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Mozilla Tests Firefox 'Tab Warming' (bleepingcomputer.com)
Catalin Cimpanu, reporting for BleepingComputer: Mozilla is currently testing a new feature called "Tab Warming" that engineers hope will improve the tab switching process. According to a description of the feature, Tab Warming will watch the user's mouse cursor and start "painting" content inside a tab whenever the user hovers his mouse over one. Firefox will do this on the assumption the user wants to click and switch to view that tab and will want to keep a pre-rendered tab on hand if this occurs. "Those precious milliseconds are used to do the rendering and uploading, so that when the click event finally comes, the [tab] is ready and waiting for you," said Mike Conley, one of the Firefox engineers who worked on this feature.
Let's bloat the browser down EVEN MORE rather than making something efficient that people want to use...or cleaning up the UI to make it clean and not confusing.
Firesux still leads Chrone on trashiness.
A realize it is probably a different team but they could spend some time improving the Android version -- it is too damn slow. I really don't have a problem on Windows and if they're trying to eek out milliseconds in UI response there, maybe put the effort to shaving seconds off of the Android interface.
In other words waste memory, bandwidth and energy in a pissing contest that started with google compromising on security by disabling ocsp, and Mozilla already lost. Who is asking for this? No one, that's who! People want back their extension API!
... what could possibly go wrong?
Wow, an actual technical innovation not copied from Chrome (or was it)!
Maybe if Mozilla hadn't focused on SJW crap and copying Chrome they'd still matter.
I actually tried out Chrome for a bit after Mozilla pulled it's Mr. Robot stunt, but came back to Firefox after noticing how much better it performed than Chrome, which was somewhat surprising to me. I had assumed they were at performance parity. At this point, I think Mozilla has the top performing browser by metrics that tend to matter in real life. The one I notice the most is that Firefox's UI rarely stutters when loading a page, while Chrome hitches and hangs in short bursts, making things feel sluggish. I think that makes a huge difference in the perception of speed and performance.
Tabs switch almost instantly for me, and that's on a nine year old PC with a moderately slow internet connection. So while I'm glad Mozilla is looking at important things like performance (instead of yet another pointless UI revamp), it almost seems unnecessary at this point. Has anyone else noticed any sort of delay when switching tabs?
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
what could go wrong?
It is pitch dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Opera just cached the rendered version of all open tabs. This is part why it were the fastes browser of its time.
And they even cached the rendered version of pages in the history. A faster back button is not possible.
Hopefully they remove hotkey for tab switching since it would be slower.
Not just because of that other stuff: This trick means it does even more "behind my back" and becomes less and less trustable. If I can't see it I expect it to not keep on running the dancing rodents, but now it'll start to do just that if my mouse cursor just happens to be near. No thanks, mozilla. Why are you so hard up on taking control away from me?
Does it also detect when my fingers are hovering over the keyboard shortcuts ???
Mozilla needs to get the message, you are nothing without XUL, speed is nothing compared to having control over every aspect of my browser, I will continue to use Waterfox instead, and also recommend Pale Moon and Basilisk.
Firefox is just a tiny step behind Chrome now. It's come a long way. It still does need better syncing (extensions, syncing, etc), removing of clutter from the new tab page, and faster startup time. Actually using the browser it seems to be about as fast.
"...do the rendering and uploading..." -- Does he mean uploading of the user's information to the website, or does he mean automatic downloading of site elements if you so much as put your cursor near the tab? This sounds like not only a waste of bandwidth and resources, but a security and privacy problem as well. Imagine the fun a malicious actor could have with these features.
... how much TeraByte of RAM will I need, now?
CYA
bitcoin mining will warm up your tab before you type the url - brilliant!
My browser better not start uploading anything when I hover over a tab.
Maybe they should invest in a new PR person with those millions they have in cash. He doesn't even know the difference between an upload and a download.
And if I don't click on that tab I hovered over for a moment? My meager bandwidth is now wasted loading all the crap on the page I didn't want to see.
