
Firefox’s speed with large numbers of tabs leaves Chrome in the dust - philnash
http://www.techradar.com/news/firefoxs-blazing-speed-with-huge-numbers-of-tabs-leaves-chrome-in-the-dust
======
clairity
for those commenting about how unhygenic having many tabs open is, why bother
trying to cajole others into having just a few tabs open? it's such a weird
social norming behavior (to me). i can understand _asking_ why others do it
because it is not your norm, but why the addition of trying to force others to
conform to your behavior? (i'm genuinely asking, as this kind of stuff is
fascinating to me.)

why not take the 30 seconds to mull it over to at least develop a sense of
understanding/empathy before throwing out a micro agression around something
so frivolous? i mean, if it's not hurting you, then let other people be,
right?

and besides, shouldn't the computer conform to how the human wants to work and
not the other way around?

~~~
ohazi
For the same reason you might cajole others to perform regular backups. People
who have too many tabs open are almost always using their tabs as bookmarks,
or as an "I want to read this later" mechanism. Very few people actually have
two hundred tabs open for a single train of thought.

When you do this, you're one crash + failed recovery away from losing those
pages forever. Yes, you can go through your history and try to recreate the
list, but let's be honest here -- Most of those tabs were from six months ago.
Finding and opening those pages manually is going to suck.

~~~
oh_sigh
If people use tabs as bookmarks, perhaps it is because something is wrong with
bookmarks.

~~~
ohazi
I completely agree. It should be way easier to "braindump" a window full of
tabs into a folder of bookmarks. There are browser extensions for this.

Alternatively, browsers could start treating window + tab lists as less
ephemeral, and make it easy to restore window + tab combinations at any time,
regardless of whether the browser thinks it crashed recently.

~~~
Others
Chrome has that first feature. Right click on a tab, and click "Bookmark All
Tabs..."

~~~
ohazi
The bookmarking interface in chrome could use a facelift. The fact that I have
to come up with a name for the folder and think about where to put it makes
this less than ideal.

Extensions like OneTab make this sort of dump a one button affair, which makes
the process easier when you also have ten windows open. It also keeps them
separate from your longer term bookmarks, which is nice.

------
pavel_lishin
This is very neat from a technological point of view, but: who are these
people who have hundreds and thousands of tabs open, and how can we get them
the help they need?

~~~
setr
I have the opposing opinion

Who are these people with a shockingly low number of tabs, and how do we get
them the help they need?

Those I usually see with few tabs are either those who only browse the web for
extremely simple things (ie facebook, netflix and google for very simple
questions), or those who only just maintain like a single docs page at any
given moment.

The hell kind of absurd usage pattern is that? Do you keep one book on your
shelf too? Do you just not have any interests? Nothing but one thing at a
time? I keep around ~300 tabs and a heavily organized bookmarks storage with
some 400 links; tabs are ram and bookmarks are disk.

How else would you naturally organize your web-information? I can only imagine
you have very little information to organize...

~~~
nice_byte
It's a completely different view of what the tab bar is.

To me, the tab bar is a working area. I don't keep stuff that is not
immediately relevant to what I'm doing in the working area.

When you're soldering stuff, you don't want spatulas and eggs getting in your
way. On the other hand, when you're cooking, you don't want solder to get
mixed up with your food.

> How else would you naturally organize your web-information?

You don't. There's google for that :-)

~~~
setr
Hence, multiple windows (and because windows UX is broken, multiple browsers)

And what'll you do for a large task thats interrupted by a small task? Wipe
out the large and replace it with the small, then work up towards the large
again? Obviously not; you stick it up with the large task's tabs, and just
note which tab marks the differentiation between tasks (not literally... you
mentally know a tab is associated with which task, unless both tasks are
extremely similar)

And multiple small tasks interrupting each other? (Often a redult of each one
being extremely boring). Obviously, more tab sequences.

