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I've tried to like Safari. It's certainly snappier than the alternatives. It's fast and seems light. I'll go as far as to say I want to like Safari. As a heavy

I've tried to like Safari. It's certainly snappier than the alternatives. It's fast and seems light. I'll go as far as to say I want to like Safari. As a heavy iPhone and Mac user, going all in on Safari would buy me a lot. In a similar vein, I want to like Firefox - even more so than Safari. An open source web browser by a non-profit? Sign me up. That's an excellent concept to rally behind. But... I can't ditch Chrome. I know it eats up resources like it's nobody's business, I know it's probably tracking me, I hate that it wants me to 'log in' like it's some sort of operating system, but I just can't kick the habit. I think it's the tabs. For whatever reason, chrome is simply the best browser for those 50 tab research sessions. It's also the best file downloader, the most configurable, has the best extension ecosystem. It manages to be the best pro-user's browser, and the best layperson's browser at the same time. I still have all three browsers sitting in my dock. I just use Chrome by default.

diggan 11y ago
I can't ditch Firefox for the exact same reason! I NEED to have my tabs on the left side or the right side. I can't have it in the top because I end up not seeing any titles, just favicons, and that doesn't really give me anything. Try the Firefox Developer Edition or Aurora (Alpha channel, rarely crashes but the performance is much better than current stable) together with TreeStyleTabs. Maybe that will help you out. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
- FungalRaincloud 11y ago
  I recently installed vimium on chrome, and being able to quick navigate to a specific tab via keyboard (by typing the title or selecting it from a list) has completely eradicated my issue with finding tabs on chrome. There's something like vimium on Firefox, but I haven't really looked into it. I mainly use chrome because I use chrome. I just don't feel like putting the energy into setting up Firefox how I like it. currently, my chrome history is synced between a bunch of devices nicely. Between setting up that and having to find alternatives to all the addons I use, making the switch just doesn't sound fun.
  - darkr 11y ago
    > There's something like vimium on Firefox Vimperator. It offers more functionality/hackability than Vimium as well (not that vimium is bad - I'm a happy user of both firefox/vimperator and chrome/vimium).
vcarl 11y ago
Fun trick I learned with Chrome: Click a tab, then shift-click another tab. The tabs should darken, and if you drag them, they all move as a unit. Very handy when you have sessions that kind of diverged and you'd like to mentally separate them.
- sawwit 11y ago
  I can't recommend the Tree Style Tabs FF add-on enough for these kinds of "large sessions that diverge into many sub-sessions". If you ctrl-click a link, this add-on creates a new child-tab of the current tab and loads the link there. It kind of builds little spanning trees of the WWW graph, which seems to be a very natural way of browsing the web, but you can also organize these tab trees completely freely with drag & drop.
- DiabloD3 11y ago
  You can select tabs using your normal item selecting techniques, including control and shift. I wish all browsers would inherit this, that is a very powerful thing.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
harryf 11y ago
For me it's the address bar - (desktop) Safaris hiding of everything to the right domain name annoys me - over hiding useful info
- untog 11y ago
  You can change that - "Show full website address" in Advanced options.
- germanier 11y ago
  You can change that by going to settings. In the "Advanced" tab you can check "Show full website address".
rangibaby 11y ago
I think you're just used to Chrome. There isn't really that much seperating Chrome, Safari, and Firefox these days.
- e40 11y ago
  Not true. I went from Chrome to FF, but after 6 months on FF I was just too annoyed to stay on FF. It was mainly the crashes in one tab taking down the entire browser, but there were a lot of things that annoyed the crap out of me. Going back to Chrome felt like a weight was lifted from my shoulders.
  - rangibaby 11y ago
    Did you find out what was causing the crashes? I'm curious because FF is rock solid for me. I'm sorry to hear that it didn't work out for you. Having used Firefox since it was Firebird (lol), I can tell you it goes through noticeable cycles of being awesome and just plain bad. Working hard to become the fastest browser an example of the former, and the whole Pocket fiasco being an example of the latter. ATM I use Safari as my main browser, Firefox for testing websites and some other plugins, and Chrome for the built-in Flash (I don't have Flash on my system).
- xyzzy4 11y ago
  Chrome forced the rest to become better.
  - rangibaby 11y ago
    That's a good point. The emergence of Chrome certainly lit a fire under Firefox's ass. Being "just" better than IE6 was no longer good enough.
untog 11y ago
I was the same, but eventually Chrome's slowness and resource-intensiveness (this is on OS X, of course) drove me to Safari. Chrome is still my 'dev' browser though, and having the two separate is actually quite nice.
- paulojreis 11y ago
  That's my setup, essentially. Chrome as my 'dev' browser, as I'm too familiar with its devs tools. Another nice thing about having a browser only for development is that, when you're demo'ing, there's less of a risk to show unwanted stuff (e.g. address bar suggestions). :)
  - culturestate 11y ago
    > Another nice thing about having a browser only for development is that, when you're demo'ing, there's less of a risk to show unwanted stuff I go a little further and use distinct Chrome profiles for every project to avoid this. It also helps to keep saved credentials for e.g. client-specific SaaS accounts separate without commingling them with my own 1Password vault. *I know 1Password now supports multiple vaults, but I haven't had a chance to try that workflow yet.
vlunkr 11y ago
This is me exactly. I can't stand the UI in FF. It seems to change too much and it's ugly. There are probably plugins to help with that, but I haven't invested the time to look into it. It's also hard to kick the Chrome dev tools.
