
The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs - robin_reala
https://metafluff.com/2017/07/21/i-am-a-tab-hoarder/
======
huntie
I'm really glad that people at Mozilla use ridiculous numbers of tabs too.
Lazy-loading of tabs is the reason I switched to firefox. I'm not sure if it's
still this way, but Chrome used to load every tab on startup. So even if you
only had 100 tabs, you were looking at 5+ minute startup time. God-forbid that
any of them were Youtube, or you'd have to go through and pause them all.

I've just updated to Firefox 55 to test this, and the improvement is
ridiculous. I hope that Firefox focuses more on power users in the future.

I'm curious what the author uses to manage all of these tabs. I use Tab
Groups, but I think they won't work in a few Firefox versions so I'm looking
for alternatives.

~~~
elorant
_So even if you only had 100 tabs_

This is fucking surreal. Why on Earth would anyone want 100 open tabs, besides
testing? What's the real life scenario we're looking at here?

~~~
atombender
I wish tabs/windows worked more like persistent "workspaces".

For example, say I'm booking a trip. I always open a bunch of sites (Kayak,
Booking.com, lots of hotels, Google Maps, places to visit, etc.) in a single
window. In pre-computer times it would be like covering a desk with a ton of
papers, books and notes. Gradually I will figure out stuff, book the trip,
etc. but the tabs can stay for quite a while.

I feel like many "dozens of tabs" windows are little projects like this. For
example, doing development I typically have a bunch of documentation tabs
open. We keep these windows open because there's no way to stash them into a
drawer while they're not actively being worked on.

What browsers lack is a good way to treat these tabs as "persistent
workspaces". I'd like to be able to close a window and be able to return to it
later. Rather like an IDE which remembers your open files. So I wish I could
"save" a window (as a "workspace") under a name, after which every action
would automatically update the saved workspace. Close the window, workspace
stays saved. Open the workspace, everything is restored.

There are some browser extensions that allow saving groups of tabs, but there
aren't any that behave like I described above.

~~~
joonoro
Firefox used to have this feature, but it was removed. You need to install
this extension now: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-
groups-pa...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-groups-
panorama/)

~~~
kenrick95
Unfortunately, this extension, too will soon die when Firefox no longer
supports legacy addons.

I think there is a new Firefox experiment that behaves somewhat like this:
[https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/containers](https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/containers)

~~~
Manishearth
IIRC [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-
groups/?s...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-
groups/?src=ss) is a replacement

Container tabs is totally different, that's about basically having multiple
profiles in one window. E.g you can have the work container logged into your
work email and work stuff, and your personal container logged in to your
personal email and personal stuff, and they don't know about each other. Like
incognito, but persistent and within the same window.

~~~
bigbugbag
I didn't know of this one, is its tab management any good ? As in how do you
move tabs around groups, open/duplicat/close tabs and groups ?

The 'simplified' in its name makes me doubtful it has any of the advanced
features I need.

~~~
Manishearth
No idea, I haven't used tab groups in a year, so I've never tried the new
version.

These "redone" addons that work post 57 start out pretty bare-minimum but they
rapidly gain features.

------
ilaksh
There are a lot of people who use tabs as bookmarks. Seems like a good way to
keep the RAM industry going strong. Someone once told me (seriously) "I need
at least 128 GB of RAM otherwise I can't keep my tabs open." But does
everything you were interested in over the last X weeks or months really need
to be loaded up? No, and if you use it like that then it can't preload stuff.

I think the main lesson is that bookmarks don't work too well or people just
don't use them. If nothing else, make the bookmark display show newer
bookmarks rather than the same old ones from four years ago. And maybe start
preloading if they are opened regularly. Merge two features together, maybe
add optional other organizational features for example similar to new tab
screen.

The tricky thing is that there are a lot of things that are potentially
supposed to happen while a tab is open. The browser is now it's own OS, and it
may be very difficult for developers to use important features if tabs
(processes) only _look_ like they are running.

~~~
vit05
That's because the bookmarkers sucks. They do not adapt to what you are doing,
you need to do a lot of setup and organize a lot to be able to use it well. It
should be more organic, grow with the use you make. I still believe that
anyone who makes a better bookmark will dominate more than just the browser
war.

~~~
_wmd
Bookmarking always struck me as a 90s solution to just having fulltext search
and analytics over your browser history, there have been a few attempts at
browsers that addressed this head-on, but they've all died off over time

IMO just one good new tab UI over a user's history/local cache could make a
sizeable dent in Google's ad revenue

~~~
bigbugbag
Opera with its unique cache offered the option to have full text search in
history and it was great. Then quarterly profit became a priority for the
board and they dropped their browser to become a google chrome advanced skin.

