Latest Firefox Release Is Faster Than Ever

brokenmachine · on June 3, 2019

Recently I've noticed that sometimes when I switch to a Firefox tab, it locks the whole PC for about 1/2 second to a second, and freezes any video I'm playing in vlc or other stuff I'm doing on the PC for that second while it loads/switches to the tab.

Anyone else seeing this behavior?

I have a fast machine: i7 8700k, 32Gb RAM, Windows 7. Everything is stable, this is the only weird behavior.

aitchnyu · on May 31, 2019

> Firefox will now detect if your computer’s memory is running low, which we define as lower than 400MB, and suspend unused tabs that you haven’t used or looked at in a while.

I have a laptop with spinning rust and I try to occupy only 12/16 G so no cache is evicted. Its filled to the brim with 12G. Maybe Firefox should leave 20% of the memory free.

ahje · on May 31, 2019

Well, a 400 MB is probably good for most people, but it would be really cool if the limit could be adjusted under about:config.

bzbarsky · on June 4, 2019

It's just a hardcoded constant right now, at https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/f8b11433159cbc9cc8..., but making it a pref would be possible, yes...

anotheryou · on June 1, 2019

As long as it unloads faster than you can fill 400MB it should be fine, no?

Android also likes to keep the ram full with recent apps that way and it makes sense.

tinus_hn · on May 31, 2019

Don’t know if it’s an option but I wouldn’t mind Firefox always suspending unused tabs.

Terretta · on May 31, 2019

Ideally, it’s “Always suspend, except for long running processes”.

Almost all pages are not / should not be active in background. Even most SPA (think Gmail) don’t need to refresh if you aren’t observing them. A small minority of update or admin type tools that run things on remote machines seem to need the page active to let the remote know you’re still there and it should keep running. In browsers that pause unseen tabs, I dislike this SPA design as I can’t click away or they stop.

NikkiA · on May 31, 2019

> Even most SPA (think Gmail) don’t need to refresh if you aren’t observing them

Maybe not 'as often', But I certainly want the (xxxx) number next to 'Inbox' to change if I get new email while looking at another tab.

bzbarsky · on June 4, 2019

Note that in this case "suspend" actually means "unload", not "pause".

So if you get on a plane and go to that tab to read that thing you meant to read... it's not there anymore.

In a world where you're always connected, of course, the difference between "pause" and "unload" is pretty minimal.