Should overlay layer activiations be preserved?

[gravitystorm]

The status of which layers are active is preserved in the session. So if you are looking at e.g. the Humanitarian layer, and open the site in another tab (either now, or at some point later) you see the same background layer. I find this useful.

However, the same also applies to the overlays, namely the notes, data and trace overlays. I often open up a new tab, sometimes a few hours later or even the following day, and I'm surprised to see note icons appearing everywhere. Or more so, I'm happily browsing around until I zoom in too far, and then my browser dies while the data layer loads since I previously had that open when I closed a tab. Now I know how to turn the overlays off again, but I'm not sure that everyone else does.

So my question is - is this behaviour even useful? And if it is actually useful in a minority of situations, should we still turn it off anyway? I guess that in most situations having the overlay active on a fresh tab is surprising and unhelpful, but I'm interested to hear what other people think.

[dieterdreist]

sent from a phone

On 26. Jun 2020, at 15:15, Andy Allan notifications@github.com wrote:

So my question is - is this behaviour even useful? And if it is actually useful in a minority of situations, should we still turn it off anyway? I guess that in most situations having the overlay active on a fresh tab is surprising and unhelpful, but I'm interested to hear what other people think.

I think it is useful for overlays like the notes, while the data overlay with its inherent tendency to freeze the browser when you zoom out should probably be tamed (e.g. limit it to high zooms or a “safe” amount of data. I know this depends on the RAM installed on the machine, but limiting on a hard zoom limit has disadvantages in areas with scarse data density). Maybe a warning like the one overpass turbo issues could help as well “you are about to load a huge overlay of 200MB of data, proceed anyway or shall we deactivate the data overlay?”

[gravitystorm]

Maybe a warning like the one overpass turbo issues could help as well “you are about to load a huge overlay of 200MB of data, proceed anyway or shall we deactivate the data overlay?”

This already exists.

But what I want to focus on is when you open a new tab, whether you want to (or expect to) see these overlays pre-activated.

[dieterdreist]

sent from a phone

On 26. Jun 2020, at 15:33, Andy Allan notifications@github.com wrote:

But what I want to focus on is when you open a new tab, whether you want to (or expect to) see this overlays pre-activated.

in case you are about to download a lot of data in the overlay (in the new tab), it should ask. If this is already implemented it must be tuned, because having the browser freeze is still common for this situation. One of the problems is that the data button becomes unresponsive, so when you deactivate the overlay it still seems to be active for many seconds, so you hit it again and it will reactivate the overlay as soon as it deactivates it, especially on mobile devices this is common (because of less RAM and because the touches on a small target are less sure than a mouseclick).

[pnorman]

So my question is - is this behaviour even useful? And if it is actually useful in a minority of situations, should we still turn it off anyway? I guess that in most situations having the overlay active on a fresh tab is surprising and unhelpful, but I'm interested to hear what other people think.

I've always found it unhelpful.

[simonpoole]

IMHO

• Notes: yes (because it is likely what one naively would expect)
• Data layer: no (because it is really really special purpose and painful when already turned on)