Skip to main content

Chrome and Session Restore

The Chrome Development team is talking about how much faster Chrome is at loading your tabs when you restore from a previous session. This is a totally welcome improvement, especially compared to Firefox's long superior handling of session restore by on-demand loading tabs only when you switch to them. Chrome, by contrast, has already penalized you for every extra tab you had to restore by loading them all at once and immediately.

But, something is missing from these announcements about improving the speed. On the forthy-fifth release of the Chrome browser, I would have expected and been happier with finally improving the plain experience of restoring a previous session in the first place.

Chrome doesn't even prompt you to restore your tabs or even tell you there is a session that could be restored, if you don't explicitly go looking for it.

Hidden behind the main menu button that many users don't even recognize and know is a menu, and then within the "History and Recent Tabs" you actually get the option to restore a previous session. Many users I've asked (anecdote, I know) don't even know this feature exists, and have just been assuming Chrome forgets all their tabs on close or crash.

When you do know about and use the feature, it leaves a dead empty window because it opens the previous session in a second window, and if you have pinned tabs it creates duplicates of them every time. This has felt less like weird behavior and more like buggy software for years now.

So, they make opening that old session faster? That's great, but maybe making it actually work first would be a better priority.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

CARDIAC: The Cardboard Computer

I am just so excited about this. CARDIAC. The Cardboard Computer. How cool is that? This piece of history is amazing and better than that: it is extremely accessible. This fantastic design was built in 1969 by David Hagelbarger at Bell Labs to explain what computers were to those who would otherwise have no exposure to them. Miraculously, the CARDIAC (CARDboard Interactive Aid to Computation) was able to actually function as a slow and rudimentary computer.  One of the most fascinating aspects of this gem is that at the time of its publication the scope it was able to demonstrate was actually useful in explaining what a computer was. Could you imagine trying to explain computers today with anything close to the CARDIAC? It had 100 memory locations and only ten instructions. The memory held signed 3-digit numbers (-999 through 999) and instructions could be encoded such that the first digit was the instruction and the second two digits were the address of memory to operat...
1 comment
Read more

Statement Functions

At a small suggestion in #python, I wrote up a simple module that allows the use of many python statements in places requiring statements. This post serves as the announcement and documentation. You can find the release here . The pattern is the statement's keyword appended with a single underscore, so the first, of course, is print_. The example writes 'some+text' to an IOString for a URL query string. This mostly follows what it seems the print function will be in py3k. print_("some", "text", outfile=query_iostring, sep="+", end="") An obvious second choice was to wrap if statements. They take a condition value, and expect a truth value or callback an an optional else value or callback. Values and callbacks are named if_true, cb_true, if_false, and cb_false. if_(raw_input("Continue?")=="Y", cb_true=play_game, cb_false=quit) Of course, often your else might be an error case, so raising an exception could be useful...
1 comment
Read more

Announcing Feet, a Python Runner

I've been working on a problem that's bugged me for about as long as I've used Python and I want to announce my stab at a solution, finally! I've been working on the problem of "How do i get this little thing I made to my friend so they can try it out?" Python is great. Python is especially a great language to get started in, when you don't know a lot about software development, and probably don't even know a lot about computers in general. Yes, Python has a lot of options for tackling some of these distribution problems for games and apps. Py2EXE was an early option, PyInstaller is very popular now, and PyOxide is an interesting recent entry. These can be great options, but they didn't fit the kind of use case and experience that made sense to me. I'd never really been about to put my finger on it, until earlier this year: Python needs LÖVE . LÖVE, also known as "Love 2D", is a game engine that makes it super easy to build ...
Post a Comment
Read more