It almost seems as though Chrome has started to obsess about supposedly "unresponsive pages". I am describing what appears to be an actual issue with Chrome, despite that I am categorizing it, somewhat flippantly.

I am using the Chrome Browser Version "83.0.4103.106 (Official Build) (64-bit)" on opensuse 15.1. I'd ask this question on the distro. specific website, but they seem to be having some issues.

I have a tendency to multi-task. In this particular case, I had multiple tabs open within Chrome, but for a short while, I was not actively using any of them. I was doing something else not involving Chrome. A small window kept popping up, supposedly from Chrome, stating that some pages had become responsive. The window had a section that could be scrolled, which seemingly listed multiple pages. In what meaningful sense should Chrome consider pages that were not actively being used, unresponsive? It was not doing anything "automatic" in any of the windows; I wasn't playing music, etc.; I was not doing anything in those windows that just runs without Human interaction.

Has anyone else experienced this type of thing with Chrome?

FWIW: I vaguely recall this behavior in Chrome when I used it last - if I remember right the default settings have it poll or reload background tabs periodically (this is a fairly long timer, like a few minutes at least) to ensure the connection is still valid and to get any updates (if available); if I remember right it will keep 'dynamic' content active in background (e.g., as you said, music playing). But it also seems to have a timer on how long it will wait for the page to do whatever it expects. From some quick googling that second timer is called 'hang-monitor' - see here at least:
https://www.reddit.com/r/chrome/comm...nsive/cmdguad/

Sadly, in the reddit discussion from 5 years ago, someone claimed that didn't work for them, and similar complaints have been made much more recently on the Google Chrome Help center. For me, it's only happened once in quite a few years. I found that the Chrome binary doesn't seem to complain if things that don't seem to be options are supplied. But I did find the string "disable-hang-monitor" in the binary, so I'll try it the next time the problem occurs. Thanks!!

If you have scripts on, then it may well be doing things in the background. Like re-loading the page whenever the web page says to. Or loading something that the script calls for. Or adds, telemetry, spying on you etc.

Also this.
https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...rs-4175677282/

Thanks for the thought, but the article seems to focus on add-ons, and I don't use Chrome for much, so no add-ons.

It's true though, javascript is the ultimate exploit - no addon required.
Only run trusted javascript. I.e., very sparingly.
One of the reasons I use Firefox, not Alphabet.

Oh Yes! When I develop websites I usually test them with a dozen or so browsers; from that testing, to me, Firefox seems quite possibly the most standards compliant browser there is, and possibly the safest. Yet, to me, it also seems a bit slower than some other browsers. I rather thought that at one time Opera, waaaaaaaaay back, could boast that it was purely written in hand tuned assembly language, and quite speedy. But these days it seems to use the "Chromium" package, and I feel that it has all sorts of issues, although still seems somewhat faster than various other browsers.

At one point while creating a website, I felt I had not made a good choice as to where on a page to put a div section. After I moved the div and was testing, I feel that the whole div just wasn't visible when testing with Chrome. At first I thought maybe I had made a mistake moving the div. But I checked manually, and also ran various HTML structure analyzers, ala *tidy* and such, and the HTML structure was ostensibly fine. I feel that other browsers displayed the div. I even checked the CSS attributes of the div using Chrome's developer tools, and the div was supposed to be visible according to those. I feel that finally I discovered that at that time, Chrome had been implemented with certain assumptions, that didn't apply in that situation.

Unfortunately, no matter how I might feel about a browser, to make sure a website I'm building is as usable as possible, I feel the need to test with a variety of browsers. I'm also rather surprised/disappointed that I feel I see so many software issues that don't seem to get fixed in any reasonable time, if ever.

Yes, Chrom*/Google/Alphabet seem to be wanting to create their own standards independent of the HTML standard - unfortunately this isn't a new thing, as any web developer will tell you. IE... Speaking of Microsoft, they also tried that with other formats (documents, Word). And Goofle/Android are also doing this, e.g. with their calendar format.

From what I understand, you are correct on Firefox - it is the 'safest' and 'most private' of current offerings (at least according to sites like privacytools.io fwiw). This is even over Firefox-clones, because many of them are essentially abandoned (my understanding is that Pale Moon is one of the only remaining projects apart from the mainline since Waterfox sold out to an advertising company). Opera dumped their in-house Presto engine years ago (when they moved past Opera 12.x) and has become yet another Chrome-clone, before being sold to some investment bank and getting into shady micro-loans and advertising on the side (I wish I was making this up). One of the original developers/founders went off to create Vivaldi somewhere in this, which is still a Chrome-clone, but significantly less bad than modern Opera.