The _natural_ thing to do is accumulate tabs until it becomes unsustainable,
and then garbage collect

You choose instead to artificially constrain yourself for some arbitrary
notion of _cleansliness_ (One window, one tab sequence, I bet !) and then
attack those of the One True Way with your spatulas and eggs. Google is your
organization? Either you have an amazing memory of arbitrary websites...or you
dont have any memory of them (artificial or otherwise)

~~~
nice_byte
> And what'll you do for a large task thats interrupted by a small task?

No, just open a new tab. I simply never have more than 2 tasks in-flight. I
can't focus on more than two things at a time, and even then the second one
has to be really quick (no more than 1 tab deep). And of course, once I'm done
with something, it goes away.

> Either you have an amazing memory of arbitrary websites...or you dont have
> any memory of them (artificial or otherwise)

The latter. I don't commit things that can be searched to memory. For example,
I don't go to Khronos website to search OpenGL APIs, I just google the
function names. Same if I want to look for something in wikipedia. I also
don't bother remembering website names. For example, if I know there's a
particular article about shadow mapping I want to read, I can just google
"article about shadowmapping by fabien" and the thing I'm looking for will be
the top result.

> The natural thing to do is accumulate tabs until it becomes unsustainable,
> and then garbage collect

Sure. It's just that > 10 is already pushing it and > 20 tabs is completely
unsustainable for me.

------
supremesaboteur
Previously :
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14823807](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14823807)

~~~
cl0rkster
I originally read about this in the post you linked. There were some great
charts in that article showing how performance has changed throughout the
version of Firefox. I only clicked this article because I was hoping to see a
direct comparison to Chrome laid out in similar fashion. Unfortunately, the
title is purely click bait and the only mention of Chrome is that anecdotally,
"Chrome has something of a reputation for being a resource hog".

The article that was originally posted was certainly more interesting and
informative.

------
roryisok
I wonder, if there was a fork of electron using Firefox instead of chromium,
what would the ram usage be like?

Mozilla really paved the way for electron with prism, shame it never really
took off

~~~
Macha
Gecko is apparently pretty painful to embed, with most other Gecko based
browsers (that weren't firefox forks a la Pale Moon) having long since stopped
development or switched to Webkit/Chromium.

~~~
kuschku
That’ll be fixed once Servo is finished, though, as that has easy APIs for
embedding.

~~~
pspeter3
Yeah, I'm really interested to see that happen. Any idea of when?

------
SubiculumCode
I must say that Firefox's last couple of version feel blazing fast.

~~~
masthead
Maybe the placebo effect?

~~~
callahad
It's real. We've landed _enormous_ performance improvements this year,
including migrating most Firefox users to a full multi-process architecture,
as well as integrating parts of the Servo parallel browser engine project into
Firefox. There are still many improvements yet-to-land, but in most cases
we're on track for Firefox 57 in November.

------
dannysu
I feel like with a bit more improvements to Firefox Snooze Tab [1] and
Container Tab [2] extensions the need to have tons of tabs open could be
solved.

What if it's easy to easily have multiple "Research containers"?

Container tab allows you to hide all tabs related to a particular container,
so I feel like you can easily improve your workflow.

What about combining that functionality with snooze tab extension? But instead
of snoozing individual tabs, snooze a container.

    
    
      [1]: https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/snooze-tabs
      [2]: https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/containers

~~~
kasabali
it is possible today using tab groups and tab groups helper extensions. tab
groups provides tab groups and the helper provides suspend/resume of
individual groups.

sadly they will stop functioning after Firefox 57, because progress, yeah.

------
seanwilson
For people that have hundreds of tabs open...how do you find anything? I
generally have about 5 frequently used tabs pinned in Chrome (so they take up
minimal space) and up to 10 or so other ones open. Once I have more than that
many tabs open I can't see the tab titles anymore which frustrates me so I'll
close some.

I'm in the camp that cannot understand how having hundreds of tabs open can be
practical...to me it would be like having hundreds of files open in an IDE or
file browser, hundreds of terminals open, or hundreds of documents scattered
across my desk. At some point the number of things you have in front of you
becomes overwhelming to keep in your head and you have to clear away the
things you don't need right now.

~~~
Manishearth
If you type in the URL bar firefox will show results from open tabs. You can
also force this by typing `%` before the search term.

Chrome's UI is _terrible_ for multiple tabs. Chrome will shrink tabs down as
much as possible. Firefox stops shrinking once they're like 75% of their
original width, and lets you scroll instead. On top of that, addons like Tab
Center Redux make it much easier to manage things by putting them on the side
(so they don't get shrunk at all) and adding a dedicated search box.

~~~
reitanqild
Edit: found your answer
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14850286](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14850286)
pointing to
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14849681](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14849681)

\---

Hi Manishearth! I know you work at Mozilla.

