It happened again today and it’s getting tiresome. I’m referring to browser auto-refreshes. The folks at Mozilla and all the other browser vendors have got to do something about this immediately. It kills your entire system as it steals cycles in the background. Everyone has noticed what I am about to explain. It needs fixing, and I do have a solution. But bear with me.
The problem goes like this: You try to open a document or spreadsheet and notice that the program won't load straight away. Oh, it eventually loads, but it takes forever. Then you type something and the T Y P I N G I S A S S L O W A S M U D. Worse, it comes in as if it were buffered. You type and type but nothing appears on the screen. Just as you notice this phenomenon, it slowly appears one l-e-t-t-e-r at a time as if someone is typing it remotely. This is so aggravating.
What could be the cause? In general, there are two culprits, both of which need to be addressed. Traditionally it's been the virus scanner, which is never scheduled properly. You set it for “daily” at 2 a.m. and you are working at 2 a.m. Or you shut off the computer and it triggers when you start up in the morning. It should be a crime to take over 90 percent of the machine’s functionality while scanning, but it does.
You can usually find the scanner and stop this process. It's the second thing that is more problematic: the website that is refreshing like a fiend in the background. It's living in what should be limbo on one of your browser tabs. Naturally, you cannot figure out what tab it is and you have to kill the whole browser to deal with it.
I'd have fewer objections to this cycle-sapping site if it was actually doing something useful, like completing a long calculation or drawing a complex image. It never is. And it would be easier to spot if it were a refreshing video of traffic conditions. It’s never doing this either.
You can often blame a piece of crap advertisement that has to keep refreshing or tagging the page for confirmation that it is “live” or who knows what. It's some miserable ad from some ad service. Generally, you never pinpoint the exact ad, although you can usually locate the webpage and kill it.
This situation is a waste of everyone's time and should be browser-illegal. Pop-ups are mostly banned from many browsers, so why can't we ban these never-ending refreshes? And why do they have to be refreshing in the background on a tab within a minimized browser? For one thing, if the ad is sending updates to home base, it is giving fake information. The tab is not open, the browser is minimized. So what's the point?
When tabs are not open, or when the browser is minimized, it should stop processing the page once the page has fully loaded for the first time. I say fully loaded because a lot of people will open a slew of tabs from hyperlinks, so they can be loaded in the background and browsed later. Once the initial load is done, there is no reason to keep pounding the site for the latest ad that nobody is viewing.
The worst case scenario with this sort of auto-load is when you load a tab in the background and then suddenly an ad starts playing video and blaring audio. It's not the page you are on, so you have to hop from tab to tab to apprehend the offending site. It's utterly annoying.
OK, so I have a couple of suggestions for the browser designers.
First of all, make it so background processing stops on closed tabs or minimized browsers. If something cannot be stopped, or even when the initial load is taking place, color code the tabs. If a site under the third tab is grinding away, shade that tab red. If a video is playing, color the tab blue. This way the tabs mean something and convey information in a new way.
That will help. Folks, you can thank me later.
You can Follow John C. Dvorak on Twitter @therealdvorak.
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