Sure, if you've got a high bandwidth connection and no cap, fine. But no love for those of us stuck with DSL or worse.
Save us from software that tries to be smart. Does no-one remember Clippy?
Just how many tabs are people keeping open at a time that this is considered a good feature? I mean, at home or at work, I only ever have maybe a half-dozen or so tabs open at once. Whereas an old roommate of mine used to have dozens of tabs open at the same time.
But I don't recall him ever complaining about clicking on a tab and it not rendering immediately. It was more of a "which tab was it again"? problem as he looked through the ones he had open.
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
I don't use the mouse to hop between tabs; I'm using ctrl-tab or ctrl-pageup/down. The keys I use depend on which keys my hands are closest to when I need to switch.
I -used- to use a mouse-right-click-mousewheel rocker gesture to hop between tabs but quantum killed that, and I haven't bothered to see if firegestures is a worthwhile replacement.
When my mouse hovers over a tab it's because it's traveling to click on something else. Will my performance be penalized for just moving my mouse around and not clicking tabs?
I want less predictive behavior not more Mozilla. Firefox doesn't need this anymore then I need a pizza guy to show up when he thinks I want a pizza. I don't want my cursor programmed into my browser tabs loading. This just sounds like trouble down the road. Another reason I do not use Firefox anymore, not that I wouldn't like a good reason to use it again. But this ain't it.
I wonder how this would work if I have a bunch of tabs open, go to the second tab, and begin mass closing them. Is it going ton consider the next one sliding down one I'm interested in and render it only to be immediately closed?
I know there are other ways of doing this, but I can't be the only person who does it.
Tor Browser is going to have to completely fork away from Firefox.
Worse than a theme consisting of googly eyes that follow your cursor all around.
For decades, browser scientists warned us this was coming. We had simple static pages, but no that wasn't enough for us. We needed dynamic content. We needed javascript.
Suddenly we had all this free computation. It was exhilirating. We could make hampsters dance and punch the monkey to win. But that computation had a cost. We kept burning more and more CPU cycles.
Browser scientists raised the alarm. All those cycles produced heat. At first our fans dissipated it, but they couldn't keep it. Eventually the heat crept into the rest of the system. They told us it would lead to tab warming. We just laughed and loaded more instagram kittens.
Who's laughing now? Our tabs are getting so hot they overflow into other programs. Their behavior is increasingly erratic and unpredictable. Now we have rogue sites mining cryptocurrency in them. Face it, our tabs are damaged beyond repair, unable to sustain simple online email anymore.
Like Icarus, we flew too close to the sun. We have no one to blame but ourselves.
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on lunch.
How about an option for disabling tabs?
Mozilla Tests Firefox 'Tab Warming'
And it's probably a feature affecting the entire browser, so now I have to worry about Global Tab Warming ... (sigh).
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Excellent! We can now have warmed-up switching between tabs that we can no longer apply secure analysis to cuz they broke, and apparently have no interest in fixing, the TLS api:
Web extensions: SSL (TLS) status API request
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1322748
maybe in another 6 months we can see warming up tabs change colors?
I just clicked some tabs. They switch instantaneously - firefox 57. I have never seen tab-switching as a problem.
Of course, I use ublock to keep ads out, and I rarely have more than 7-15 tabs. And I have little patience for slow sites - I don't visit them. My experience is that there is nothing new to render when clicking a tab - it is the same static image as the last time that tab was open. Click the tab, and it is there before I let go of the mouse button.
What are people doing in order to need 'tab warming'? Having a TV show going in another tab - and surfing around waiting for commercials to clear?
Does this mean whenever I start moving the mouse around Firefox is going to madly start running a bunch of javascript, spinning my CPU up to full?
Ye gods. Delay in switching to a new tab is not an issue.
I use <Ctrl>+<TAB> to switch tabs like a normal person, you insensitive clods!
Google Earth runs in Chrome but not in Firefox 57. What replacement for Google Earth do you recommend?
Friends don't let friends use Chrome.
