fickle browser - Nexus One General

The web browser should be Google's most stable and capable app, that's where google should shine. I wont rehash all of my browser problems (yes I've tried 3rd party browser apps) because I trust google and ill be patient for software updates to make the browser more functional. But sometimes from the browser I press home, send a text and when I go back to browser I'm at my homepage but other times same sequence and I'm at the same page that I was on before I pressed home and sent the text. I know its not my task manager. I thought maybe it was a setting but sometimes it doesn't take me to my homepage and sometimes it does. Does anyone know how I can consistently go to browser and be at the page I was on when I last left the browser? I want it to restart via my task manager at the times I have it set to but I need to be able to press home, carry out various functions and still have the same website up. I'm almost positive its user error but I don't know what to do. And yes I used the goddammed stupid search function. Thanks for any help...

Android has a built in task manager itself, as well, that closes apps as need be to free up RAM for current processing. As well, if you have a 3rd party task killer, it can get pretty dicey, even if you have browser "excluded". Also, keep in mind that your task manager uses up RAM itself, and in all honesty is not needed unless you really want to close tasks, and in that case just use Astro.
Anyways, 99.9% of the time the browser is where I left it at. I would say 100%, but I can't be 1000% certain the browser has never been closed by the built in task manager.

I remember having that problem constantly with my G1 but haven't run into it yet with my N1. As the guy before said, its likely that the memory manager is killing the browser app. Here are a few questions I would look into:
1. Are you using an advanced launcher? This can open a NEW window, but won't close an old one
2. How many apps do you have installed? The more apps you have the more that will boot on startup, eating away at memory
3. How many messages do you have? Maybe there are so many that the messaging app is logging all the memory.
4. Are you running CM5 with the highmem hack? If not, this sounds like a good excuse for you to root.

I've noticed that if you launch the Browser by using Home <Long Press> it often tries to reload some previous page that you were at. If you launch the browser directly from the home screen / app tray, it doesn't do this.
Very weird.

Related

Hero "multitasking"

It started driving me mad. If I minimize browser, I can't be sure it won't close. Not only minimizing for longer periods, but short ones as well - wanted to reply an sms when a page was loading, but when I got back to it, it started over. And all the loaded tabs were gone! Saving states my ass, it takes time to load a page from zero and only the active browsing window remains. How to make this "multitasker" multitask?
does this also happen if you return to the browser by holding home?
kendong2 said:
does this also happen if you return to the browser by holding home?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yes, that's the only way I switch betwen apps.
Have you installed the 'system-based' taskiller mod by any chance (you know, the one that was announced here that automatically keeps memory free by modifying the default thresholds for killing apps)?
If so, I reckon that's the issue! Either that, or you have too much running, so popping the browser into the background makes it a background task and it gets killed cos you're really short of RAM.
Let us know if you have used the tweak though...
@kengdong...
it doesn't matter how you change the apps.
For android it's the same, whether you tap an icon on a homescreen/list or whether you select it from the "task switch" thing... all that does is listing the last recently used applications but still tapping them results in the same internal action.
Source: Android SDK Documentation
I've had pretty much the same issue since I got the phone back in November (I guess I've just gotten used to it by now). I'm never really sure when I switch back to the browser if it will retain the page loaded and any other windows, or if it will reset, close the other windows, and have to reload the active page. I'm on the stock Telus ROM, no custom ROM, not rooted, no tweaks, nothing extra (I've been waiting patiently for 2.1 to come out before messing with custom ROMS).
olafos said:
Source: Android SDK Documentation
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
thx for the heads up, i wasn't sure about this, actually i was asking to maybe get an answer to this worked
anon2122 said:
Have you installed the 'system-based' taskiller mod by any chance (you know, the one that was announced here that automatically keeps memory free by modifying the default thresholds for killing apps)?
If so, I reckon that's the issue! Either that, or you have too much running, so popping the browser into the background makes it a background task and it gets killed cos you're really short of RAM.
Let us know if you have used the tweak though...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
No, I have stock rom and I have never used any task killer or related app / tweak.
And I don't run too much stuff.. only music player, messaging and sense's facebook perhaps. If music player is paused, why can't it quit it instead... I prefer multitasking of my past htc s730 which had like 7 megs of free ram after booting.
Even after a hard reset, this behavior remains.
i dont know.. it works fine for me....
1.. maybe there is a setting in the browser.. to always refresh.
2.. you have a repair issue.. Need to take it in to your local service provider repair center. Let them see your issue.
Dan330 said:
i dont know.. it works fine for me....
1.. maybe there is a setting in the browser.. to always refresh.
2.. you have a repair issue.. Need to take it in to your local service provider repair center. Let them see your issue.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Come on, it's no hardware issue. Most of the time the browser stays, but u just can't be sure about that because it sometimes just closes. I think that it's an issue with Android's STUPID memory management, which also has a scheduled "quit all" script.
Yesterday I opened up a few articles on the browser and decided to read them later. This morning they all remained and I was pleasantly surprised I could read them. This very moment, though, they are gone by now even though I haven't quit the browser - probably that 'quit all' script kicked in.
There could be something in settings, where you could chose apps which would not close ever unless quit..
I would love if Android apps were quitable without any automatic mem management.
Suggest to grab AutoKiller or MinFreeManager, which are just frontends to Android's memory management (also they reapply settings at boot time, as the system file that's being modified is reset every boot.)
See what your current settings are, and lower them (e.g. use "moderate" preset). Just search XDA for autokiller or minfreemanager for more info.
Pressing home should only move that application to the background (pressing back should close it).
If you are pressing home and applications are still closing then there must be a task killer of some sort in place closing it for you.
Lennyuk said:
Pressing home should only move that application to the background (pressing back should close it).
If you are pressing home and applications are still closing then there must be a task killer of some sort in place closing it for you.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You obviously have not read the topic.
No task killers, tasks dont neceaarily close, its juast that u cant be sure they will remain in memory.
Lennyuk said:
If you are pressing home and applications are still closing then there must be a task killer of some sort in place closing it for you.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yes - it's the standard Android process management rather than a 3rd party task killer.
I guess the browser is given a low priority and is one of the first apps to be killed.
Regards,
Dave