------
elfchief
Wow. I've been getting more and more frustrated with how poorly Chrome handles
even a moderately large number of tabs (~150), and it sounds like my savior is
going to be ... Firefox. Huh.

Wouldn't have guessed it, but I'll totally take it.

I have a nice extension for Chrome called Quick Tabs that gives me a
searchable list of my open tabs and makes it easy to find things I have
open... anyone know which of the several things that seem to do that with
Firefox would be the best to use?

~~~
sillysaurus3
It's unfortunate because back in ~2010 I used to open over 1,000 tabs in
Chrome at a time. It's very useful when doing research: each window represents
a topic, and each topic can spawn 30+ tabs.

Nowadays Chrome keels over at around 150, like you say. It also leaks memory
like a sieve, so if your hard drive is anywhere close to full you'll end up
with a lovely OS X popup saying all your running programs have been frozen and
that your system is out of memory (since it can't page to disk because it's
full).

~~~
fletchowns
There has got to be a better solution to this problem than having 1,000 tabs
open in a web browser. That sounds like an absolute nightmare.

~~~
awalton
I don't understand this perspective. It's similar to saying "Surely there's a
better solution than having 1000 files on your file system. That sounds like a
nightmare."

It's not like you're actively monitoring every tab at once, you just have the
knowledge ready to go and at a finger's whim. You use extensions like Tab
Hunter to jump directly to the tab you care about.

Yeah, you could do the same with using a bunch of profiles and bookmarks...
but then you need to copy your login cookies and such and it just becomes a
mess. I've tried many, many other solutions over the years and simply having a
huge number of tabs is the one that continues to Just Work.

~~~
zdkl
> It's similar to saying "Surely there's a better solution than having 1000
> files on your file system. That sounds like a nightmare."

No, it's similar to saying "Surely there's a better solution than having 1000
radio/tv channels tuned on at once, waiting for you to decide which one is
relevant"

Like why not open what you need when you need it rather than squirreling all
those "maybes"?

~~~
sillysaurus3
Different people are different. When researching a question without a direct
answer, it's more effective for me to open up tabs as I read a page and then
search the most likely candidate. Whenever I reach a dead-end I can just
switch tabs as opposed to pressing the back button N times. zzalpha's comment
sums it up nicely:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14824086](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14824086)

I know I'm a power user, but I miss how effective old Chrome was at this.

~~~
meowface
I'm a chronic tab abuser as well, often with over 100 tabs at once. 1000 tabs
still sounds insane to me.

~~~
TheGrassyKnoll
Well, I'm running 600+ in Firefox for no particular reason. I guess that makes
me only 60% insane.

------
lobster_johnson
I've been considering switching to Firefox due to these performance
improvements, but the one feature that's always missing is for the location
bar to autocomplete terms from other sources such as Wikipedia. Is there some
add-on I can install that can fix this?

Safari is brilliant here. If you enter something in Safari's location bar, it
will suggest Wikipedia and other search suggestions right away [1]. I use this
feature all the time. But FF, out of the box, will only show suggestions from
_one_ source. Here [2] is what FF suggests; all the hits are from Google, and
it doesn't try to be clever about showing what I might mean to search for.
Notice how it offers to _search_ Wikipedia, with this tiny, obscure icon at
the bottom of the suggestions, which I find to be a completely useless feature
(I have keywords for that). The top hit tends to be what Google puts in a
special box in its search results.

Here is another nice thing Safari does [3] which I make use of all the time.
I've not visited walmart.com, so that "Top Hit" is just because it's a popular
site. I can't make FF do anything like that.

[1] [http://i.imgur.com/83FfnPn.png](http://i.imgur.com/83FfnPn.png)

[2] [http://i.imgur.com/T4p1NZv.png](http://i.imgur.com/T4p1NZv.png)

[3] [http://i.imgur.com/MkRP2Le.png](http://i.imgur.com/MkRP2Le.png)

~~~
JulienSchmidt
Go to Preferences > Search and set keywords for each search engine.

E.g. I use "g" for Google and "w" for Wikipedia. "g hacker news" in the
AwesomeBar would then search for "hacker news" on Google and "w hacker news"
likewise on Wikipedia.

~~~
Antrikshy
That requires typing the full name of the thing.

------
rc_kas
I <3 you Firefox. I'm so sad that nobody uses you.

~~~
kevin_thibedeau
Hard to love when the broken extension ecosystem prevents the use of vertical
tabs for these scenarios.

~~~
intherdfield
> Hard to love when the broken extension ecosystem prevents the use of
> vertical tabs for these scenarios.

Here's an in-development vertical tabs extension using their new extensions
API.

    
    
      https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-center-redux/
    

Apparently the tabs still show up at the top because the API to disable that
isn't available yet. But you get vertical tabs and it should get better over
time. I've been using this and it isn't 100% perfect, but getting better and
better.

