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TrickyBird

Session

A session is 1 site in 1 tab for 60 minutes. It starts when the site opens and ends on its own, whether or not you are still reading.

At the start

You open a site through TrickyBird, and the session is that site in that tab. Go back to open another and this one is over; the next site starts a new one.

In between

Whatever you do on the site, and however long you leave the tab alone, the session runs until its time is up.

At the end

When the 60 minutes are up, the tab goes back to our home page. There is no extend button and nothing renews it; open the site again from there and a new session starts. The exception is a page you come back to with the browser’s Back button after the session ended: it stays where it is.

Where the edges are

A session has limits, and 3 of them can reach you. You can tell which one you hit from what you saw and from what you were doing.

  1. 1

    The 60 minutes ran out, and the tab went back to our home page.

  2. 2

    Too many requests went through too fast, and the page you landed on says so in its heading. This one clears after a wait of up to a minute: let it pass, then reload. The limit exists to keep the service stable for everyone.

  3. 3

    A lot of traffic in a short time lands on the same page, and it clears after the same wait of up to a minute. Ordinary reading and watching never reach it.

Hit a limit without doing anything unusual? The counters attach to a session and to a network rather than to a person. On a large shared network, where many people share one address, they fill sooner than they would on a home connection, no matter who caused it.

What the lightning bolt shows

The bolt in the toolbar shows which of 3 speeds the session runs at. The color is the whole readout.

  • Full speed

    Purple. The session runs at full speed, and every session does. TrickyBird does not slow it down. The 60 minutes, the limits and the sites you can open are the same at all 3 speeds.

  • Reduced speed

    Amber. The session runs slower than full speed. Whatever you open takes longer to arrive, and that is the only change: the 60-minute clock does not slow with the page.

  • Limited speed

    Red. The session runs slower still, the slowest of the 3. Whatever you open takes longest to arrive, and it is only a wait: the limits do not move, and the sites that open do not change.

The bolt reports which speed the session runs at and measures nothing: a page that loads slowly leaves it unchanged.

What a copied link gives someone else

A link you copy from a session hands whoever opens it a session of their own, not yours, so nothing you are signed in to travels with it, and the site’s address rides inside the link encoded rather than spelled out. The link itself works for a few hours.