Uploading custom emoji to Discordapp.com works in Chrome and in Chromium but not in Firefox 57, where clicking the upload button has no effect. It's even worse in Firefox ESR 52 on Debian 9 "Stretch", with many actions lagging and pegging one core of a Core 2 Duo CPU for one or more seconds, sometimes blanking the whole page for a second. Discord staff has a habit of closing issue reports in Firefox to the effect "Works for me in Chrome. Could you try it in Chrome?" Would you recommend stopping using Discord over this incompatibility? If so, then to what text and voice chat platform with built-in support for retrieval and search of older messages and attachments do you recommend that a community using Discord migrate? (IRC lacks voice chat, retrieval and search of older messages, and attachments.)
Or get back to actually doing your job?
What did you mean by this? A break room computer at work is not the only environment that restricts installation of native applications. Another is a computer at a public library. A third is a computer using an uncommon architecture for which the application's publisher has not compiled the native application, such as GNU/Linux on ARM instead of x86-64. From Google Earth on a Pi? - Raspberry Pi Forums:
God Bless Mozilla. I am on 57.0.4 and it is so fast I think it is actually boring. No tearing or slowdowns, unlike chrome.
Switched to Chrome after Mozilla abused their power to push the Mr Robot adware to their users.
Mozilla has been purged from my systems. Screw them.
I wonder if people at Mozilla realized that this approach will cause an increase in CPU usage triggered by mouse cursor movement, and this will ultimately result in an increase of world power consumption.
No new feature matters until I can have a plain, old AD FREE blank tab back.
One plus has been hacked. This is bait.
https://news.slashdot.org/stor...
Who the hell uses a shitty website for multi-user chat/video?
Use a real solution, where you can have your own server, see the code, even deploy configuration presets if in a company... and video chat with 150 people (!!) ... *encrypted*... no problem.
you cannot install chrome on a raspberry pi
You are technically correct in that Google Chrome is not available for Raspberry Pi. Instead, one would access Google Earth using Chromium, which is the same thing as Google Chrome except without components under a proprietary software license.
What problems have you had getting Chromium to run on your Raspberry Pi?
this guy spent his whole life preparing to code "tab warming"? our fucking species is doomed because of fuckwits like this.
All the fancy smart new websites use mouse hover for everything. Every time you move your mouse, things pop up and down, move around, come into existence, fry eggs, pour milk, and do all sorts of unpredictable and unintuitive things that make the browser stop while it process 180 mouse hover events with 2-second timers. So, naturally, Mozilla wants to jump on this bandwagon and make things even worse. As usual.
I am already sick and tired of all the dynamic bullshit that happens on the page. You can't find a place to let your mouse just quietly hover so you can read the content. I can't tell you the number of times where I got so frustrated in trying to fight the pop-ups, hover-shading, fly-out ads, auto-playing-and-scrolling-video-players, etc. that I just closed the browser window before even reading a complete sentence.
And, you want to ad more annoying bullshit, built directly into the browser? Why? Just so that I don't have to click on a tab in order to see the content?
There used to be a discipline called "user experience" in tech. When did all those folks get fired? Was it when you geniuses decided to fire all the testers?
Yes, Zuckerberg, you are right. Young people without experience are just so much smarter than old people (Poe's law disclaimer: the previous statement was meant to be taken sarcastically).
Stop futzing around with less than necessary trivia. Keep IT SIMPLE Stupids, and keep it efficient.
Efficient also means cpu memory footprint, and computer cycles.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
I like Tree Style Tab. Solves all your problems. There are a few other vertical-tab extensions, try them all. I don't see how people can live with 30 tabs across the top :-(
Guess I'll move to Vivaldi, the only modern browser that shows tabs on the side (hopefully in an awesome tree) that old XUL Firefox extensions used to allow.
For many versions, Chrome even had a built-in tabs-on-side feature, but they removed it ages ago.
The only sensible way to manage many tabs is on the side! Or multiple rows on top/bottom if you are in portrait mode!
Sad that WebExtensions can no longer modify the user interface.
R.I.P. power-browsing the web.