~~~
idlewan
I've started making another one that try to respect the system's theme:
[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vertigo-
tabs/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vertigo-tabs/)

------
randomString1
I find way more productive to use bookmarks

\- Archive folder: bookmark dump to keep the links just in case I ever need it
again (so they pop on the search bar even after I clean my history, you can
also add keywords manually if you want)

\- Buffer folder: to-dos, reminders and things I <need> to read soon™. I keep
it at a maximum of 10 items at all times

\- Follow up folders (plural): pages I want to check ocasionally for updates.
Often used for pages without RSS. I don't like to use extensions to check for
page modification because I want to do it on my own pace. This helps reducing
my mental load because I know it's there if I ever need it. I often delete the
entire folder if I don't feel it's useful anymore.

\- The rest are folders divided by a main folder and subject. This way I can
easily delete them after I'm done with that task (after a minute or after a
year). Example: Programming > Project X, Programming > CSS fix for that thing.

Middle click on the folder to open everything at once. Done.

The position of the folders are crucial and also helps with muscle memory. I
keep it like this: the more to the right (of the browser), the more disposable
they are.

------
iamleppert
Firefox is a case study in how performance really does matter. A lot.

It used to be the best browser, and then something happened and it gradually
became slow, really slow, while Chrome became fast. Who was in charge over at
Mozilla during all this?

Any engineering director worth their salt would have noticed what was
happening and installed metrics that didn't let engineers commit code that
caused performance regressions and given an engineer (or multiple engineers)
who loves optimizing things carte blanche.

Really, I want to know what happened over there. Does anyone know?

~~~
acdha
> It used to be the best browser, and then something happened and it gradually
> became slow, really slow

In many cases, it wasn't that Firefox became slow but that people installed
extensions which made it slow. For years, you could solve 90% of those
complaints by uninstalling AdBlock Plus.

~~~
twobyfour
Except that Adblock Plus wasn't the problem when Firefox was slow with web
apps or sites that used JavaScript to load content. Firefox's JavaScript
engine lagged significantly behind Chrome (and Safari) for a few years. It
still does in a few areas.

~~~
acdha
That's partially true but remember that you're generalizing from micro-
benchmarks – which did not universally tilt Chrome – to the complex behavior
of real sites, where networking, memory usage, and general de-optimization
tended to cancel out many of those small wins.

That's not saying that the browser teams haven't made big strides, only that
it's not such a simple story. Chrome running a certain JavaScript function 15%
faster isn't a game changer if a side is limited by layout or poorly
structured DOM interactions.

~~~
twobyfour
Aren't micro-benchmarks kind of pointless if they don't reflect real-world
behavior?

The fact is that javascript execution (not networking behavior but javascript
performance) on many web apps differs by orders of magnitude between Firefox
and Chrome. There are a handful of sites that I find literally unusable in
Firefox on a new Macbook Pro because even after loading, sitting in the
background doing nothing, they make the entire computer unresponsive due to
high CPU usage. These same sites work just fine in Chrome and Safari.

------
adrianmonk
A quick tangent to plug my method for paring down open tabs when it gets out
of control: I create a document!

Personally I use Google Docs, but you could use a wiki or MS Word or many
other things. The point isn't the technology, it's that when you have a whole
slew of tabs open, and you feel the urge to keep them open, it's a strong sign
that your mind is trying to gather info about a topic.

Putting it into a document often feels great. It gives you an opportunity to
type out a few quick notes on the topic (like what you thought was significant
about various links) or other thoughts you had. And you might find you want to
share the document with people you're working with. And I find I feel more
organized, not just because I cleaned up something messy but because I took a
moment to focus my energies on something my mind was begging me to pay
attention to. Sometimes you even realize you need two different documents on
different subjects, and it's a little enlightening to realize the two separate
themes.

~~~
Manishearth
I once wrote AnnoTabe
([https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/annotabe/fdhebnled...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/annotabe/fdhebnledngmjdkhgamneiapbmjeigee?hl=en))
for this in Chrome. Bare minimum extension that lets you annotate tabs, and
find them again after closing them.

Pocket is good for this too.

------
chippy
I'm also very impressed with FF's performance on Linux in recent versions. I
bumped up the RAM allocated for multiprocess but I never really have more than
20 tabs open. Startup and rendering seems much quicker, and the add-ons seem
more open.

~~~
ac29
I'm curious, if you go to about:support are HW_COMPOSITING and
OPENGL_COMPOSITING enabled?