Autokill apps on gingerbread?

I don't know if anyone else has been having this issue but I've been having a starnge problem on the gingerbread leak. This has been present for both stock and drod's blurrybread rom.
When using my browser to watch videos, I will often leave the browser running and use different apps while the video is loading. This was fine until I went to gingerbread. When coming back to my browser, I would find that the browser had stopped running and had to reload the page causing me to lose all progress on the loading video. I have tried several different browsers and the same thing has happened.
Is there any way to stop this? It really is a pain to have to stay in the browser and watch it load
Nobody at all?
I'm pretty sure Gingerbread is still at the default of 25mb of ram free at least. But you can try downloading spare parts and changing it to mild or non-aggressive whatever it's called. What I usually do is use a task killer to end all my apps before opening the browser, since flash takes up a lot of memory. That way if I do close out of it for a second it usually won't get killed. Hope this helps.
Thanks for the reply. But it is usually fine if I go back after a second. I'm talking aboutt if I leave for 15-30 minutes. Is there a way to exclude the browser I use from the internal task killer?
Not that I know of. I think Android decides how "important" the app is to keep open. Usually their apps come first.
That makes sense. I'll have to find a way to set my own priorities inside of it

Stock Browser not sleeping

There seems to be an issue with the stock browser not remaining idle in memory after I press the home button
This seems to happen when multiple pages are loaded. In idle, the stock browser continues using CPU!
Anyone experiencing this?
How do you know it continues using CPU ?
By looking at the stock task manager!
The CPU usage ticks away for the browser
So close it with Task Manager, what's the problem? Stock browser doesn't have an exit option.
The problem is, why would I keep monitoring the program to see if it is using CPU power if it is supposed to be idle?
Well if you stop from Task Manager it will not be idle.
Android task killing is not recommended, so what gives?!
Now what does that mean? You have to exit it from Task Manger when you don't need it, pressing home button will never close it.
I know... but I was under the impression that manual monitoring of apps that are supposed to be in idle is unnecessary as people who advise against using task killers say that it is actually better for the operation of the Android OS as a whole, and killing apps is bad, since when home button is pressed, the apps actually lie dormant and do nothing
The issue now is I noticed the internet browser is still using CPU power, when it is supposed to be dormant. Of course I know the task manager can kill it, but I try not to kill the program!
Mate I am amazed by your thought. Some users say that don't use ATK or 3rd party Task Killer apps, but they NEVER say don't use the in built Task Manager. Jeez man, you don't wanna Exit an app because of some technical comment, unbelievable.
Regards.
The point being I don't wanna keep checking the task manager to see if the stock browser is using CPU power, that's the whole point of how Android is supposed to work, that is, if the app is in the background, it is supposed to idle and not consume power!
Just wondering why is it the stock browser is consuming power when it's supposed to be dormant
Well .. try to have the browser in background overnight .. and then check the battery statistics how much battery it did consumed over time ..
If you have background downloading set to ON in Android settings, and if the browser is on a site that's set to auto-refresh, it'll keep working in the background. That's by design and completely normal.
If you don't want this, make sure no auto-refreshing site is active in the browser before you send it to the background, or simply disable background downloading.
ithehappy said:
Mate I am amazed by your thought. Some users say that don't use ATK or 3rd party Task Killer apps, but they NEVER say don't use the in built Task Manager. Jeez man, you don't wanna Exit an app because of some technical comment, unbelievable.
Regards.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
A lot of people advice against killing applications with task manager for good reasons, except for ill-behaving applications of course. How have you managed to miss those threads?
Killing an application prevents the "exit"-routine in the application from running so it cannot do want it wants to do when it shuts down (maybe storing settings/data to flash etc). Killing applications with task manager in Android is like killing applications in Windows with the task manager, something you shouldn't need to do.
