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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.
I find that Firefox is unstable when there are many windows and tabs. I've reported that numerous times.
I often end up with an unwieldy number of tabs and I've recently been looking at ways of managing them. The situation does not look good though. Tab Groups was removed from Firefox and the impending Webextensions crippling of Firefox is apparently going to make it almost impossible to port over existing addons that allow for tab management.
Here's the thing that's really pathetic about this whole situation: FF users have been complaining about performance problems for many, many years.
Yet FF's most ardent supporters have always denied or dismissed these complaints, claiming that "FF is fast" or "FF doesn't suffer from performance problems", despite so many users experiencing horrible performance when using FF.
So if these performance problems allegedly didn't exist, then why the fuck did Mozilla need to create this "Quantum Flow" project to fix FF's responsiveness?!
And if there allegedly weren't performance problems, then why have these recent changes resulted in significant performance boosts?!
It's no wonder we've seen FF's market share drop down to only about 5%.
FF's worst enemy isn't Chrome. FF's worst enemy is its own advocates, who treat FF's regular users like absolute shit.
When regular FF users reported very real performance problems with FF, these FF fanatics denied these problems, driving away most of these other FF users.
Yet here we are, with it being shown that earlier versions of FF did in fact suffer from very poor performance. The FF users who were driven away have been vindicated. The FF fanatics have been proven wrong.
It's really pathetic that it took this long for these problems to be taken seriously, and even longer for some initial fixes to be made. Maybe FF would still be up around 30% of the browser market, if not higher, had the complaints about FF's performance been taken seriously years ago, and the users who reported these performance problems not been ridiculed and dismissed.
Other open source projects should learn from the mistakes that FF has made: when a large number of users repeatedly report performance problems, take these reports seriously! There probably is a performance problem that should be fixed! Don't dismiss these users. Don't ridicule and insult these users. Take them seriously! Look into the problems that they're reporting.
Why should I waste many hours (if not days or weeks...) of my time tracking down and fixing stupid performance problems in Firefox, when I can take about 45 seconds and install Chrome, or Chromium, or Vivaldi, or Opera instead and get very good performance? Heck, in even less time than that I could just use a pre-installed browser like Safari or Edge and still get better performance than Firefox!
Don't give me any bullshit about Firefox "respecting our privacy", either. Just look at its privacy policy to see that it's sending a lot of data back to various places. Be sure to click the "Learn More" links so that you can see the full details.
Firefox doesn't deserve our contributions.
I, a Chrome user, will happily answer.
I have a main set of tabs for news sites - Slashdot is one of them, CNN, BBC, Drudge, whatever I feel like monitoring - stocks for instance. This set includes pages to each of my web email accounts too. A second page full of tabs reaches to internal pages for various software setup for my home and HTPC type stuff - Plex, PlexPy, Webmin, my NAS, SAB, and a bunch of others to handle a few VMs. Sadly Chrome sux for ESX so I have some damned IE windows open for consoles and monitoring.
Then there's the other pages that vary wildly. I have a wide variety of interests. If I begin researching say wood flooring for my home that's a separate page or two filled with tabs. Do a google search on electrical wiring? Each result of interest is a new tab. Ditto' kitchen cabinets and other things. Then there's my various web forums for car interests, parts searches, research into various electronic projects, Youtube videos and well you get the idea. I tend to use a google search as an anchor and multiple tabs after as I dig in deeply.
Sessionbuddy allows me to keep these across sessions. My current largest saved session contains 517 tabs across 161 windows. This session is 24 windows and 114 tabs and I'm finding that it's not really too responsive right now 16gig memory and sadly cannot use more due to the OS version I'm running - grr! Oh my sessions are synched across hardware so my browsers all have the same plug-ins and I can pull window history too as needed.
I can use Sessionbuddy to find things of interest from past sessions if I close them to recover memory, I can hover over a minimized window to get a list of the windows and find a "project" and in general I find this works pretty well for me. IE cannot handle this, menu items disappear as memory runs low, FireFox used to just up and die losing my sessions, and Chrome simply handles it but has become slow and bloated over the past year or three. Hopefully they take note of FireFox's advances! Chrome, being more secure, is where I'll likely stay for a browser hoping that they trim some fat as FireFox has
So yeah, some of us find this pretty damned handy and use quite a few tabs. 1600 is pushing it but 500 was fine by me for sure :)
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I'm angry with FireFox. I have been using it for many years, and for a long time, I thought it to be the bee's knees, the cat's meow.
However, their high handed way with security and such has come to the point that I can't trust them. I use Firefox browser in my work. When they block things for security reasons, it stops me from being able to work. I have to manage over 250,000 devices on an internal and secure network. We don't have resources to upgrade those devices - indeed, many of them cannot be upgraded.
Hey - Firefox folks - not every one is a security idiot, and not everyone has the dosh to replace still functioning equipment.
No matter. I've been reduced to using other browsers anyway because FireFox has become too resource intensive and intrusive. Yes, I know I'm a "special snowflake" but it is disheartening to have to discontinue using a tool I used to love so much.
I do still use it for my personal needs for the most part, but no longer for my banking or retirement sites. For work I no longer use it at all.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
Serious question: what is it about bookmarks that don't fulfill this role for you? Everything you describe, I do in Firefox with bookmarks and folders. Obviously, it takes almost zero extra memory. I tend to keep my tab usage under a dozen or two, since after that things start getting cluttered. So... is it a workflow thing, or a UI issue?
I keep thinking if one of the browser makers could figure out the answer to this question and make a change to their browser to accommodate people who like to collect windows and tabs as "live" bookmarks, they'd add a few percentage points from users like you who work this way.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.