Someone (likely here) mentioned that setting layers.acceleration.force-enabled
to true in about:config makes a dramatic difference in performance, and based
on my limited experience, it does. So much so, that I'm thinking about
switching to Firefox after many years of only using it sparingly due to lousy
performance on Linux compared to Chrome (e10s has helped too).

edit: I should note that HW_COMPOSITING and OPENGL_COMPOSITING are not enabled
by default on the 2 Arch Linux systems I have (Ivy Bridge and Haswell iGPUs,
up to date Firefox, Mesa and Kernel). Not sure if there is a white/blacklist,
or if its just always disabled in Linux.

~~~
suby
Is there a particular reason that layers.acceleration.force-enabled is off by
default?

~~~
johnp_
Linux users have a lower priority and there are some hard to debug issues with
graphics drivers and sometimes it causes horrible performance and freezes.

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=ogl-linux-
beta](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=ogl-linux-beta)

------
aboodman
Why do you have a profile w/ 1600 tabs in it. If whatever it is is so
important, aren't you afraid to lose it? I'd be terrified that one time
Firefox just wouldn't shut down clean.

~~~
bzbarsky
> I'd be terrified that one time Firefox just wouldn't shut down clean.

This is why Firefox stores a sessionstore file. _And_ a backup of that
sessionstore file. And a previous version of that sessionstore file. And a
backup of the file as of the last several times you did a browser update.

The idea is to never lose the session in an irrecoverable way.

~~~
toast0
From my experience (max tab count of maybe 30, usual close to 4 or 5), when I
tried to restore, I would always get the 'we tried hard, but couldn't do it'
type of message, so I don't even bother trying anymore. My guess is that all
the people relying on session storage are losing a bunch of data, but they
just don't know it because how do you know when you lost one of 1000 tabs.

At one of my jobs, they instituted weekly scheduled reboots of desktops; after
several times of getting my sessions killed by that, I started making an
effort to close everything at the end of the day; I don't always close all my
tabs, but often, and I never leave more than two or three. Whatever was
interesting, but I couldn't read, I don't worry about -- if it's important,
it'll probably come up again; I just leave a couple things open if there's
work I need to do on them when I get back.

------
forevercrashing
Surprised to see no mention of Tab Center
([https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/tab-
center](https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/tab-center)) in the
comments. I've gotten so used to it that now I find it hard to use a browser
with tabs on top. Being able to see more of the page title when tabs are
displayed horizontally is extremely useful. There's a search field too. This
combined with the "browser.ctrlTab.previews" set to true in about:config
(enables MRU tab switching with ctrl-tab) makes managing tabs awesome for me.

~~~
Manishearth
Note that Tab Center will stop working by the end of this year, but I have
found [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-center-
re...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-center-redux/) to be
an adequate replacement!

~~~
6ak74rfy
How is this different from Tree Tabs?

~~~
Manishearth
There's no tree, it's flat. I find it works better than Tree Tabs at the
moment unless you need the tree.

~~~
idlewan
Shameless plug: the current lack of a WebExtension for vertical tabs bothered
me, so I wrote one: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vertigo-
tabs/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vertigo-tabs/)

------
Koshkin
Can anyone offer an explanation of why should not tabs be managed by the
window manager? (My understanding is that this question is independent from
how the particular application would choose to control the _contents_ of a tab
- whether directly, or through a separate thread, or by spawning a child
process.)

~~~
frik
We had that already. Opera was the first browser with tabs, it had MDI support
and tabs. MDI stands for Multiple Document Interface, and was common with Win
3x and Win9x (WinAPI) applications:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_document_interface](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_document_interface)
.

Macromedia Dreamweaver had tabs even before Opera browser, as well as
Frontpage. Word, Excel and PowerPoint used to be MDI applications up to Office
2010 (up to 2003 with a good UI, kind of hidden but still that way until
2010). Photoshop on Win, older Acrobat, mIRC, etc use MDI and have tabs as
well. Win3x had all the auto arrange and different MDI modes, Win95
unfortunately broke the "icon" MDI mode, though the mode still exists but
doesn't work in Win95 or later.

So it would be great if Chrome and other browsers would support MDI with tabs
like the old Opera 4-6. Use could auto-arrange two tab-windows within the
browser main window side by side or arrange them in any way you wanted by
hand. Very unfortunately Microsoft lost all their proper devs from last
century and with it all the previous inbuilt WinAPI knowledge - otherwise Win8
and Win10 trainwrecks would never have happened.

~~~
jwilk
Non-mobile link:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_document_interface](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_document_interface)

------
eyeball
The OneTab extension has been really good for helping me handle my tab
hoarding tendency.

[https://www.one-tab.com/](https://www.one-tab.com/)

It lets you hit a button and send all open tabs to a single page that persists
between browser sessions. You can remove a link by opening up that list and
clicking on it.

Has a bunch of other handy features too ... like publishing the list of links
to a share-able URL.

~~~
pacomerh
I'm pretty happy with this extension too. The other one I use is 'The Great
Suspender' which basically suspends unused tabs to free up resources.

------
ledgerdev
I would love get rid of chrome and to switch back to firefox as my everyday
browser, but simply can't get over how messy/ugly the tabs(even in compact
theme) and window title look compared to what chrome does with tabs and title
bar, and lack of window title bar.

