"Suspension" seems to only save URL, not page contents

[AugustM]

I regularly use a page where the contents change daily at midnight: www.facebook.com/memories. If I have yesterday's page open, or even the day before's, I can work with it, but if I accidentally navigate away or Chrome hangs or crashes, I lose the data, reopening that page gets me today's version, not what I had been working with.

As a test of The Great Suspender, last night I suspended that page. I was just intending to reopen it today to see what I got. Then my browser crashed. A perfect test, I thought. Not my preference, but let's see.

This morning I restored the supposedly suspended page and I got today's version of the page, not yesterday's as I had hoped and as I thought was promised by the descriptions of this extension.

That says to me that this extension is not really suspending the page, saving a snapshot of the current state to be restored later, it is just saving the URL. The Tabs Outliner extension does that a lot better and more simply for me; I was hoping for something that went a little deeper. TGS seemed to be promising that.

If I'm wrong about how this extension works, if it can do what I hope to be able to do, restore yesterday's (or some previous) version of that volatile page, how do I get it do what I expect and what happened differently in my test?

Thanks.

• Extension version: 7.1.6
• Browser name & version: Chrome Version 84.0.4147.105
• Operating system & version: Mac OSX 10.14.6

Yes, I searched for this, as thoroughly as I could because I'd rather find the answer right now than be pointed to it later. If there is an answer already, great, thanks. (Maybe I'm not using the right keywords?)

[switham]

There are some things to be aware of:

1. If it did freeze a snapshot, first of all that might take a whole lot of memory. Right now it can save an image that you can't scroll, and they already warn about how much memory it might take. But if it did save the whole page frozen, you couldn't actually work with the snapshot, as in, type in a post, share, etc., but maybe you could (say) scroll, cut and paste, open link or image in new tab, things that leave the page sitting there frozen. That is a feature I would like.

2. As it is, when you unsuspend a page, it just reloads the page from the website from scratch and then scrolls to where it thinks you were. But opening the page the next day means the website (e.g. Facebook) gives you whatever it thinks you should have today, not yesterday. The web has no standard way to ask the web server to see a page the way it was yesterday, plus see 4.

3. If TGS were to keep a snapshot, then when you unsuspend, it could reload the current page (boo) or not reload it, just reactivate it. But being able to reactivate it would mean keeping the "process" around as well as the image of the page, taking even more memory. Having it reactivate might not work because the web server (Facebook) and just the network software in your computer might have decided your browser hung up the phone. (I'm thinking, technically, maybe TGS could keep the TCP connections open but I don't know.) Whether the page could recover from that by itself is pretty iffy. There is no standard way for a browser to ask a web server to pick up where we left off when I broke contact last night. And if there were, see 4.

4. If TGS woke up the process, the process may have set a timer for itself to check for page updates. Facebook pages definitely do this. So, once reactivated the web page itself would decide to reload itself with the current content. I don't see how TGS could detect that the web page is doing something that Facebook wants it to but you don't.

[nfultz]

You might prefer The Great Discarder instead, which using discarding instead of suspending;