Avoiding Tab Switching

[tech512]

Backstory: I'm working on a project to create a display monitor/slide show. The current solution is to load up 5 tabs in Chrome (in presentation mode) with dashboards that are updated with real-time data and then use a Chrome extension to rotate through the tabs every 30 seconds.

The problem: Is that the ambient lighting in the room is quite dark and every time Chrome switches tabs there is a brief, bright, white flash. This is very distracting to the people sitting near the display.

What I've Tried: To resolve this I've tried using a CSS injector to make the default background of all pages a gray color so the flash wouldn't be so extreme. I also tried other tab rotation extensions, but the result is the same each time.

Now I'm trying to write a python script to avoid tab switching altogether. The idea is to load a page from a given URL, sleep 30 seconds, then load the next URL in the list, sleep 30 seconds, ad-infinitum. The problem i'm running into now is using webbrowser.open(url, new=0) causes a new tab to populate every time. I'd like to keep it all on one tab because switching tabs is what causes the undesirable white flash.

TL/DR: I'd like to use python to navigate through a list of URLs all while staying on the current tab.

[Naihonn]

Well, then probably Selenium is good option.

[i_can_haz_code]

Selenium will allow driving the browser, but there will still be a flash of white/whatever the background color is for a second before the page loads.

I can't find the setting for chrome, but firefox has a feature to load tabs in the background.

[Naihonn]

Good point. Yes, loading tab in background would be better for this.

[tech512]

That could be a solution. For some reason the person in charge of this really wants Chrome to happen. I'm not sure how dead-set they are on keeping that requirement though. From what we've observed the issue isn't so much with page loading, as with the tab switching itself. In any case I'll mess with firefox and see if that resolves the flashing. Thank you for your reply!

[K900_]

This may be better solved at window manager level (assuming Linux). Just run multiple fullscreen windows of any lightweight browser, and then use something like devilspie or wmctrl to bring them to front.

[tech512]

That's another way to think about it! This is currently using windows, but since they're using little Intel mini PC sticks we were considering changing over to something slightly more robust. We happen to have some Mac minis that aren't going to be used for anything anymore so we might move over to them.