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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Seriously, what is the point of having more than a couple dozen tabs open, how the hell do you find anything that way?
I understand fixing the issue and all, but...go fuck yourself with 1691 tabs.
Loading the entire internet inside a single browser session isn't exactly a great idea...
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.
Fuck Chrome.
You're confusing bookmarks and tabs.
Read one of those Internet for Dummies books, and you'll figure it out.
You're doing it wrong.
So they are going back to how it used to be?
I recall having hundred(s) of tabs open. Back in 2006 on a single-core centrino Laptop with a whoping 2GB of ram and a terrific ATI x700 GPU.
No issues were had.
Then they brought in the UX-torturers, started with their ridiculous high version numbers and it all went downhill from there.
8)
I was always amazed at those people whose desktops were completely filled with shortcuts. I guess they're all using Firefox now.
I wonder if their houses are stacked floor to ceiling, wall to wall, with old newspapers.
#DeleteChrome
Said Bill Gates
--- Illogical Spock
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.
I'm a programmer...
When learning about a topic that I'm trying to implement I often open a new window whose tabs will all be results of a certain context.
I'm sure most are familiar with ending up at cat videos when initially you were on YouTube for a completely different topic. When I'm doing research and find that a certain search pattern is diverging in a different direction that's when I'll break off into a seperate window.
This allows me to view context specific history and sites. I don't necessarily want to save a windows tabs as a bookmark collection thus the behavior I'm describing.
When I look at how I use tabs it's very much like how I organize my virtual desktops in Linux. It would be nice if web browsers had something similar outside of a whole new window.
So while a shit load of tabs is bad I can see multiple reasons for why it happens.
Why are you loading all of the tabs at startup? Do you really need all of them? If you want to change the behaviour so that only the visible tab is loaded then go into about:config and search for "browser.sessionstore.restore_hidden_tabs" (without the quotes). Change the value to false. The tabs will still be there but will only load when you select the tab.
Maybe Firefox changed the default behaviour and that is why you see the change in performance.
So one volunteer, in his spare time, spearheaded this effort to lazy-load tabs more efficiently. If only the rest of us snarkers in the peanut gallery were so bold, we'd probably have the Firefox we want, rather than the Firefox we deserve.
But no, easier to sit back and bitch and moan about things, distancing ourselves from the hard work, until someone else does it for us for free. And then we snark about how long it took, and how right we were for leaving instead of helping out (even with a casual donation from time to time, because "they're not doing what we want", even when they are). Yay, us.
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.
It was barely usable for us many-tabs types, until a few years ago when they quit trying to load every single tab when you start it. Now it only tries to open the active tab on each window.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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
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.
That word would be bullshit.
I've been using it for over a decade, I've made easily over twenty posts on Slashdot about the performance maybe double that.
I used it exclusively including 64 bit nightly editions, up to I think version 54?
I reduced my plugins significantly to about 4 or so.
I'm an extreme browser (although I peek around 400 tabs around once or twice Year, not 1600) and I can assure you at least up until 2/3 months ago, it still ran like crap compared to chrome (and again, I don't even like chrome)
I simply do not believe this, period. It's bloated crap and needs a MASSIVE fundamental rewrite to fix the disaster it's become. Very unlikely they finally got this all magically fixed after many many years of me being patient.
Not coming back Mozilla, nope
(Check my post history, I'm convinced I was one of the last die hards for it )
but I permit facebook stuff to load
May I ask why? Why in the blazes a reasonable person would ever allow anything Facebook to load (assuming you're not paid for pushing crap there)?
If you have a family member who insists on still using Facebook, most of the blockers can be configured to allow it through on a single site (like facebook.com directly), I don't have any experience there though (thanks Marduk!). Letting it crap on, track you on, and, as you say, lock your setup on, random third-party sites, is preposterous.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
https://xkcd.com/1172/
That's so turn of the millennium. 1692 tabs is where it's at now. All the cool kidz are doing it.
We'll make great pets
Perhaps it's just me, I can't name the 183 (or so) countries of the world, and I often miss one or two US states when listing them
I can't remember which of the several thousand bookmarks I have are still relevant; nor do I remember, or often have time, to sift through them and delete those which are no longer relevant. Tabs, grouped by window, are an easy way to track this.
