Colas Nahaboo personal site, with discussions about programming code, web and computing topics, surfing and SUPing, and various musings. Zola 2026-08-09T00:00:00+00:00 https://colas.nahaboo.net/tags/c/atom.xml 2026-08-09T00:00:00+00:00 2026-08-09T00:00:00+00:00 Unknown https://colas.nahaboo.net/code/browser-freezer/ <img src='browser-freezer.jpg'> <p>I have a small NUC-style mini PC that runs linux with X11, and I cannot suspend it — probably some hardware incompatibility or BIOS bug, as is often the case on these mini-PCs. So, to minimize power consumption and heat generation, I made <strong><a rel="noopener external" target="_blank" href="https://github.com/ColasNahaboo/browser-freezer">browser-freezer</a></strong>: a small and light utility to freeze the browsers when the screen blanks, and un-freeze them on wakeup. On such a machine, the browser is the only thing consuming power when not being used.</p> <h2 id="why-two-parts-c-bash">Why two parts? C + bash<a class="zola-anchor" href="#why-two-parts-c-bash" aria-label="Anchor link for: why-two-parts-c-bash">🔗</a></h2> <p>It is composed of two parts:</p> <ul> <li>a tiny C daemon <strong>browser-freezer</strong> that polls the state of the monitor (On / Off) with as less CPU usage as possible (no forks under X11)</li> <li>on monitor status change detection, it runs the bash script <strong>browser-freezer-signal</strong> that sends the SIGSTOP or SIGCONT signal to all browser processes (firefox by default). It uses a bash script for the most possible flexibility and customization, as performance is not an issue there.</li> </ul> <h2 id="wayland">Wayland<a class="zola-anchor" href="#wayland" aria-label="Anchor link for: wayland">🔗</a></h2> <p>The initial release was X11 only, but two weeks later I added a Wayland variant: a second binary <code>browser-freezer-wayland</code> and a wrapper that picks the right one at login depending on <code>$WAYLAND_DISPLAY</code>. As always with Wayland, it is a second incompatible API to implement, but it works.</p> <p>My browsers are the only things consuming power on that machine when idle, so freezing them is the next best thing to suspending the whole PC. Indeed :-)</p> <h2 id="installation-usage-and-more-info">Installation, Usage, and more info<a class="zola-anchor" href="#installation-usage-and-more-info" aria-label="Anchor link for: installation-usage-and-more-info">🔗</a></h2> <p>See the <a rel="noopener external" target="_blank" href="https://github.com/ColasNahaboo/browser-freezer">browser-freezer repository</a>.</p> <p>Some code and images generated by AI (Gemini), as my C was a bit rusty.</p>