[Feature Request] Load opened tabs on demand when starting Opera

[Feature Request] Load opened tabs on demand when starting Opera

When Opera is started and a lot of tabs are left opened from previous session, Opera starts loading pages on all tabs right away. Maybe it would be useful not to load them right away (while still displaying icon and title in a tab) but on demand (i.e. load when tab is selected or maybe even better, when refresh is clicked). This would prevent mass loading at startup.

regards
TomazK

+++++++1 This is a MUST!

Must have a option to not loading the tabs when you start the Opera. It's boring I have to use the Windows Panel and select all the tabs to stop them.

+1 for me.

This is the first time I saw a feature I wanted in Firefox (albeit in the Nightlies) that Opera hadn't implemented yet. When I re-open a window with 15 tabs or whatever, the mass-refreshing kills my browser for a minute and that's even on a quad-core, 8GB RAM machine connected to a 22MB down cable line. Just refreshing the currently-opened tab and refreshing the rest on-demand is a much more elegant solution.

What happens if you set Preferences, Advanced, History, Check Documents, to "Never" ?

I never use that setting because I spend a lot of time on forums, and having threads not refreshing when new posts are added is impractical, but it might at least solve the problem of loading many tabs at startup.

I also want that option! I hate to wait and I also hate to stop every tab each time I start Opera. I need the tabs, I don't want to close them, but it doesn't make sense to load them all together at the begining.

Originally posted by siteod:

Just refreshing the currently-opened tab and refreshing the rest on-demand is a much more elegant solution.

Or another option to all the tabs, including the currently one don't load.

+1 from me too.
I recently made another thread about the same topic, without knowing this one exists: http://my.opera.com/community/forums/topic.dml?id=1137392

Myself posted the link of this topic there

+1

+1

+1 as option, and tab title should stored in session.win file (to allow use search in "windows side panel")

also it can be useful to store tab's screenshots with session:

• so user activate tab and immediatly see tab's screenshot while tab is loading,
• after tab loaded it immediatly replace screenshot

(Note: tab's screenshot should be small - only visible part of page stored and in medium quality)

+1. I would switch back to Opera instantly if this feature was added. I'm using Firefox 8 because it has this feature.

Originally posted by homeagain:

+1. I would switch back to Opera instantly if this feature was added. I'm using Firefox 8 because it has this feature.

How do I active it in FF? I ha tried to test it in FF but I haven't seen nothing different.

Go to Options, and then under the General tab, check "Don't load tabs until selected".

+1

Add another option to load the tabs one-by-one at start, or load say 5 or 10 tabs at the very start of a session and load the next as soon as one tab has completely been loaded, as well.

1+

in my opinion that would solve the "another user is running opera" problem when it crash after opening to many pages

but since there's a opera turbo mode for slow connections there should be a memory saving mode where not only it doesnt load until you click it erases it after you click the next one but keeping the tab still there until you click it again, better yet having a "clear tab cache" type option for all the tabs except the last 2 or 3 or 10 etc. viewed plus another button type option saying "keep loaded" in the address bar in case you use the autopatchwork extension


on another note opera developers backup the backup autosave.win.bak it doesnt always restore session after it crashes (even after you rename it) just simply make 2 backups in different locations and .zip it i've been using opera since version 9 and theres alot of anti-opera sites and patches but opera still is my only browser any problem i have i look into it myself until i have not choice but to use ie

I have to subscribe to this This is one of the very few features that I appreciate in the later versions of Firefox

+1
I want this feature...

+1

Now set by default in Firefox 13.

And SPDY... Super fast with gmail, docs, etc.

This is a great idea and +1 for me.

My current workaround is to disable wireless (or networking) for a moment. Then I start Opera and all the tabs instantly appear with the "Network problem" message. Then I can navigate to the tabs I want and refresh to see. No waiting of net bottleneck needed.

Interesting discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4069535

Not really interesting, just silly - He can turn off the option so why complain? It's a godsend for people like me!

So +1 from me too! (Although I'd still love a "Stop All" button which I've been asking for since, oh, about Opera5? )

Nice tip: In Opera 11.64 and lower, if you switch on Work Offline before you close the browser, it WON'T load all the tabs when you reload; It'll just say you are off-line and ask you if you want to go on-line: if you say Yes, it loads all the tabs. If you say no, it doesn't. Simples!


Unfortunately, this trick is broken in Opera 12 as it asks if you want to go online for EVERY tab you have!!!

If that is intended behaviour, a Load Tab On Demand option is an essential addition!!

