Slashdot Mirror
The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs (metafluff.com)
An anonymous reader shares a blog post: I've got a Firefox profile with 1691 tabs. As you would expect, Firefox handled this profile quite poorly for a long time. I got used to multi-minute startup time, waiting 15-30 seconds for tabs from external apps to show up, and all manner of non-responsive behavior. And then, quite recently, everything changed. Right now, more effort is being put into making Firefox fast than I've seen since... well, since I've been working on Firefox. And I've been at Mozilla for more than a decade. Part of this effort is a project called Quantum Flow -- a bunch of engineers making changes that directly impact Firefox responsiveness. A lot of the improvement in this particular scenario is from Kevin Jones' work on bringing the overall cost of unloaded tabs as close to zero as possible. While the major work has landed, the work continues in Bug 906076. Test scenario: I took my 1691 tab browser profile, and did a wall-clock measurement of start-up time and memory use for Firefox versions 20, 30, 40, and 50 through 56. In the result, the person found that Firefox startup time has gotten worse over time... until Firefox 51.
That you had to do a wall-clock measurement to determine that Firefox startup time has ballooned is evidence of a greater problem. The focus has been on the rapid release schedule with little to no thought towards user experience.
Pro-tip: Make my shit fast. Make it super fucking responsive. I don't need the shine, I don't need the glitter. That's where I can rely on a mod/extension community to fill in the short comings. I can't rely on them to put in extensive multicore support. Make the engine that everyone wants to use, and worry about what color to paint the car later.
I managed to put 10 pounds of shit into a 5 pound box and it fell apart. What am I doing wrong?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
You know they have this other new feature that lets you group all those pages without needing any memory, CPU, or screen space. They call this cool new feature "bookmarks". You should check it out.
Somebody should invent bookmarks!
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
...I've got a Firefox profile with 1691 tabs....
I'd really not want to see Firefox wasting their precious development resources to make a ridiculous corner case as this one work properly, instead of applying those same precious resources to more pressing issues. Issues that are experienced by a much wider set of users.