If I'm still researching the topic, any tabs open in that topic's window are relevant (or have not been reviewed yet); when I'm done researching a topic, I bookmark any content I might find useful later and close that topic's window, along with all of its tabs. Done. I don't have to open the overly complex (compared to clicking single "X") bookmark management interface to clean up after a research session, which matters when researching several concurrent topics as I'd spend practically as much time cleaning up after each topic as I spend on the actual research. Most of those tabs have no relevance after the research session ends and, thus, do not belong in the long-term archive that is my bookmark list.
Mind you, I'm an efficient researcher and tend to keep my tab count under 200, spread across 6 or 7 windows, but I see how someone who opens every link they find on a subject, or who is maybe researching a wider range of topics at a given moment, might peak in the thousands. If you just finished several days, or a week or more, of topical research, would you rather your cleanup process was clicking a handful of "X" buttons to close a handful of windows, or sifting through hundreds or thousands of bookmarks to ensure that you only delete the ones that are no longer relevant?
Or are you implying that, because some people might lose track of the names of countries or states, we shouldn't have so many? Maybe you think a few nukes would improve things? Should we just bookmark Bolivia and only open it up when you need a bump of coke?
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Having hundreds of tabs open is a user stupidity problem, not a coding problem.
Good points, but I would counter with a few things:
1. This is not the first or only work the Firefox team has been doing to improve performance. You're writing as though this Quantum Flow project is the first performance work they've done ever, or within the past five years. It isn't. The switch to multi-threading has been underway for years.
2. Firefox's problems today are largely a result of its own success ten years ago. The biggest cause of performance slowdowns is add-ons that have inefficient code, or add-ons that use inefficient code in Firefox. The Firefox team is trying to address this - and every change they make that breaks add-on compatibility brings howls of protest from the community. I don't blame the people who are upset by the changes, either. But the result is that the very things that made Firefox a big success then is slowing it down now.
3. Conversely, if you want fastest performance try running without add-ons. That's how Firefox has been doing well in benchmarks, like the Tom's Hardware Browser Shoutouts it won.
4. I don't think the Firefox developers have been the ones telling the regular users that Firefox is fine. I think it's other Firefox fans. I've been defending Firefox for years - but I'm not a Firefox developer or contributor. And I haven't been claiming it's as fast as Chrome, just that it's fast enough.
but I permit facebook stuff to load
May I ask why? Why in the blazes a reasonable person would ever allow anything Facebook to load (assuming you're not paid for pushing crap there)?
If you have a family member who insists on still using Facebook, most of the blockers can be configured to allow it through on a single site (like facebook.com directly),
Slowwwww down thar, jack. I'm only allowing facebook crap to load on facebook, and I didn't say otherwise. I perhaps wasn't clear, but making assumptions is half-cocked.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
This is what Boomarks are for : keeping a list of frequently visited sites.
And if you are a tabs hoarder, The Great Suspender extension is your best friend on Chrome : https://chrome.google.com/webs...
On Firefox, you can use Suspend Tab or UnloadTab extensions I think.
Will $CURRENT_YEAR be the year of the Linux Desktop?
...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.
I'm running FF52 (LTS) because the "consumer" grade Firefoxen don't allow unsigned extensions, with no saving throw (the LTS ones do).
The next LTS version (57 IIRC) is going to lose real extensions, with only the stripped down WebExtensions.
So what is a user to do?
Windows 7 has 49.04% marketshare, as of "June, 2017".
I come here for the love
Nobody uses 1600 tabs. Sorry, at best, you use maybe, MAYBE 1-3% of those with any regularity. The rest is just masturbation.
What's REALLY upsetting with the latest versions are the nasty memory leaks and slowdowns in FF since the multi-threading was enabled.
With just three tabs open (for this example Slashdot, Facebook and YouTube, but I can reproduce the behavior with any number of sites), the browser begins exhibiting multiple tens of seconds of input lag after as little as 5 minutes of browsing. So you click on something and wait, and wait, and wait. And it "eventually" does it.