So the question is if the stock browser is ill-behaving or if this is a normal behaviour. If this is just for a short while and then the browser stops using CPU then this isn't a problem.
If an application won't exit correctly when stopped from task manager, it most probably won't exit correctly when the phone is being turned off. Does it mean you can't turn the phone off ?
This is actually true for windows too.
tjtj4444 said:
Killing applications with task manager in Android is like killing applications in Windows with the task manager, something you shouldn't need to do.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Well buddy I really can't take the comparison between a PC and a Mobile phone. A PC never has a battery problem, neither RAM problem, if 1000+ apps are running on background, which exists on Mobile phone. I listen to Music while playing Crysis 2. GS II is a powerful device, a damn powerful one, but comparing it or it's Task Manager with a PC is kiddish IMO.
Anyway, I just meant to OP that he/she should press the 'Exit' option in Task Manager after it gets minimized to completely close the Browser.
Regards.
rantzzz said:
The point being I don't wanna keep checking the task manager to see if the stock browser is using CPU power, that's the whole point of how Android is supposed to work, that is, if the app is in the background, it is supposed to idle and not consume power!
Just wondering why is it the stock browser is consuming power when it's supposed to be dormant
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
agreed! would be very interesting to see how much does it consume overnight!
ithehappy said:
Well buddy I really can't take the comparison between a PC and a Mobile phone. A PC never has a battery problem, neither RAM problem, if 1000+ apps are running on background, which exists on Mobile phone. I listen to Music while playing Crysis 2. GS II is a powerful device, a damn powerful one, but comparing it or it's Task Manager with a PC is kiddish IMO.
Anyway, I just meant to OP that he/she should press the 'Exit' option in Task Manager after it gets minimized to completely close the Browser.
Regards.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Sorry, but the task manager in Android and Windows are very similar in more or less every way. And regarding "A PC never has battery problem" makes me laugh, have you heard about laptops and netbooks? With a CPU with 35W TDP in a standard laptop it is pretty important with well behaved applications in a PC as well.
I remember when I had problems with Word on my PC and often had to kill Word, I got tons of backup files laying around in my folders, and I often had to deal with the annoying document recovery at startup, you get similar unexpected issues with Android applications. It is easy to get corrupt files and end up in strange applications states if applications aren't able to shutdown properly.
Killing the stock browser is an ugly work-around, better than doing nothing if it drains the battery a lot though.
So my point is that this is an interesting thing to investigate, this is after all XDA, we should understand if the stock browser drains the battery or not, and also understand why (for some reason Flash comes to mind...).
on nexus phones when i minimize the browser with multiple windows open, then monitor CPU usage, it is dead flat using zero cpu. so there is definitely a problem if the SGS2 browser is doing something. dont listen to anyone saying to just kill it with a task manager. that's not the point. are you supposed to kill the browser 30 times a day everytime you are done doing something with it? of course not, that's insanity.
my suggestion is to monitor the browser 5 minutes after you minimized it and see if it still continues to burn CPU. my hunch is that after a few minutes it should go to zero usage.
aydc said:
If you have background downloading set to ON in Android settings, and if the browser is on a site that's set to auto-refresh, it'll keep working in the background. That's by design and completely normal.
If you don't want this, make sure no auto-refreshing site is active in the browser before you send it to the background, or simply disable background downloading.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
this is completely wrong. the stock browser will NOT auto refresh in the background. it is specifically coded such that if you are loading a webpage and switch to the homescreen in the middle of loading, the web page will finish loading and then the browser will remain frozen and not do anything until the next time the user returns to the browser. this is well documented.

