Browsers are here to own our desktops. But they will never deliver the absolute horsepower of a natively-coded world-class desktop app or game.
These days, when you try to run one, you will find it is crippled by the browser’s 100 open tabs (admit it, you have that many open…). And lord knows you don’t want to close them all.
I am the user. I am the king. Not the last 20 sites I happened to browse, each of which is allowed to take a huge chunk of our system resources for whatever task they deem important. Once you’ve rabbit-holed down a few holes, you have given your entire system resources to them.
Don’t put up with this. OWN YOUR OWN SYSTEM.
To really take it back when you need to play a game, work in your DAW, or play a 4k video at high frame rate, you need that browser to give up ALL its resources. And in linux, that is super easy.
- Find the parent browser process pid:
ps ax --forest| grep "[0-9][\_ ]*/usr/lib/firefox/firefox$"- “STOP” it. This is the magic that tells linux to just stop serving the parent process and all its children, stripping all CPU allocation from the tasks, without actually closing anything (especially your precious tabs scattered across all your virtual desktops). It’s amazing, it will freeze your browser in its tracks in an instant:
kill -STOP #pid-from-previous-step#- Start your powerhouse desktop app and do your thing.
- When you’re done, you can “CONTINUE” the stopped process, kicking off the CPU to immediately start servicing all that javascript again:
kill -CONT #pid-from-previous-step#I’ve scripted this up so I can press a media key to “stop” firefox and start up Kodi with beautiful performance. Here’s my javascript “continue” script, which uses my rad-scripts tooling:
#!/usr/bin/env node
import * as rs from 'rad-scripts';
const ffPs = rs.run_command_sync('ps ax --forest| grep "[0-9][\_ ]*/usr/lib/firefox/firefox$"');
const ffProcId = +( ffPs.trim().split(' ')[ 0 ] );
console.log( `Parent firefox pid = ${ffProcId}` );
rs.run_command_sync_to_console(`kill -CONT ${ffProcId}`);