If you see this: Do you have anything to share WRT the possibility of having
extensions like tree-style-tabs in future versions of FF?

This is probably the one thing that leaves most Chrome users awe-struck and
also is really really really useful to many of us.

~~~
Manishearth
Tree Tabs ([https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-
tabs/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-tabs/)) is the
WebExtensions version of Tree Style Tabs.

It works. It's a bit unpolished UI wise, but that should improve.

There are two crucial missing bits of functionality in it. One is respecting
tab order. Currently it just lets you organize the tabs, but will not actually
reorder them under the hood, i.e. the ordering that ctrl-tab respects. What it
should do is reorder tabs as they are moved around. Tab Center Redux does
this, so I suspect the webextension API exists (in fact IIRC the google chrome
webextension tabs API, which Firefox definitely supports, has this), so it
just needs the stuff to be fixed. I considered fixing it myself, but the
extension doesn't seem to be open source (you can of course inspect the source
of the bundle but then there's no easy way to contribute back)

This may even have been fixed by the time I looked at it last.

The second is that it doesn't actually hide the tab bar up top. Neither does
Tab Center Redux. This is a matter of a missing webextensions api, but it's
one that's probably easy to add.

The other missing bits are mostly minor, like configurability etc.

------
roryisok
Correct me if I'm wrong but hasn't Mozilla been rewriting parts of Firefox in
Rust lately?

~~~
the8472
[https://wiki.mozilla.org/Oxidation#Rust_components_in_Firefo...](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Oxidation#Rust_components_in_Firefox)

------
scott_karana
Didn't we just discuss this on the _front page_ two days ago? Seems like a
dupe/linkspam post to me...

Thread:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14823807](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14823807)

Original blog post: [https://metafluff.com/2017/07/21/i-am-a-tab-
hoarder/](https://metafluff.com/2017/07/21/i-am-a-tab-hoarder/)

~~~
jessaustin
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14849247](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14849247)

------
pspeter3
Our page load performance numbers collected from real users show the following
performance ranking: 1\. Chrome 2\. Safari 3\. Explorer 4\. Firefox

~~~
tyrw
Yes, but did those users have 1,600 tabs open? That seems to be the use case
Firefox is going all in on lately.

------
superkuh
As someone that switched to Pale Moon (FF fork) because of the loss of large
tab session performance in post-v30 builds this is great to hear. Now all they
have to do is kill the walled garden and Firefox might be worth trying again.

~~~
BeetleB
>As someone that switched to Pale Moon (FF fork) because of the loss of large
tab session performance in post-v30 builds this is great to hear.

I tried Pale Moon about a year ago. It had a nasty memory leak (my browser
stays open for weeks). I really wanted to like it, but this was a serious
problem.

------
pkamb
I started using the "Firefox Focus" browser for iOS a lot specifically because
it has _one_ tab.

[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/firefox-focus-the-privacy-
br...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/firefox-focus-the-privacy-
browser/id1055677337?mt=8)

Removing the ability to even make tabs (which I _love_ and hoard) is nice. Big
button to delete your current page, which you have to do if you want something
else. You're constantly at "inbox zero" for your tabs.

Will look through the comments here for similar solutions on the desktop.
Perhaps something that limits the number of tabs you can open. Or
automatically closes old tabs if they're on the website's "home page" as
opposed to a specific article.

------
eitland
But why is this on the bottom of the front page now after 3 hours and 169
points?

Is someone flagging this or has it triggered a flamewar-detector?

------
romanovcode
I hope this is correct. I would gladly switch to Firefox and forget about
google forever. But firefox is just too slow for me.

------
foota
I use a plug-in called fresh start to manage saving large number of tabs.

------
Tomis02
Meh, Opera was easily handling huge numbers of tabs a decade ago, while
providing the option for vertical tabs, tab stacking and a tab scroller so
that you could comfortably switch between them. By comparison, Chrome and
Firefox have always appeared as dilettantes.

