News

Chromium developers to introduce a “Never-Slow Mode”, which sets limits on resource usage

2 min read

Today, Alex Russell, a Google software engineer, submitted a patch called ‘Never-Slow Mode’ for Chromium. With this patch, various limits will be enforced for per-interaction and resources to keep the main thread clean.

Russell’s patch is very similar to a bug Craig Hockenberry, a Partner at The Iconfactory, reported for WebKit, last week. He suggested adding limits on how much JavaScript code a website can load to avoid resource abuse of user computers.

Here are some of the changes that will be done under this patch:

  • Large scripts will be blocked.
  • document.write() will be turned off
  • Client-Hints will be enabled pervasively
  • Resources will be buffered without ‘Content-Lenght’ set
  • Budgets will be re-set on the interaction
  • Long script tasks, which take more than 200ms, will pause all page execution until the next interaction.
  • Budgets will be set for certain resource types such as script, font, CSS, and images.

These are the limits that have been suggested under this patch (all the sizes are in wired size):

Source: Chromium

Similar to Hockenberry’s suggestion, this patch did get both negative and positive feedback from developers. Some Hacker News users believe that this will prevent web bloat. A user commented, “It’s probably in Google’s interest to limit web bloat that degrades UX”. Another user said, “I imagine they’re trying to encourage code splitting.”

According to another Hacker News user putting hard coded limits will probably not work, “Hardcoded limits are the first tool most people reach for, but they fall apart completely when you have multiple teams working on a product, and when real-world deadlines kick in. It’s like the corporate IT approach to solving problems — people can’t break things if you lock everything down. But you will make them miserable and stop them doing their job”.

You can check out the patch submitted by Russell at Chromium Gerrit.

Read Next

Chromium developers propose an alternative to webRequest API that could result in existing ad blockers’ end

Chromium blacklists nouveau graphics device driver for Linux and Ubuntu users

Chromium-based Brave browser shows 22% faster page load time than its Muon-based counterpart

Bhagyashree R

Share
Published by
Bhagyashree R

Recent Posts

Top life hacks for prepping for your IT certification exam

I remember deciding to pursue my first IT certification, the CompTIA A+. I had signed…

3 years ago

Learn Transformers for Natural Language Processing with Denis Rothman

Key takeaways The transformer architecture has proved to be revolutionary in outperforming the classical RNN…

3 years ago

Learning Essential Linux Commands for Navigating the Shell Effectively

Once we learn how to deploy an Ubuntu server, how to manage users, and how…

3 years ago

Clean Coding in Python with Mariano Anaya

Key-takeaways:   Clean code isn’t just a nice thing to have or a luxury in software projects; it's a necessity. If we…

3 years ago

Exploring Forms in Angular – types, benefits and differences   

While developing a web application, or setting dynamic pages and meta tags we need to deal with…

3 years ago

Gain Practical Expertise with the Latest Edition of Software Architecture with C# 9 and .NET 5

Software architecture is one of the most discussed topics in the software industry today, and…

3 years ago