Atrix's (or Android's?) memory handling behavior -- auto shutdown of apps etc.

Hi fellas,
Something's been peeving me lately with the Atrix, and it's got to do with its memory handling & auto-killing functionality.
This particular situation has been driving me nuts:
I like to use both the native browser & and the Opera browser. Primarily I use the native browser, which is set as the default, and Opera when I want to check something and I want the full (non mobile) webpage layout and its superior (in my opinion) rendering quality and speed.
So, say I've got Opera open on Engadget or XDA, one or two tabs open. I hit the Home button and open Youtube to look something up. Finish the video, hit the Home button again, and launch Opera, and it has exited already and has to reload my tabs again. This of course can cause issues like losing my place in the page or a flash video I had paused, or a message I was typing and wasn't done with.
In this simple example, all I did was launch a browser, open 2 tabs (40-60 or maybe even 80 MBs of RAM usage, depending on page complexity), hit the Home button, launch the YouTube player (30 to 50 MBs RAM usage), hit the Home button again and Opera's already been killed.
OS Monitor shows there's about 470 MBs of RAM free.
What gives? Checking the autokill settings it shows that the OS will kill empty processes when free RAM hits 82 MBs of free RAM (default settings, haven't messed with them)
This behavior doesn't happen only right after a fresh reboot. Once I've opened a few apps, google readers, twitter, facebook, camera/gallery, browser etc., it happens every time. I say this because, while I'm not a programmer (beyond high school level C++ and general computer curiosity), from what I understand by watching the app life cycle videos on Google's Android programmer site, if Opera and YouTube were the last apps to be launched, they should have the highest priority in being kept in memory and not being killed, and previously open apps should be killed off to reclaim memory before them.
I found that using Gemini app manager I can set an app to not be killed automatically, and while I understand that it's not recommended that this is done by end users, it does work, and I use the Exit button in Opera to exit it once I'm done using it.
It just seems ridiculous that I always have between 350-450 of free RAM available to the system, while apps that I use often end up being killed in the background.
Before someone jumps on me, I understand that Android apps are designed to be shut down and reopened seamlessly. My annoyance stems from the behavior of a phone that has 836 MBs of RAM to work with, and about 570 available on startup (I've frozen several motorola processes I don't use, such as the social network integration and home launcher).
I just tried what you did (open opera, loaded bbc and endgadget, watch a youtube video than returned to opera) and opera retained everything including webpage, where I have scrolled to etc. I would suggest you to unfreeze the moto apps and try again, maybe that is what is causing the problem. Sorry I could not be of greater help =(
I'm not disagreeing with you -- like I said, it's not the case after a fresh reboot, or perhaps when not using the phone heavily. It had been a couple of days since rebooting the phone for me, and kept happening all evening long every time I switched apps.
Still, even when I force keep Opera open through the Gemini third party app manager, and while opening other apps, the RAM usage never goes below 300. The OS is overly aggresively in keeping RAM free, and considering it never falls below 100 MBs free of RAM, it shouldn't be shutting down apps EVER -- at least according to the autokill levels. Is there something else I should be looking at in determining when Android kills apps open in the background?
Was it just a fluke due to memory leaks, etc?
Edit:
Further research shows that Gemini app manager doesn't stop it from being killed, but rather removes it from its own auto task kill list (which I don't use). Seeing Opera stay open for a while after a fresh reboot shows that after two or three days of being used, the phone's memory management gets bogged down & that's what caused the very short app lifespan.
I wouldn't mind rebooting more frequently if it wasn't for that damned battery jumping issue.

Not really able to multitask due to constant low memory situation?