~~~
mconley
If you enter customize mode, you can:

1) Choose one of the compact themes, which have square tabs instead of curved

and

2) Re-enable the title bar

------
overcast
I was already using 55.x Beta. My BIGGEST issue, is that EVERY browser seems
to chew up memory over time, just by leaving it open with tabs going. Firefox,
Chrome, Safari. All do the same thing. Alleviated by using the Great Suspender
in Chrome, but why can't they all have this just built in? Startup/speed, and
initially memory use really haven't been that big of an issue. It's the
memory, and finally grinding to a halt that is the BIGGEST issue for me. I
can't escape it.

Happens on MacOS, and Windows for me.

~~~
gamekathu
I just downloaded 55.x beta to see whats such hype about, but opening more
tabs are still chewing memory on Mac. maybe it is not mac optimized yet?

~~~
overcast
Yeh I've gone from 500MB to 1.06GB in the time since I wrote the last post, an
hour? Forty tabs total.

------
userbinator
"Ridiculous" is right, especially from a UI perspective --- it still puzzles
me why they would design it so that by default all the tabs are crammed into
the place which used to be the titlebar, making it difficult to both read the
title and find the tab you're looking for.

I've seen others start opening multiple windows when the tabs get too small. I
usually do that to keep tabs grouped into "pages I am unlikely to view
simultaneously".

~~~
Manishearth
Chrome's UI is worse. Firefox shrinks tabs until they're maybe 10 characters
in width, and then lets you scroll through them. Chrome just shrinks forever.

I've found that a vertical tabs addon (Tree Tabs, Tab Center Redux) is great
for fixing this problem, since vertical tabs never get squeezed.

------
fiatjaf
I have 2 tabs open right now. If the number of open tabs gets over 10 I start
to actively look for tabs to close.

~~~
renolc
I'm the same way. I use bookmarks for places I regularly visit that I will
want to have ready access to (things like work related services and what have
you).

For just articles or something I'll want to read later, I've started using the
Google Inbox extension to save the link as a reminder. From there I can snooze
it until I have the time or motivation to actually read it.

------
outworlder
I use Firefox as much as I can, for many reasons. Two things keep me from
using it all the time:

– Yubikey – My Chromebook (I would use and equivalent FirefoxOS if given the
choice)

There are performance issues in some cases but nothing major. It is still
somewhat slow compared to Chrome, even though this may be due to optimizations
done specifically for Chrome.

~~~
raindev
There's a plugin for U2F support[1]. I use a Yubikey at work daily without
issues.

1\. [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/u2f-support-a...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/u2f-support-add-on/)

~~~
kuschku
Many sites, including Google, specifically check the UA instead of checking
for U2F support, so won’t work with this.

------
ernsheong
(shameless plug) For those of you keeping many many tabs open because you
worry you might forget it again, or working on related topics, I am building
[https://www.pagedash.com](https://www.pagedash.com) to save your page exactly
as you saw it, and everything from the original page (HTML and assets) are
saved to PageDash so that you can load it again without worrying that the
original page went bonkers/down.

v1 will be quite basic, just a list of saved pages. Expect more organization
tools (folders, tags, etc.) in the further releases.

Please do sign up to be informed of impending release! :) (estimated end
August)

Also, do leave a reply if you are keen on using ML (link classification) to
help organize your pages for you. Unfortunately, because computers can't read
our minds, this can't be perfect so folders are probably still relevant for
your mini-projects.

------
septentrional
Sorry if this is somewhat off-topic but how do you make Firefox' tab bar look
like the one in the article (i.e. no rounded edges for the tabs) on MacOS?

~~~
asadotzler
Firefox has two alternative built-in themes, compact light and compact dark.

~~~
septentrional
I've never noticed this, thank you!

------
mannigfaltig
Whenever people ask me about the excessive number tabs in my browser, I simply
show them Einstein's desk:
[http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-eyOIn_EOW2Q/Vmcl6O-55OI/AAAAAAAADs...](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-eyOIn_EOW2Q/Vmcl6O-55OI/AAAAAAAADsc/9LxoHK4jV00/s1600/La%2Boficina%2Bde%2BEinstein.jpg)

I am not Einstein but it is probably not a bad idea to have a whole lot of
interesting things around you all the time. Sort of like a cache or the way
proteins are synthesized, like swimming in a nutritious soup. "Oh, look here
is a piece that fits!".

One basically decreases the chance of forgetting interesting and useful
information. "Out of sight, out of mind."

