Live views, snapshots and locks
Live and frozen
A saved view is either live, still running with everything intact, or a snapshot, a frozen copy that reloads when opened.
live_limit sets how many stay live. When a new view needs a live slot, the least recently used unlocked view is frozen. Snapshots are faded and marked with a snowflake.
Snapshots are cheap, so total_limit can be higher than live_limit. Turn off Snapshot previews to show frozen views as a simple title card, which is even lighter.
Pause and resume
Hover a saved view and click the snowflake to freeze it. Click it on a frozen view to bring it back to life, if there is a free live slot. If there is not, Earmark dispatches earmark:limit so your app can explain why.
Locking
Click the padlock to lock a view. A locked view is protected:
- It is never frozen to make room for newer views.
- It is never replaced by a fresh copy of the same page. If a visitor opens the same page again and leaves it, the fresh copy is dropped and
earmark:lockedis dispatched. - It is never pushed out when the list is full.
Lock a half-filled form, and it will be waiting exactly as you left it. You can lock as many views as there are live slots.
A lock cannot survive a browser reload. Live views exist only in the open page, so a full reload or closing the tab starts every saved view fresh, locked or not. The lock itself is remembered, so the view comes back locked, but anything typed into it is gone. Locking protects a view from Earmark, not from the browser.
Pop out
In Chrome and Edge 116+, hover a live view and click the pop-out button to move it into a small always-on-top window. It keeps running there and stays interactive, even while you work in another app. Its slot shows "Popped out" until you close the window or click the slot to bring it back.
Pop out needs a secure page: your site must be served over HTTPS (or localhost). On plain HTTP, browsers hide the feature and the button does not appear.
One view can be popped out at a time. Moving a view into the window reloads any iframes inside it, such as embedded videos.
Collect as you browse
With collect on, the page a visitor leaves is kept automatically, with no animation. When the list is full, the oldest collected page makes room. Pages the visitor saved with +, and locked pages, are never pushed out.
One of each page
Each page is saved once. Saving a page that is already saved refreshes the saved copy instead of adding a second one, unless it is locked.