It's getting so bad that I'm going to HAVE to stop using Firefox if it continues.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I promise you that Facebook is punching Firefox right in the nuts, and I really do want to know if anyone else is having the same problem.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'm kind of astounded that everyone here is so cynical while at the same time being so ill-informed about the stuff Mozilla is/has been doing the past few years. In addition to "Quantum Flow", they wrote a C++ replacement (Rust) that's concurrency-minded and memory-safe for better performance and fewer bugs, as well as a completely new HTML/CSS rendering engine (Servo) written in said programming language, that's faster than any other rendering engine in existence at this point. All this is coming to Firefox soon. (Although IMHO they might as well just rebrand/rewrite a whole new browser at this point, seeing as Firefox extensions are disappearing and the Firefox's market share has already dwindled). Relevant links: https://www.rust-lang.org/ https://servo.org/ https://wiki.mozilla.org/Quant...
"I've got a Firefox profile with 1691 tabs"
It must suck to be you. I guess you also have 2321 apps on your iPhone and 4352 open documents in Winword.
You should read about the x icon in the corner.
It's bitztream - the autism-hating, custom EpiPen-hating, Musk-hating, Qualcomm-hating, Firefox tab-hating Slashdot troll!
If the browser is running short on memory, then why not just discard a few tabs until they're selected again? There's absolutely nothing stopping the browser from doing that.
Say a user navigates to an HTML document on his laptop, closes the lid, boards a city bus in a city whose buses do not provide Wi-Fi, opens the lid, and switches to the document's tab. If the browser has discarded the document for later reloading, the browser will attempt to reload the document, fail because there is no Internet connection, and show "You are offline" instead of the document. This defeats the purpose of having loaded the document in a tab in the first place. And browsers on tablets have an annoying habit of doing this often.
3. Conversely, if you want fastest performance try running without add-ons.
I don't see how running without add-ons would help performance, as disabling add-ons causes sites to load excessive tracking devices, real-time bidding scripts, animated advertisements, and video advertisements.
Is Apple the only laptop maker whose products 1. run "a newer OS" that isn't designed as one huge tracking device for the advertisement industry and 2. are in U.S. electronics showroom chains? Because for years, I haven't seen any GNU/Linux laptops in showrooms near me; it's just Windows 10 and macOS.
Until then, Windows 7 receives "extended support" (security updates) until 2020.
You should really consider looking into having similar problems. Why? A human can't pay attention to that much information at any given time. If you are researching a book, you may have a hundred or two references but most of those are one time checks. Not open reading material, and not something you need after you make sure you have the quotes/concepts correct. Once you have to fish for labels in your tabs, the efficiency drops dramatically. You are faster to have a bookmark or re-search for the source than wait for a mouse-over popup to tell you the title.
Now I am quite sure that we all have different limitations. I'm sure we could find the limit on efficiency though, and I'd be willing to bet a box of donuts that it's well below 100.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
And why? All the data is available elsewhere, either in the disk cache
The changes made to a document's DOM by scripts aren't in the disk cache. One example of a document is any Slashdot discussion page. Scripts collapse or expand comments, add a "Reply to This" box, and add newly posted comments when the user activates "Check for New Comments" link at the bottom.
or the remote server itself.
Once a battery-powered computer leaves the range of Wi-Fi hotspots whose WPA2 password you know, "the remote server itself" is no longer accessible. Browsers for tablets aggressively discard inactive tabs under memory pressure, and it frustrates me because by the time I get around to reading a document, it's been discarded, and I can't retrieve it again because I've already boarded the bus. Browsers for laptops don't have quite as much of a problem because operating systems for laptops instead use a page file when under memory pressure.
Exactly this.
It's actually been my impression that sites run faster with add-ons disabled. I don't have hard data, though, so don't give any weight to what I write. What I suspect - a wild guess, mind you - is that for example older versions of EFF Privacy Badger are single-threaded, so they actually slow you down more by blocking three hundred trackers spread across forty tabs than you would be if you just let all those advertising networks run their code.
Depends on the add-ons you're using...and how trustworthy those advertising networks are. Malware infections tend to slow computers down, and would it particularly hurt sites or ad networks to start making it be standard policy that ads capable of injecting malware just don't get in? (I'm not going to ask that they vet where the links go, that does seem a bit too labor-intensive and easily abused, but it shouldn't be difficult to just refuse to run ads that have the technical capability of loading programs on somebody's computer without their permission/knowledge.)
NoScript deserves particular mention here, as it definitely makes sites with javascript written by an alleged programmer run faster...by letting you keep those buggy scripts from running at all.
I didn't set out to screed at this length. Shit happens. It might at first look appear to be a bramble patch. Appearances are deceiving.