------
giancarlostoro
I love Firefox and never had issues, except at work. For some odd reason it
will break, all tabs will look white and all I see is a loading icon on the
middle no matter what tab I click on ruining my workflow. No idea what that's
about since at home Firefox works fine, Chrome seems to work fine at work on
the other hand. I guess I'll be using Chrome at work and Firefox at home till
I figure out how whats causing the Firefox issue. I only usually have no more
than 20 tabs open at any given time. Very unusual for me to keep 10 tabs open
really.

~~~
scott_karana
I had a very similar issue (running e18s) with uBlock Origin after restoring
my computer from backups.

I narrowed down the problem to that add on by selectively disabling them.

Uninstalling and reinstalling uBlock fixed it.

YMMV, but figured I ought to speak up :)

------
PhasmaFelis
I'm torn between thinking it's time to switch back to Firefox, and thinking I
need to avoid Firefox at all costs, because the slowdown when Chrome gets over
100+ tabs is the only thing keeping my browser windows remotely navigable.

You know what I really want? A way to attach _titles_ to browser windows. This
window is "Games", this one is for "Books", this one is for my current "Work"
task, this one is "Research" on the new doohickey I'm thinking of buying...

~~~
cpeterso
Check out the Firefox extension "Simplified Tab Groups" to create named groups
of tabs:

[1] [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-
groups/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-groups/)

~~~
PhasmaFelis
Holy shit. Don't have time to try it right now, but if it does what I want I
probably will go back to Firefox. Thanks!

~~~
hvis
It was a built-in feature for manu Firefox releases (called Panorama), but
then it was removed, and ended up in extensions.

------
problems
I've been running a ~7 year old laptop for occasional browsing. Chrome is
unable to seek properly in video playback (gives page unresponsive after a
while) and lags randomly when loading large pages, I suspect due to RAM
allocations.

Old Firefox played videos fine, but lagged on many page loads. I was about to
conclude it was just too old to browse the web decently, but this... this
seems incredibly usable.

Thanks Mozila, I'm definitely installing this thing on my main, much more
modern machine tomorrow.

------
ChoGGi

      I measured by eyeball, using "time cat" on the command line. This might seem weird, but c'mon - I'm measuring minutes. Microsecond precision is not required.
    

For anyone else doing this sort of testing; there is an extension to monitor
startup speed called about:startup

[https://addons.mozilla.org/addon/about-
startup/](https://addons.mozilla.org/addon/about-startup/)

------
softinio
I use chrome with the extension The Great suspender and that works well for
me:

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-
suspende...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-
suspender/klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg?hl=en)

Would love to switch to Firefox, but I still find Chrome faster to use. Anyone
tried vivaldi?

------
rndmize
This is nice to hear. I use Firefox as my default browser with the tree-style
tabs add-on, and just yesterday I replaced ABP with uBlock and Ghostery with
Disconnect out of frustration with how slow things were going (~30-50 tabs
open). The slow startup time hasn't been helping (come on, its not even
loading the tabs until I click them, what's taking so long?)

~~~
technojunkie
Hint: uBlock Origin already includes filters for Disconnect if you go to the
settings

------
evolve2k
My biggest frustration with Firefox is that you can't 'Tab to Search' as you
can in chrome. Every time I attempt to switch to FF the lack of this feature
just kills my productivity and I end up switching back.

So wish this was possible.

Ref: [https://www.chromium.org/tab-to-search](https://www.chromium.org/tab-to-
search)

~~~
Osmose
A similar (but not as magical) feature in Firefox is Smart keywords:
[https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-search-from-
address...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-search-from-address-bar)

There's a bug on file to consider adding this, but it has no momentum behind
it right now since it's a bit niche:
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1373740](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1373740)

~~~
cpeterso
I used to have dozens of Firefox Smart Keywords (for Wikipedia, Amazon, etc),
but now I just use DuckDuckGo's !bang searches in my address bar:

[https://duckduckgo.com/bang](https://duckduckgo.com/bang)

------
versteegen
I currently have over 1380 tabs open in firefox 52 ESR (over 4 windows). Oh
god, it's terrible. Very slow and unresponsive, CPU usage is typically 60+%
when idle. I restart firefox every couple days (which takes many minutes) to
keep CPU and memory usage down, by causing all tabs to be unloaded. (As an
example, right now at 5.2GB resident, with only a small percentage of tabs
loaded). I've been trying to kick the habit. I also have several other
profiles and other computers. Probably adds to 5000 tabs all in all.

I use All Tabs Helper to help jump between tabs. Finding tabs is hopeless
without it. ATH also has features like mass closing tabs or unloading them. I
wish it had a way to bookmark tabs, which I would use to close most of my
tabs.

So, I'm very glad to hear this. Time to switch off ESR.

------
libeclipse
Is there anything similar for chrome/chromium? Would be interesting to compare
them.

------
reiichiroh
With Chrome, I use "The Great Suspender" extension.