Chrome has essentially become Internet Explorer 6.0 v2.0 - it probably (optimistically?) isn't so much a case of 'Google wants to make their own standards' (at least not in the embrace-extend-extinguish style of MS) as much as massively overwhelming supermajority of web users are on Chrome (and remember all of the Android devices out there), so whatever quirks or peculiarities it has essentially become the standard, just as with IE6.0 back in the day. It's not an ideal situation but its where we're at.

Out of curiosity to the original question: have you tried a non-Chrome/Chromium derivative, like Vivaldi? Does it still throw this behavior with 'idle' tabs?

I've been programming professionally for dozens of years. In that time I've done plenty of web development. At first, I was rather surprised by the idea that Google wants to make their own standards. I'd be interested to know how the comment was intended. But when I thought about the idea more, I realized that I have had the feeling that there's a common thread to the way they do things. E.G. I feel as if the Chrome implementation makes certain assumptions about how HTML will be used, that differ from any requirements in the HTML specifications. Also, the last time I used the Google Maps API, even though it was seemingly represented as being possible to easily do things in a flexible fashion WRT areas that could be displayed with information associated with a point on a map, instead I feel there was all sorts of preset formatting that had to be overcome, at least for my purpose, by digging through, and overriding layers of it.Chrome is not my favorite browser. Yet, I feel there have been claims made about how pervasive HTML 5 video, and more or less related matters are on the Web, but that it terms of what I've actually encountered, either the claims might be somewhat exaggerated, or I tend to frequent various sites that haven't converted. In my environment, of the fairly well known browsers, Chrome just seems to be the one that is most fully functional when I visit some websites. When the problem occurred, I was in the midst of other activities, some using Firefox and some Opera. I don't know the history behind it, but it does seem interesting that at some point after someone presented on the Chrome Help center, a problem with the message about unresponsive pages, comments to the question were locked out. For me, the problem hasn't occurred since that one time. If it happens again I will try to dig into it more. I wondered if perhaps it was yet another "trick" that advertising was playing, like those which get past ad. blockers, effectively take over almost all UI capabilities, and make a website almost unusable, at least without a good deal of aggravation. I'm well aware that it should be possible to prevent such things, but I've been too busy to even start to write something to do that.

I was a little unprecise there.
I was refering to the practice of using open standards, but adding little quirks to them that work well on your own software, but might break on others'.
Effectively undermining open standards.
Works well if a majority are already using your product.
Like I said, Google/Android/Alphabet are guilty of this on multiple counts, just like Microsoft with Internet Explorer and Word.

Interesting - my understanding (based on my previous comment) was that Google wasn't being quite so overt here, but that the 'quirks' underlying Chrome/Chromium were essentially creating a quasi-standard due to the proliferation of Chrome (and Chromium-based projects) over IE and Firefox in recent years.

rigor: My comment re: Vivaldi or similar was that perhaps a Chromium-based browser may have different configuration of 'hang-monitor' behavior or other tunables, which may side-step or eliminate this issue. I don't know this for certain, just making a guess as I know there are more than cosmetic differences between some of the Chromium-based projects (just as there were/are with Firefox-based projects).

Sure. I have Vivaldi around for when I test websites I've built. I can try it if the problem happens again. The problem occurred a total of one time. To be clear, I should say there was what I would categorize as one "event", and during that event, the notice was repeatedly displayed. I had clicked on links to various ads. in which I was mildly interested, but I was mostly focusing on the work I was doing in the other browsers, so I don't necessarily have a good way to reproduce the problem. I've referred to the other work that I was doing, and mentioned that the event has only happened once, by way of saying the problem, at least so far, is not a big deal for me. Anytime that I have used Chrome since that initial event, I have not gotten any notices about pages being unresponsive. When I have some time, I might try to examine the history in Chrome, or the bookmark timestamps, if any, and determine if it was a particular page, a combination of pages, or whatever. Hopefully then I can reproduce the problem and do some serious testing. Thanks very much to everyone for your thoughts!