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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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
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.
You're confusing bookmarks and tabs.
Read one of those Internet for Dummies books, and you'll figure it out.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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
https://xkcd.com/1172/
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.
...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.
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'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...
How's life in the hypocrite lane?