~~~
alexpw
This. Changed the way I use a browser. New window per topic. Only stop making
tabs when the titles/icons can't be seen any more...

~~~
bzbarsky
In Firefox, the "titles/icons can't be seen any more" state is never reached,
because Firefox enforces a minimum width on tabs so that information is always
visible. Combined with searching tab titles via "% stuff" in the URL bar, it's
a much nicer experience than Chrome, imo. [Disclosure: I'm biased, obviously,
since I'm using Firefox and hence more used to it.]

------
znpy
I am happy to hear this because I stopped using firefox and migrated to google
chrome around firefox 51, and boy it was SLOW.

Now it might be worth it to give it another try.

In the meantime, I am seriously concerned about Thunderbird. Thunderbird is my
MUA of choice and quite frankly, there are very few options to replace it, and
none of them seems 100% okay (except, maybe, Evolution). Clawsmail is okay-
ish, but so ugly to see and feature-poor.

------
bigbugbag
How does this translate to real use, as in actually loading the pages and
having a couple dozens extensions ?

The ability to open 5-10 times more tabs than I use is quite and edge case
that mozilla usually doesn't care about, but the real question is what is the
point of this when it comes with making firefox totally useless for said use
case by dropping support for extension that make it practical or useful.

------
kowdermeister
I follow the zero inbox mindset with tabs and try to reduce them to a few ever
running apps like Gmail and Mixcloud. The rest is just noise and mental load
that I can get rid of.

I put articles to Pocket if I don't read them for a week or so. I'll probably
read them on a vacation, but I don't need a constant reminder how poor my time
limits are.

------
fouc
Note for the blog author:

"It's interesting that Firefox startup time got consistently worse over time
until Firefox 51."

I believe you meant to write "until Firefox 52." I think the usage of "until"
would typically point out the exception to the rule, in this case Firefox 52
is the first version that is no longer slower than the previous.

------
cf
So one challenge I face is that many of my tabs are for web content that isn't
always there. Do any of these extensions like Great Suspender, Session Buddy,
etc actually let me save the webpage as it is and then let me choose to
refetch it as necessary?

~~~
akaralar
not exactly what you're looking for but pinboard.in archival account does
this: [https://pinboard.in/upgrade/](https://pinboard.in/upgrade/)

------
manuelmagic
I have the bad habit to open many tabs on my old MacBook (mid 2010). Boot
time, together with CPU usage, is one of the main reasons I had to use Opera
as my primary browser. I'm really happy to see this might change in the near
future.

------
austinjp
And then there's Firefox Focus which has no tabs and no other new instance
capability. One single window. "Focus" indeed. It still makes me twitchy, but
is so far completely usable.

Could do with a "fetch as desktop" mode, though.

~~~
ajmurmann
How does this work in practice. I frequently have workflows where for example
I have the AWS or GCloud console open and in parallel some kind of tutorial,
documentation or help page I'm looking at. Would you go back and forth?

~~~
austinjp
Yeah the one major issue is comparison shopping: you can't open multiple
tabs/windows and flick between them.

Then again, "focus" might mean reading one review at a time. Or instead
waiting until you're at a desktop and remembering to do it. If you forget, are
you worse off or better off?

It's just a different situation. Depends on your criteria. Certainly, I've not
missed it on my mobile.

------
kronos29296
If such numbers happen in android also you sir just have another firefox fan.
I want to know right now. (Chrome sucks at this on all devices now.) The only
reason I am using it is that it is better than firefox for accessing google.

------
muppetman
This would have been useful 4 years ago before we all gave up on Firefox.

------
caio1982
This is the first time in a decade that something (the article) convinced me
to try Firefox as a possible day-to-day browser once again.

------
TekMol
Great that you can open over a thousand tabs now. Next blog post will be when
it's over a million I guess?

Personally, I usually have something like 3 or 4 tabs open. But what I would
really need is this:

[https://xkcd.com/619/](https://xkcd.com/619/)

Yup, hardware accelerated video on Linux. Chromium has it. Firefox doesn't.

It's 2017 and for me Firefox is still missing the basic feature of seeing
smooth Youtube videos.

Anybody working on that? Can't you just take it from Chromium? I mean it's
open source, isn't it?

------
CurtMonash
I use ridiculous numbers of tabs, and Firefox has been less stable for me the
past months than ever before.

