-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Alan Bell wrote on 01/10/15 12:25: > > I quite agree, even if it is a user preference it would be fine,
Making background processing a user preference would be the worst possible approach. It would mean sometimes having to choose between battery life and an app that works. It would mean users experiencing different things, from the same app on different devices, and not understanding why, never realizing that it was because they twiddled the setting a year ago to see what it did and then forgot about it. It would mean app developers often not experiencing their own apps the same way that most of their users were. It would mean silly nag screens in some apps prompting you to change your multitasking setting. And for a combination of those reasons, it would require people to learn what "background processing" is, and make a decision about it, when most of them have far, far better things to do with their lives. > I would choose to have multitasking when the screen is on. I find > it rather frustrating on slow connections to be unable to > background the web browser to let it load something while I check > on other things. > > ... Notice how Safari on an iPhone doesn't have the same problem, despite not multitasking. Half-load a page, switch to another app, switch back a while later, and the whole page will usually be loaded. (Except maybe bits that were to be loaded by scripts that were frozen.) So, multitasking is not the only solution to that problem. A better solution, perhaps, would be to expand the Download Manager service. <https://developer.ubuntu.com/api/apps/qml/sdk-15.04/Ubuntu.DownloadManager.index/> First, make it accept more than just an URL. You can encode HTTP authentication into an URL, but you can't provide cookies, client certificates, a POST form payload, or even an HTTP Referer. Second, instead of making it an opt-in API for apps to use for "a long running connection", just make it automatic for every transfer. There's little point in halting a transfer because an app is going into the background; the app will usually just restart it again later, using more battery (and more data) in the long run. If those two things were done, the Web browser could use it for almost everything. So as long as the HTML of a page had been loaded, with the other resources requested, the rest of the page would load in the background. - -- mpt -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.22 (GNU/Linux) iEYEARECAAYFAlYOWCwACgkQ6PUxNfU6eco/WgCfXvMvXvw0lfKCj2BQmQTvtGFx 2dIAoM8QpjI42tqygOy0DzLcG7nxqUmt =aZGG -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-phone Post to : ubuntu-phone@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-phone More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
