Freeze active content in background tabs

[RichZzz]

I would like to have the possibility to freeze all scripts, active content and reloading in background tabs.
Is this possible?

[Giorgio Maone]

In latest development build this happens for refreshes/reloads on untrusted pages.
Doing this with all the background tabs and all the active content may be very cumbersome, hurt performance and lead to very unwanted side effect on many sites (GMail is the first coming to mind, but anything AJAX will probably fit as well).

[RichZzz]

stopping reloads is a great step forward but for various reasons I think it would be a good idea to freeze scripts in inactive tabs. Sure, not without exceptions like gmail - even though I use the plain html interface which I guess will be broken anyway because it relies on reloading?

The top reasons I want to freeze inactive tabs:
* privacy - just too much information leaking, makes it harder to isolate rogue sites when many tabs do requests
* performance, network load, some folks on mobile connections have limited traffic allowances
* restart behaviour: a while ago I tried to restart a crashed session which contained a dozen or so tabs with various embedded videos. Upon restart the plugins attempted to videos start playing all at once.. resulting in another crash

[Alan Baxter]

I use the BarTab extension to freeze inactive tabs. Have you checked it out yet?
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/67651

[RichZzz]

The BarTab extension looks really interesting, thanks.

[Alan Baxter]

The BarTab extension looks really interesting, thanks.

You're welcome.

[therube]

To point out, the current BarTab, Beta 2.1b2 works in SeaMonkey (& FF4).

(I've only used it in SeaMonkey 2.0.x so far. And it's great! It may not be fully functional, like I think there should be context menu's <?>, but who cares. It significantly speeds up browser <session restore> load to use times (main incentive for me) while at the same time keeps memory requirements down.)

[dhouwn]

Firefox 4 has a BarTab-like behavior concerning session restore when browser.sessionstore.max_concurrent_tabs is set to 0.