Originally posted by Pesala:

What happens if you set Preferences, Advanced, History, Check Documents, to "Never" ?

just tested that with 11.64 - it still reloads pages upon startup.
traveling often, i get lots of stupid connections that redirect me to some idiotic authentication or just "HI THERE !<>!><!@>!M!" page. guess what happens with sites i had open.

i could threaten bodily harm to everybody who does that bastardly thing, but an option not to reload anything upon startup and just stay with the cached page (which opera has and then happily discards...) would be so much more practical

Originally posted by Cyker:

Nice tip: In Opera 11.64 and lower, if you switch on Work Offline before you close the browser, it WON'T load all the tabs when you reload; It'll just say you are off-line and ask you if you want to go on-line: if you say Yes, it loads all the tabs. If you say no, it doesn't. Simples!

Unfortunately, this trick is broken in Opera 12 as it asks if you want to go online for EVERY tab you have!!!

Hmm...not a substitute for the requested feature, but not bad either if you don't empty the cache on exit. If Opera finds chached page contents for each tab upon start it wont pop up the offline dialog. It seems that only if you try to access a link it would ask to switch to online mode. If you say yes, Opera would only reload the current page.

However if Opera has to ask already at startup, then - in 11.64 - it's all or nothing: Yes reloads all tabs, no switches all unaccessible pages to "Could not locate remote server" page.

12.00 is not broken, it's buggy: The idea to ask for every page is not bad. To empty the cache if you want to work offline would be silly, so if you really want to work offline the dialog would pop up rarely. The problem is that you can decline one by one to work offline, but once you said "yes" ALL pages are reloaded. Strangely you still have to answer all remaining dialogs even if they have become meaningless.

Now I regret that I did not speak up about a month ago when I first saw this thread and before I tried Opera-12.

Originally posted by Cyker:

Nice tip: In Opera 11.64 and lower, if you switch on Work Offline before you close the browser, it WON'T load all the tabs when you reload; It'll just say you are off-line and ask you if you want to go on-line: if you say Yes, it loads all the tabs. If you say no, it doesn't. Simples!

I use this trick to emulate a "load on demand" behavior since several years. The only annoyance was that opera always asked me twice whether I want to go online because the page could not be loaded. The cache (which is not deleted) obviously does not help with this at all, but that's not a very serious problem.

Originally posted by Cyker:

Unfortunately, this trick is broken in Opera 12 as it asks if you want to go online for EVERY tab you have!!!

At least once for every open tab - while Opera-11.64 asked two times all in all! This is a (IMHO serious) regression.

Originally posted by Cyker:

If that is intended behaviour, a Load Tab On Demand option is an essential addition!!

Indeed. I cannot imagine how this could become intended behavior. It must be a bug.

Originally posted by mochikun:

However if Opera has to ask already at startup, then - in 11.64 - it's all or nothing: Yes reloads all tabs, no switches all unaccessible pages to "Could not locate remote server" page.

12.00 is not broken, it's buggy: The idea to ask for every page is not bad. To empty the cache if you want to work offline would be silly, so if you really want to work offline the dialog would pop up rarely. The problem is that you can decline one by one to work offline, but once you said "yes" ALL pages are reloaded. Strangely you still have to answer all remaining dialogs even if they have become meaningless.

The whole idea behind Working Offline is that the browser must not try to contact the internet when I want to work offline - at all, for the time during Working Offline is enabled.
- It is therefor a bug to ask the user more than once, no matter how many tabs are open. (Although of minor annoyance.)
- It is a very serious bug to ask the user for every page! This makes Working Offline essentially unusable for simulating "Load Tab On Demand" and thus pretty useless because once you loaded a page, you are "working offline" as long as you don't reload the page. Without this, the fun of reloading a big session with lots of tabs (while you know that only want to use some of them) is also very much reduced, pretty much to being useless as well. Which in turn makes the whole browser useless for me Luckily I can simply stay with Opera-11.64.
- When working offline, the browser should do its best to reload all elements of a page from the cache and leave parts of a page blank that cannot be properly reloaded (e.g. because they are dynamically generated). But this not happening, the pages are not loaded at all, they are instead replaced with a message about "Could not locate remote server" Here lies another bug.

In trying to be constructive even though: I could imagine that the user would be asked whether he/she wants to go online and given the following choice:

[ No ] [No, but ask me again] [Yes]

and then only repeat the question if the user clicked the middle one. This would twist the meaning of Working Offline (and still would make no sense to me because "Working Offline" should be related to the whole browser and not single pages) but, well, if there are people who want it, I could live with the addition of a 3rd option.

+1 As option

Load pages from cache is not the best idea. Many sites do not allow you to store pages in the cache. In my opinion is better to load the page when you access it (as is done in Firefox). In this case, is not wasted CPU time and memory for unused tabs (I have an average of 700MB with 50 tabs, and sometimes more). It is also noticeable loading time (does not help even disabling images on the unused tabs).

