When I duplicate a tab, a new tab is created with the same URL and I have to wait for it to download again. Why wouldn’t Firefox just duplicate all the data of the tab into a new tab?
Not safely. For simple sites, probably, but anything remotely complex and the JavaScript would be impossible to deal with.
Lets say the tab has a websocket open, and you clone the tab. What happens to that websocket connection? OpenGL contexts when you’re running a game? Both at the same time because it’s a browser MMO? CSRF tokens? Any sort of ID that got generated as a message you were typing?
There’s no way this can be done without causing things to break in some way. The next best thing is to load it anew, and hopefully 100% cache hit on that.
Good websites duplicate in the blink of an eye because it’s 100% cache hit. Crappy websites take seconds to load with a warm cache.
Modern websites are so complex and dynamic now it makes saving their state next to impossible.
For a while I’ve been longing for something similar, but for going forwards and backwards in a tab. There’s been too many times when I hit back to look at something I missed, only to find it was some dynamically loaded element that changes when the page is reopened.
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