I have recently realized that I will occasionally hear notification sounds from applications that I had previously opened but no longer has any active tabs (email client, discord, etc.). I’m assuming this means they are allowed to keep some sort of connection in the background until I close all Firefox windows. Is this a bug or a “feature”? How do I turn it off? I don’t want any application running at any capacity except when I have tab(s) open for them.
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This is a browser feature called ‘service workers’ which indeed allows websites to keep a process running for e.g. notifications.and pending updates.
Can be highly annoying. Visit ‘about:serviceworkers‘ to see the installed ones.
Can I remove these without issue? I have a shocking amount of them.
Try using an addon like Basic Automatic Tabs Unloader, it will kill tabs completely a while after they’ve been closed. You can set the grace period as low as you want.
The Firefox native tab unloader is extremely permissive and only kills tabs when the whole system starts running low on RAM.
I had similar unexpected behavior with a closed Telegram tab. Feels weird and a bit worrying that stuff is allowed to run in the background like that.
I just freeze all my apps that I don’t need to run in the background and also restricted them from autostarting, running in the background, etc. in the battery settings. I’m not sure if this is a good solution, but it’s how I do it.
I have a bad connection and I find that a closed tab will still finish what it was doing before you closed it, could be related.
I think you just have to open those sites and turn off notifications for them. I would hope there’s a more fine grained option somewhere to say “only when the tab ids open” but if there is, I don’t know about it.
I have notifications turned off globally. The notifications I’m getting are in-app notifications.
