Re:Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs
by bluGill on Tuesday January 24, 2017 @01:32PM
(#13474092)
No tab should get the audio exception unless it started playing audio while I was looking at it. (reopen yesterdays tabs counts as looking at it...) If you play audio to get around throttling - you should get zero CPU, not just throttled. If you have work to do in the background that is fine - there is legitimate work to do. However once you are playing audio it must mean the other work is done.
What do I know though? I don't normally listen to audio on the web...
Re:Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs
by tyingq on Tuesday January 24, 2017 @01:36PM
(#13474130)
I think they are somewhat stuck with conflicting goals. Online games, for example, play audio while doing other work. But it's probably reasonable to pause everything, including the audio, if you move away from the tab.
On the other hand, if they are using Pandora or similar, the end user probably wants the background tab playing and doing other work (showing current album cover art or whatever so it's there if you switch back to that tab).
Re:Chrome will aggressively throttle background tabs
by chowyuncat on Tuesday January 24, 2017 @03:13PM
(#13475025)
allow_exception = volume < audible_threshold
You can see the discussion back and forth, here: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/blink...
I can see where that will end up though. Everyone who's app was broken by this change will start playing zero volume audio, then the exception will be yanked back.
With the web poised to be the new platform for applications, there really needs to be some more thought put into how to accomplish that goal. The chrome devs already sunset some solutions in that space, like the HTML5 app cache. Now this. Nobody likes a constantly moving target.