Pinned tabs should always be loaded.

Really looking forward to this feature.

i want an option to always load pages from cache upon startup, only.

what do you mean by "Many sites do not allow you to store pages in the cache" ? i don't care about those sites, i care about the content i had

i also do not want the page to be reloaded when i open that tab. i want it to sit as is until i explicitly request a page reload.

Agreed! So basically we want something similar to the Work Off-line trick that worked in Opera 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11

Maybe also an option in the Startup menu that says "Start Opera in Off-line mode?" too. (At the moment with 11.64, I have to manually edit operaprefs.ini if I forget to turn Work Off-line mode on when I shut down Opera XD)

Otherwise a Load Tab on Demand option in Preferences.


Don't care about cache; Like IE and FF, Opera can just try to load what it can from the cache but if elements or pages are not available, that's fine - We are not expecting miracles (In fact it's better if Opera loads a blank page to save on resources!)
On my Eee I turn the disk cache off completely anyway!

Stop All button can be done...

read this : http://my.opera.com/community/forums/topic.dml?id=260492 or this http://my.opera.com/dude09/blog/how-to-reload-all-or-stop-all-pages-at-once

-1. simple reason: I want my tabs available when I click on them. "click on tab" -> "now would be a great time to refresh the page" is about the worst conclusion you can make ... but just m2c

Originally posted by zedlord:

Stop All button can be done...

read this : http://my.opera.com/community/forums/topic.dml?id=260492 or this http://my.opera.com/dude09/blog/how-to-reload-all-or-stop-all-pages-at-once

I'm aware of several scripted buttons like this, but they're basically dirty hacks and don't work all that well as you scale up to the number of tabs that us people that want^H^H^H^HNEED a Load Tab On Demand function (Or for the Work Off-line mode to be fixed!)

They basically open up the window list, select all the windows and then try to send stop commands to all of them one by one but it is so slow that usually most of the windows finish loading before it gets to them, and seems to expose some bugs in Opera's command queuing; on my system at least it usually resulted in Opera spiking to 100% CPU usage then crashing (Thank smeg for session saving!)

It may just be indicative of Opera's current state of stability; I must say it's been getting worse and worse in terms of stability; 12 has been particularly bad, so much so that I'm sticking with 11.64! (The killer bugs for me are the crash on session reload and Work Off-line repeated dialog; Until those get fixed I can't use Opera 12!)

+1 for loading pages only on demand (specially when starting up opera with multiple tabs).

I was using FF today and it works so good...

+1 to this feature.

Moderator edit: This comment has been removed for breaching our terms of use.

Originally posted by ozoratsubasa:

It works so good on firefox

I lol'd ... switch to tab -> page reload starts with all the redrawing and loading and such ... hell yeah, that's good interaction design

Originally posted by serious:

Originally posted by ozoratsubasa:

It works so good on firefox

I lol'd ... switch to tab -> page reload starts with all the redrawing and loading and such ... hell yeah, that's good interaction design

You might not LOL that much if when you do research, you have about 50-60 tabs open and Opera decides to crash. You re-open Opera and have to wait 1-2 minutes until it reloads all the tabs before you can actually do anything.
The idea isn't to reload the tabs each time you go to them, only just not to load them initially when you open Opera, that way you can resume your work and when you get to a tab that haven't been loaded it gets loaded (so no more waiting minutes before you can actually use Opera).

This also saves a lot of traffic, and there are still a lot of people with limited Internet quotas, for them it would be a godsend not to load a page unless you actually switched to that tab.

P.S. i know having 50+ tabs opened is not very common, but even with 10 tabs it takes quite a lot of time (and resources) to load Opera, specially if there is Java or Flash embedded in those pages.

Originally posted by albuemil:

i know having 50+ tabs opened is not very common, but even with 10 tabs it takes quite a lot of time (and resources) to load Opera

Only 35 out of 443 users typically open 50 or more tabs. How Many Tabs?

It makes no sense to design the browser for the benefit of 8% of users. IMO twenty tabs is plenty, and for most users fifty is clearly enough.

Many problems reported in these forums arise from users opening way too many tabs. They should learn to use sessions — opening ten or so tabs in each Window, and saving each window as a session. Then, there would be fewer problem reports, and complaints about excessive memory use.

If you restart your browser with the speed dial only or with a modest default session of five tabs, you won't ever find that it takes ages to load. If you load other sessions as and when you need them, then you will have what this Feature Request is asking — load tabs only on demand.

What is the point of spending many hours of programming time implementing a dialogue or whatever to select which tabs to load when the user starts Opera when they can already open the sessions menu, and select which session to load?

There is some scope for improving the sessions management, but I don't think we need a whole new feature for this. Just implement some way of editing sessions, previewing tabs in each session, etc. There are already several threads on this topic.