Hi,
I don't think this is limited to my device so I am asking here. Are you guys really able to multitask on your devices? On mine I start the web browser then I switch over a couple of apps and when I try to go bqck to the browser it gets launched all over again. Of course it remembers all the pages I have opened but they get reloaded. The same happens to other apps all the time. That drives me crazy. I installed an app called System Panel that I used to have on my HTC Desire and it shows that there are a lot of background services running and out of 700 megs of RAM it's only 50-80 free memory. Among those running apss there are services of widgets that I have never used like AP widget, world clocks, Yahoo finance, samsung hubs and etc. That's insane that such stuff occupies memory while apps that I really use gets killed so eagerly. Is there any way to improve on this behavior? My HTC desire seems to handle more apps at once than my GalTab :O
Marcin
Sent from my GT-P7500 using Tapatalk
I'm with you about the browser. So irritating that pages are reloaded when you leave the browser. I put starburst ROM on mine so I'm not sure if that took care of the RAM issues, but the reloading browser is pure fail. (BTW- I use dolphin for pad and it's the same).
I guess it's more a matter of the OS killing background apps to retain memory than the app behavior.
In Android an app(it's called an Activity) cannot forbid the operating system from killing it when the OS decides to. An app can only gets notified about the event of being killed to persist its state to be able to restore it later. And the browser does that.
What the problem really is here is that because of a lot of bloatware(including background services of Samsung hubs, Yahoo widget, Associated Press widget) running in background the OS is not having enough memory to keep the user apps runinng. So soon afther an app is put into background it gets killed to make space in memory for other apps.
And as far as I know killing thresholds for available memory are set to around 56 MB. And this happens to be around how much free memory is available for most of the time. So it makes any app put in background to be killed almost immediately. This makes the OS that is supposed to have an edge over iOS in terms of multitasking to be in fact able to run a single app at a time
And ifor example my HTC desire that runs vanilla Android 2.3.4 (Oxygen) seems to run with close to 200 MBs (out of 576MB built in according to the specs) of free RAM during normal operation. I do not use any task killers or any similiar tools. This makes the OS to easily handle multiple apps in background.
So, the question becomes: "how do we [permanently] kill all those background bloatware processes?"
freeze them with titanium backup
U guys realize it only reloads browser pages if u back out or hit the home button right? X the tabs out and ur browser will not do this
The only app that ever shows me the low memory msg is logmein ignition
Sent from my GT-P7510 using XDA Premium App
This is not really what we are talking about here. Try it this way. Open any page in a browser. GMail for instance. Log in and leave it this way. Now open the task switcher and go to some other app (e.g. Tapatalk). Navigate through some other apps and then select the task switcher and try to go back to your browser. You will notice that it was shut down silently and now it's started again. All previously open pages will be reloaded at this point. On my HTC Desire using the same scenario I end up with a web browser screen restored with the already open page not being reloaded. It even remembers what part of the page I scrolled down to.
bandit_knight said:
This is not really what we are talking about here. Try it this way. Open any page in a browser. GMail for instance. Log in and leave it this way. Now open the task switcher and go to some other app (e.g. Tapatalk). Navigate through some other apps and then select the task switcher and try to go back to your browser. You will notice that it was shut down silently and now it's started again. All previously open pages will be reloaded at this point. On my HTC Desire using the same scenario I end up with a web browser screen restored with the already open page not being reloaded. It even remembers what part of the page I scrolled down to.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
So the honeycomb memory management system is doing its job and freeing up memory when the browser is in the background idle. You are complaining?
bluskye said:
So the honeycomb memory management system is doing its job and freeing up memory when the browser is in the background idle. You are complaining?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Well, it does not really. I just rebooted my device and noticed that now I can switch between tasks without having the one that I've just put into background immediatelly killed. Also after the reboot there is around 300 MB of free RAM compared to 50 MB thad I had after a few days of use. Also the entire device feels way more snappy now. Doesn't it look like a memory leak?
I have not seen this problem - can have many things running and still have close to 100mb memory free. Doesn't seem to have got worse from a few weeks usage, either. But I have noticed some running processes that I have never even opened, which is strange. Solution is definitely to root and then freeze the things you don't need, but personally I am not going to do this as my memory seems fine. You could try taking off certain widgets and not running certain programs after reboot to see if one thing in particular causes a big memory drain. Social Hubs? I have never even opened this as it caused a mess on my Samsung phone.

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