Maybe this is a symptom of the fact that loading orders, preloading, etc isn't built into the standard, but is hacked on top?
If I want it rendered in a clean "Instapaper" view, I get that too.
If it's ephemera, it clears automatically. If I want to have it stick around, that too.
When I actually _do_ load it up, it's reading locally from disk. This is pretty much how Readability itself works, in the app versions, and it's quick even on low-powered devices such as my rather old HTC Incredible Android phone (faster than most Web pages these days, and rather more compatible as I'm now multiple revs out of date).
As for SWF and Javascript: I tend to keep both disabled by default, and for most content, neither SWF nor Javascript are generally meaningful. There's the odd site which fails utterly to render without them (it's more than a tad bit ironic that Google's own blogging platform is one of the worse offenders), but that's pretty much the minority.
But good to know.
By the way, Firefox has don't-load-till-opened tabs, it's just not on by default. Go to the preferences, "General", click on the "don't load tabs until selected" checkbox.
Also, in "about:config", the "plugins.click_to_play" option (which I believe is now on by default) allows you to block plugins by default. Go to "about:addons", in the plugins section, to specify which plugins you wish to block by default.
Close enough too, but like I said, a bug report targeted at HTML media (not just plugins) would probably be well-received.
The fact that Debian tends to stay well behind the Firefox / Iceweasel release curve (and manual updates suck) hasn't helped, though it looks as if I've got Iceweasel 24 available now. I'd have to check to see how much of the memory-management goodness has gotten into it.
All that said: yeah, I'll see if I can't find FF bugzilla and write that request.
Unless I specify otherwise, media should play in a window only when it's active, unless I specify otherwise.
Media should not play automatically by default. Again, unless I've activated it.
A bigger issue is that browsers are absolute crap for managing content generally. My typical session is: start with a few launching points (project pages, wiki/blog, newsreader, possibly social page), queue up material to look at.
At this point, my preference would be that the material I've queued up doesn't even fucking load. Too many pages and too much memory simply pigs stuff out.
Most browsers currently have a "pin as app" option for tabs -- if you want your GitHub, CampFire, Jira, Gmail, or similar pages to run as apps, then set them to run as apps.
Unfortunately, the browser has, for some time, been stuck in a worst-of-all-possible-worlds limbo: it's neither a good reading environment -- for that you'd want something like Readability, Pocket, Instapaper, or an eBook management tool such as Moon+Reader, Kindle, or (bad as it is) Calibre -- nor a decent applications environment: it's bloated, crash-prone, slow, full of security holes, and underfeatured relative to native applications.
However in both cases the browser's ability to load and display or run arbitrary content makes it convenient.
What do I want? Vastly better content management tools. Bookmarks and tab management on steroids. As Jay-Z said: I've got 99 tabs open and your autoplay isn't the one I'm looking at. If something's in background, let it fucking die already, saving state somewhere and restoring it should I happen to navigate back to it. Keeping a small number of tabs (2? 6? 12?) active should be more than enough. Least used gets offed when I switch to number n+1.
And figure out what the hell you want to do with the applications space. I do use some Web apps, but still largely find them annoying. I've all but given up on G+ and Gmail for numerous reasons, but the fact that my Chromium session becomes completely unusable once I've got either open really doesn't help matters much.
Frankly, this is like providing cleaner, brighter living quarters for slaves when what needs to be done is emancipation. I appreciate the thought, but it's far too little, far too late.