Sessions Here's a custom button to provide quick access to the sessions menu, and the current open tabs and windows menu (click and hold).

Originally posted by Pesala:

It makes no sense to design the browser for the benefit of 8% of users. IMO twenty tabs is plenty, and for most users fifty is clearly enough.

Many problems reported in these forums arise from users opening way too many tabs. They should learn to use sessions — opening ten or so tabs in each Window, and saving each window as a session. Then, there would be fewer problem reports, and complaints about excessive memory use.

i currently have 27 tabs opened, although that's a bit high for me - usual count is around 10.

but for me it's not about the tab count, or about some button. i want only one thing - when i start up the browser LOAD EVERYTHING FROM CACHE. no matter whether i'm offline or online, just do not try something stupid like loading all that from the web, because it is highly likely to hit some idiotic redirect.

i understand that for somebody on a fast internet at home this is not as obvious, but when traveling a lot it is _heavily_ annoying to have all my open tabs redirected to whichever bastard vendor or provider is used in that location.

i don't want a button or whatever. just the behaviour as it was several versions ago. only reload pages when i ask for that.

Originally posted by Cyker:

So basically we want something similar to the Work Off-line trick that worked in Opera 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11

However, that seems to me to be an entirely different topic to this feature request. Its asking to fix the offline mode so that it works properly as it used to work. As such, its not a feature request, and does not belong in this forum. The thing to do is to submit a bug report if offline mode is not working as it should.

Originally posted by albuemil:

You might not LOL that much if when you do research, you have about 50-60 tabs open and Opera decides to crash. You re-open Opera and have to wait 1-2 minutes until it reloads all the tabs before you can actually do anything.

I often have ~10 - 15 tabs opened when closing it (continue from last time is the most awesome feature imo), and when starting it up again it doesn't take much longer than when starting without opened tabs. Also recovering after crashes is _not_ the common case.

Originally posted by albuemil:

The idea isn't to reload the tabs each time you go to them

I didn't state that.

Originally posted by albuemil:

when you get to a tab that haven't been loaded it gets loaded (so no more waiting minutes before you can actually use Opera)

sorry, but that's just the wrong way round. If i resume from last time, I exactly _don't_ want to wait for the reload after clicking on a tab, I expect it's contents to be there instantly, just like any other tab I click.

Originally posted by albuemil:

This also saves a lot of traffic

only if you don't start to search for something in your heap of tabs Also there is Turbo to conserve bandwith without crippling the user experience.

Originally posted by serious:

If i resume from last time, I exactly _don't_ want to wait for the reload after clicking on a tab, I expect it's contents to be there instantly

...from the cache ;)

+1 for OPTION, especially when too many stupid website today loaded with heavy JavaScript.

this is a must have feature to stop website with heavy JavaScript or plugin from constantly suck up all the resources in the background on startup. Firefox solved this problem by not loading background tabs on startup to reduce memory bloat.

Originally posted by richlv:

...from the cache

jeah, but then the reload starts ... i know how this "feature" works at least in firefox, and it was not a pleasure to have it.

Originally posted by serious:

Originally posted by richlv:

...from the cache ;)

jeah, but then the reload starts ... i know how this "feature" works at least in firefox, and it was not a pleasure to have it.

no, what i meant, page is loaded from cache and that's it. do not load those pages again until i EXPLICITLY request that with f5 or whatever.

opera used to be real nice in this regard, not reloading needlessly. it did have this problem that you could not actually force it to refresh everything (and still has to some extent), but now also the not-reloading is broken. can we get some opera developers to travel a bit and use wifis that redirect them constantly ? surely they'll be pissed off enough to push this change rapidly ;)

Mod edit: No trolling, please.

Originally posted by Dr-Livesey:

Too many users for Opera? OK. Let more 8% go to Firefox.

No, just too many whiners and trolls in these forums. Development efforts should be focused on improving the browser for the majority of users. Fixing the bug with offline browser should be a higher priority than adding a new feature that would be useful to only 8% of users (who open 50 or more tabs).

+1

Originally posted by Pesala:

Fixing the bug with offline browser should be a higher priority than adding a new feature

IMO it's not a reason. I'm not even sure it'll be fixed.

+1.
Just wanted to start similar thread.

The problem is - i love reading habrahabr (an russian IT related collaborative blog, something like slashdot), so i open many tabs with good articles, and then read them, when i have time to.
But some authors are putting their articles in the "drafts", so i can't read them, if opera reloads all my tabs on next start.
An option to load cache version at startup, at least in opera:settings, would be useful.

Sorry for my bad eng

+1 to firefox style "don't load tabs until selected". Both for startup time and initial memory usage.