Every word here is as deliberate as accidental off-the-cuff could possibly be. I suppose I could open up every second snarky entry on TV Tropes.org just listing all the rhetorical devices employed within (should my browser permit this).
However, I spent my wad in the composition and don't feeling like going back over it with a grooming rake. Colour me slovenly. Yes, Dragon Killers Wear Black, but not while actually killing dragons.
___
I have three displays, so I have three FF tab bars on my working desktop. The vast majority of my windows are full screen. I use middle mouse on the title bar (push to back) to rotate through multiple windows on one screen. I rarely have more than three windows per screen.
In addition, I have a bunch of desktops. Stray tabs from half-completed research topics get grouped together into a new window, which is titled with FireTitle. Then the window itself gets fired off to an alternate desktop. I find that my tab bars become annoying with more than 10 tabs, unproductive at 20 tabs, and almost unusable at 30 tabs (unless my work process is extremely stack oriented, and they all tear down again in LIFO order).
Sometimes a work process starts out LIFO, but then you realize that you're cross-referencing tabs on the same FF window that are far apart. Crossing the phase boundary from a stack-based workflow to a heap-based workflow with more than a dozen tabs open is usually what triggers forking a new window and a mark-and-sweep GC into a named tabs-for-later window, immediately "niced" onto a different desktop).
Now we need to get into why bookmarks suck.
You see, there used to be this technology called a "book", subtype: comprehensive reference work, subsubtype: warts and everything.
People talk about code smells. I'm more likely to talk about documentation smells. A super common documentation smell these days is "let's not even mention the possibility of not-yet-implemented, but super obvious feature that completes the conceptual paradigm". You know, the kind of software which discusses the fabulous cosine feature on their home page, mentions the related feature sin as a footnote in some appendix, and the tan feature not at all, anywhere, ever (maybe the bowels of an associated bug tracker as a feature request, largely snowed under by discussion of "do we REALLY need this" scrum-brainrot feature triage).
A scrummer might think, well, sin is sufficient, anything more would be feature creep. And there is some logic in that, as viewed by anyone who hoped that all Java floating point primitives would be bit-identical across all machine architectures, forever.
But it turns out that floating point is nasty, in the same way that managing memory is nasty, so nasty that we often abstract memory management right out of the software specification (some specifications are just too hard).
sin(x) equals cos(pi/2 - x) only for extremely high quality values of pi.
tan(x)=sin(x)/cos(x) only for a Taylor series expansion of sin(x) with enough precision to complicate memory management .
I'm just using this as a hyperbolic example of skin-deep identities.
Another example: if you've got copy and delete, do you really need move? (If you've previously abstracted memory management right out of the specification, you might struggle to answer "yes".)
What reference book technology used to do is have a little paragraph near the front of a relevant chapter which declared that for the purpose of this application, you do have a complete set of sin/cos/tan, but you don't have a complete set of copy/delete/move (some composition required).
There's a systemic reason why the official online documentation goes to code-smell "obnoxious silence". Because S
That's not how it works. That's not how any of this works. Sounds like tabs are being used instead of bookmarks. Or I don't understand something. Firefox still hangs frequently when I have only a few tabs going, if they're to the ridiculously complicated pages that are so common these days. HuffPo and its friends are some of the biggest miscreants. Ditch the nonoptional videos, guys.
Slowwwww down thar, jack. I'm only allowing facebook crap to load on facebook, and I didn't say otherwise. I perhaps wasn't clear, but making assumptions is half-cocked.
Sorry for questioning your sanity then :)
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
In principle, browsers for desktop operating systems already discard DOMs to the page file. One drawback of this approach is fragmentation: because one 4K page of memory may contain objects associated with more than one tab, it might take longer for a document to get completely paged out. To what extent does Firefox try to keep a document's data together in address space?
How's life in the hypocrite lane?
I wonder how many of these speed tests are run with JS and video loading disabled vs having it on and using real world browsing scenarios. I know running with no JS breaks things on the modern web, but even crusty old IE runs like speedracing champ when the mostly useless crap found in JS scripts isn't allowed to load, ditto with videos.
@Mindless Drivel: 100% of Twitter posts ever Tweeted.
Could you describe further? When has Apple violated its privacy policy? Or which practices does this policy allow that are still unacceptably intrusive?
And which brand of laptop should I try in a showroom instead?