~~~
esMazer
vertical tabs: It seems you are taking of an extension? (I got excited for a
second but I couldn't find the option under settings). If you are talking
about an extension then Firefox also has a similar extension that works very
well.

~~~
Symbiote
I think it means this [1], which is a screenshot from Opera 12 in 2011, but
looks pretty much the same as I remember the tab sidebar working in 2004-ish.

I haven't used Opera for a decade, so I don't know if the feature still
exists.

[1] [http://forums.opera.com/discussion/1866076/tab-stacks-in-
sid...](http://forums.opera.com/discussion/1866076/tab-stacks-in-side-bar/p1)

------
phasnox
Curious, how many tabs do you have open right now? Me:

17

~~~
jumbopapa
11 here. StackOverflow at 5, Google at 3, HackerNews at 1, MvvmCross
Documentation at 1, and Vivaldi Start Page at 1.

------
digitalshankar
Firefox Rocks! #FirefoxMasterRace

------
overcast
Now if they can only fix the memory leak, that chews up gigs of RAM in only an
hour.

~~~
sp332
If you can reproduce the issue with a clean profile or in Safe Mode, please
file a bug report.

~~~
geokon
I've narrowed it down to specific webpages - but how can I know if the leak is
the pages' fault or the browser's fault?

(Biggest culprits are Discourse forums.. which is a shame b/c I really like
the platform)

~~~
jamesgeck0
A couple weeks ago I'd've advised reporting those pages with the Pulse
extension [1], but it looks like it's recently been retired.

1\.
[https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/pulse](https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/pulse)

~~~
sp332
Download Developer Edition [https://www.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/developer/](https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/developer/) (or
Nightly), load up the page, and in the browser menu click "Report Site Issue".

------
stewbrew
IMHO there is something wrong when people leave tens+ tabs open. There are
bookmarks for keeping references to pages. FF also has Pocket for keeping
references to pages I want to read later. So, this is a benchmark that should
not be relevant in real life if the GUI offers the right solution for the
problem of keeping references to pages.

~~~
sixothree
I often open 80+ tabs during the normal course of a day. Often times 5 of
those are spreadsheets in one window with a few pdf spec documents, reference
sites, handfuls a internet searches, a few for different version/pages of the
application under test, and boom.

Why would I want any of those in bookmarks when I can have them open when I
need them, which is now.

~~~
stewbrew
Well but ... In the course of a day, I often realize that I have the same URL
opened in 2+ tabs. There of course are use cases where I want to have more
views on the same page but usually, that's not the default behaviour I want.

> open when I need them

Well, what do you mean with "open". As I said IMHO there is something wrong
here.

~~~
sixothree
By open I mean that they require no additional navigation or credential, other
than clicking on the correct tab.

------
syshum
>>Mozilla will be hoping to attract power users

They already had the power users, which they have now told to get screwed when
they killed the extensions to chase the performance benchmark

Trading Usability and the ability to customize the browser for something that
is "fast" but you cant do anything with it...

Useless is what it is IMO

This is the difference between a sports car and a truck. Me I drive a truck,
it might be slow and cumbersome but it is versatile and customizable, I haul
people and things, I can add a camper, I can do all kinds of things with my
truck. If I had a sports car it might be fast but I would be limited in the
places I could go and the things I could do

They are taking the FF Pickup and turning it into a FF Sports car... I have no
interest in a sports car

~~~
Ar-Curunir
The new system is more secure. There'll be some initial pain as new APIs are
stabilized and new extensions are created, but I'm willing to give Mozilla the
chance, they're the only major browser that's not making a browser with a
secondary, ulterior motive.

~~~
syshum
The problem is that the new API are not and can not be as powerful as the XUL
based system. It is impossible.

The new Chrome Replica Web Extensions can never be as powerful as the old
system.

~~~
staticassertion
What power, specifically, are you missing in extensions?

~~~
yukinon
Vimperator is not possible in the new Web Extensions, it requires customizing
the UI in a way that Web Extensions doesn't allow. I am supremely salty about
this still.

~~~
Manishearth
The APIs don't exist for this _now_ but they could be added.

See
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14849681](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14849681)

------
frinks2000
This is all fine if you are running Windows. On a mac it will spin the fan
faster than anything else... with two tabs open. Firefox has become a Windows
browser, if anything

~~~
michaelmrose
I'm curious if this has something to do with video. Do you experience much
more power when consuming video on the browser and is there a difference
between how firefox, chrome, and safari use the gpu while decoding video?

This might be interesting to quantify.

~~~
dkhenry
It might not be video. For a while my firefox was forcing the system to use
the dGPU which caused the fan to spin and battery performance to drop. The
cause was the google talk plugin that got loaded when I opened gmail.

