly.In fact, it is the reason for me not using chrome at all on my laptop and ujse firefox instead.(I use Chrome on my desktop though which has plenty of memory).And there are plugins that adress this problem so there is a demand for it, but these plug-ins work very poorly, so it is a good thing that google is adressing this!They wouldn't do it if it wasn't needed, and it is, since the plugs works so poorly and many still use computers with too little memory in them![/citation]

Actually, Chrome does not give each tab its own process, but gives tab groups their own processes (not even always related tabs, sometimes it just seems to group tabs randomly into processes). It's not quite the same.

 

[tobalaz]

Maybe they'd rather just chase after a stupid patent before Apple pattens the vague idea then tries to sue them for it?

 

[srap]

[citation][nom]Pherule[/nom]I'm sure Firefox already has this functionality with an extension, so Google trying to patent something that already exists is utter crud.[/citation]
Add-on developers wouldn't come up with something so radical, one has to be a patient troll to think up something like this.
The closest thing to this are addons that first suspend the tab, then unload it from the memory.

 

[techpm]

Hey Google, this is called paging. First implementation circa 1962 at the University of Manchester.

 

[cTs Corvette]

[citation][nom]blazorthon[/nom]Not everyone always has that option. I often use a few dozen tabs that I have to flip through for some things and on my laptop with only 2GB of RAM, I really have to watch my memory usage. Instead of closing tabs, I even occasionally kill their process through the task manager if I'm not using them now, but will use them soon and need more memory right now.[/citation]

But the whole point of this isn't managing memory from active tabs you are using/flipping through, it's killing off open tabs that you aren't using that are tying up resources. Hence my thoughts that this is unnecessary because if it's been unused long enough for tab assassin to have killed it, you could have done the same thing yourself.

 

[cookoy]

the quality of so-called innovation being patented is going downhill

 

[blazorthon]

[citation][nom]cTs Corvette[/nom]But the whole point of this isn't managing memory from active tabs you are using/flipping through, it's killing off open tabs that you aren't using that are tying up resources. Hence my thoughts that this is unnecessary because if it's been unused long enough for tab assassin to have killed it, you could have done the same thing yourself.[/citation]

Actually, I think that it falls under the last part of what you quoted from me where I occasionally kill the process of some tabs that I don't want closed, but can't afford the memory to keep them open. Also, I can't always kill the process because Chrome and Chromium based browsers have this annoying knack for grouping old tabs with tabs that I'm using. If this new feature can move them around and kill what doesn't need to be running without closing their tabs and without affecting what I do want to still be running, it could help me quite a bit.

Perhaps that I can benefit from the feature makes me somewhat biased towards it, but even if I didn't benefit from it, it still seems like a decent idea. I'm not sure if it's worth patenting it, but if some other company patented it, then Google wouldn't be able to legally use the feature.

 

[m32]

Close your tabs if you don't need them. That is all....

 

[voiidwulf]

They better have a way to disable this. I often have game guides or tutorials of various kinds open when I'm doing things, and I don't want them closing after 5 minutes or something. I only leave tabs open that I need open.

 

[unksol]

I thought apple was trying to be the "tab" ASSASSin. (they are a double ass)

And failing world wide with their attempt on Samsung

 

[roger smith]

cant we just keep the lawyers out of software development. i mean, this is a really really simple feature. how does something like this get a patent. what a broken system! now handwriting/voice recognition software is advanced and deserve patent protection.

 

[InvalidError]

[citation][nom]roger smith[/nom] i mean, this is a really really simple feature. [/citation]
Trying to accurately determine which tabs are truly unnecessary might be more complicated than it sounds.

A simple way of not wasting bandwidth and RAM on tabs until you actually use them is to simply disable prefetching so tabs only load when you actually use them.

 

[scriddlybojangs]

"The system would also allow the user to set a period of time over which a tab would not be killed."

So if the user sets it to, say, three months and the tab lasts that long it would not be killed? Gotcha.