ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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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

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