------
wnevets
What made it so much worse over time?

~~~
the8472
Things that need to be initialized per tab. Lazy-loaded tabs were till backed
by about:blank content window which get replaced with the actual content once
you open the tab. And with that about:blank comes overhead, which is fairly
small for a single tab but it adds up in large numbers.

The change is that now the tab item does not have an associated content window
at all until you visit it.

------
codychan
Impressive, now I'm looking forward to the official stable version of 55

------
minusSeven
I wonder what these numbers would be compared to chrome.

------
crorella
I tested with 1690 tabs and got similar results :D

------
digitalzombie
lol this is why I love firefox. I hoard tabs. But not as excessively as OP
though... 1000+ is crazy.

------
snorrah
John Siracusa would be proud :)

------
daef
My usual day looks something like this:

open FF (it it's not already running) and wait for a hand full app-tabs to
load:

    
    
      * slack (there's no dark theme in the native app)
      * skype (there's no dark theme in the native app)
      * toggl (timetracking)
      * email (office365, I stopped worrying about outlook/thunderbird)
      * jira (gotta know what to work on next)
      * social (fb&twitter - could probably also do w/o - I rarely open those)
    

since they exist I'm also use a hand full tab groups - at least those 3:

    
    
      * work
      * private
      * to read
    

the work tab group usually starts empty (at least when I finished up the day
before), might grow to a hundred or two during the day - but usually ends up
empty at the end of the day when I'm done again.

I hardly ever left-click a link, I only wheelclick. but my ^w is at least as
fast as my wheel click - since the awesomebar searches through history,
pagetitles and already openend tabs it's really easy to navigate even between
tab groups just by ^t, type 3 letters, press return to 'switch to tab' (really
convenient icon there so you know you're going to close the new tab and switch
to an existing tab at this moment)

if I want to restore a tab i killed prematurely I fire up the history - where
I only use the 'by last visited view' \- does anyone srsly use the 'by date
and site' view?

tabs are something very different than bookmarks to me, a bookmark is
something I return to on a regular basis - a tab is an open 'todo'. I don't
use the usual bookmarks thou, only the bookmark-toolbar below the url - and my
bookmarks there have no text - they get renamed to "" so I only see their
favicon. entries there are e.g.

    
    
      * HN
      * blog.fefe
      * oglaf
      * xkcd
      ...
    

one thing that I really disliked that mozilla sometimes decided to drop the
dedicated keyboardshortcut to hide/show the bookmark-toolbar (I tend to hide
it for screenshots where I want the URL to be on the screenshot
[https://xkcd.com/1863/](https://xkcd.com/1863/) )

I have no idea what I'm going to do after the death of the tab groups
extension.

one thing that really bugs me is that every time a show tab groups to 'normal
users' (tm) they insta love them. I really wonder if no one used to use them
bcs hardly anyone ever knew about them.

~~~
amai
You might want to try [http://meetfranz.com/](http://meetfranz.com/) .

------
linuxray
thanks for info

------
megamindbrian
It's about time. Slowness is why I quit all of Mozilla. Also dumping
Thunderbird is irresponsible. We need one client that doesn't give annoying
pop-ups when using IMAP and that use to be it. Guess we have to go back to
using CLI to avoid pop-ups.

------
mrkrabo
I suppose I'm alone in getting all nervous if I have more than 10 tabs open.

~~~
yoasif_
Getting nervous because your computer starts slowing down or swapping because
of the number of tabs open, or because you can't read the tab titles or see
the favicons anymore? Firefox doesn't have those problems. ;)

------
johansch
Opera has supported this abnormal behavior for like two decades now. I
remember being shocked by how many tabs the Opera core browsing/rendering
engine developers used to have open on their desktops when I joined Opera back
in 2004. I guess it was an odd pride thing? :)

To clarify: I am talking about a one-row tab scenario. With about 3-4 pixels
per tab. And they were perfectly happy with that. Even seemed to feel it was a
good user experience.

------
droithomme
When I see bug reports with these sorts of ridiculous over the top use cases,
I think, yeah buddy, why don't you join the project and fix it since it's only
applicable to you.

And in this case that happened. This guy is an actual Firefox developer.

This is as it should be and congrats.

Now I am wondering how I can possibly get into this mysterious world of having
thousands of tabs open.

------
BlytheSchuma
LOL I've been running Firefox with 5k+ tabs since 2009.

------
valuearb
Dear god, why?

------
revelation
Whut? It didn't get any faster, it's just more aggressively lazy loaded now.
This is breaking the very use case of people who have 100+ tabs; they want
stuff to be there when they click on it.

~~~
glandium
Things have been lazy loaded on startup since Firefox 13:
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=711193](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=711193)

but the feature itself is much older.

The problem was that the xul/xbl code creating the tabbar was still doing a
lot of work for the not-yet-loaded tabs.

~~~
revelation
Yes, it's "it's just more aggressively lazy loaded". Unless you are trying to
say it's now not doing less work because it's 1) lazy loading but because 2)
they don't know how to implement a tabbar and should have used some native
component like Chrome.

~~~
Dylan16807
I wouldn't call it "more aggressively". The lazy loading is the same, but they
fixed the UI code around it.