- sawwit 11y ago
  How is FF ugly? I don't find the UI very different from Chrome and Safari.
  - cptskippy 11y ago
    I don't get how he thinks it's ugly or different. Not only is it very similar but, unlike Chrome or Safari, every aspect of it is customizable so you can make it look however you want. Out of the box you can rearrange the the UI elements to match Chrome or Safari.
    - swozey 11y ago
      I absolutely hate the FF UI. I WANT to use FF, I actually switched a few months ago and did it for a couple of months. I THINK my problem (I say think because I feel like someone will measure the pixel and say I'm wrong) is that it feels like there is a ton of wasted space between the tabs, above the tabs. etc. I can't control the size of the top bars and they're huge compared to chrome. I'm a fan of tiny icons and very, very compact UIs so that I can get more on the screen at once. Here's my comparison on a 28" monitor https://www.dropbox.com/s/k32gln7s3ev5a7t/Screenshot%202016-01-27%2010.51.41.png?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/k32gln7s3ev5a7t/Screenshot%202016-...
      - sawwit 11y ago
        Perhaps give Tree Style Tabs on FF a try.
      - JupiterMoon 11y ago
        Hang on the chrome UI at the top takes up a couple of mm more vertically than the FF one. What other differences are there?
gruez 11y ago
disclosure: I'm a firefox user. >I think it's the tabs. [...] It's also the best file downloader In what way? The only difference I can see is the download status bar, but that's available on firefox as an extension. >the most configurable debatable, considering firefox has a bunch of about:config options, whereas chrome has a few configurable flags. >has the best extension ecosystem. Can you elaborate this? My impression was that firefox's ecosystem was better because addons can do more (thanks to XUL), whereas chrome addons are limited to glorified userscripts.
- autoreleasepool 11y ago
  > In what way? The only difference I can see is the download status bar, but that's available on firefox as an extension. Yes, I've tried to replicate Chrome's UI with Firefox extension. But it feels like I'm using extensions. Furthermore, I really don't enjoy configuring browsers because between work, school, and hobbies I use a lot of different machine. For this reason, if I'm using firefox, it's usually with the default UI... which is not my personal preference. >> has the best extension ecosystem. > Can you elaborate this? Take a cursory glance at each of the two stores: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/ vs https://chrome.google.com/webstore/category/extensions https://chrome.google.com/webstore/category/extensions Aesthetically speaking, the firefox add ons page is the Tux Racer to chrome's Mario Kart. One has the passion and enthusiasm of well respected open source volunteers behind it, and the other has a sleek high quality shine only our dear corporate overlords could deliver. This is minor, but it sets the mood the for the whole experience of add ons. (Of which, I only need uBlock Origin"). In general, it's easier to find what I'm looking for, see what's trending, and generally browse for extensions in the chrome store. EDIT: The chrome store is also much faster and more responsive. Aside from that, Chrome seems to have more active developers because of it's better brand name. On /r/cscareerqustions, for example, you'll hear people ask about ideas for resume-boosting side projects. One of the first answers is usually "make a chrome extension". I have yet to see anyone say "make a firefox extension" or "make a cross platform browser extension". Either way, it's all personal preference. I'm sure you prefer a different model car, style of clothing, and a favorite color than me too. It's all ok. There's no right answer here.
notwhereyouare 11y ago
>the most configurable, has the best extension ecosystem. that's why I haven't left chrome. I HATE some of the stuff they (google) do, but I can make this my browser and I like the overall appearance
- akerro 11y ago
  Can you force it not to download binary blobs that turn on your microphone?
overcast 11y ago
I came in here, to share my experience between Safari and Chrome, and it looks like you've iterated exactly the same sentiment. After El Capitan came out, and the changes to Safari, I REALLY gave it a shot. A sleek interface, and certainly fast, but it chews through RAM at an insane rate. There is no rhyme or reason to it, I can have a fresh window open, restore previous session of ten tabs, and after a few hours, each tab starts consuming 5GB+ of RAM until everything is exhausted. Chrome(Canary) on the other hand, twice as many tabs open, and it never runs away with RAM usage. It still uses a hundred megs per tab, but none of them go crazy. I need to have every browser under the sun installed for testing, but Chrome is the only thing I can keep opening without killing my Mac Pro that has 28GB of RAM.
- ZanyProgrammer 11y ago
  Its hard to parse these responses because everyone says that their browser that they don't use uses RAM at ridiculous rates.
  - overcast 11y ago
    I use every browser, Safari primarily since El Capitan. It was only in the last week or so that I've just had enough of dealing with it killing my machine. I had to systematically kill each tab process on a regular basis.
meburns 11y ago
This is exactly the same experience I have had. I gave Safari a few months, added extensions, etc. I just found myself banging my head against the wall over certain things that Chrome had natively that Safari choose not to have.
forgottenpass 11y ago
I think it's the tabs. For whatever reason, chrome is simply the best browser for those 50 tab research sessions. You might like this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
executive 11y ago
I use Chrome for the Duplicate Tab feature.
thrownaway2424 11y ago
Being logged into chrome is really the best feature they offer. I love having all my tabs on all my devices, and a unified omnibox history and all that.
barrkel 11y ago
Until Chrome has Tree Style Tabs, it's not a viable competitor to FF for me. Chrome is a fine development environment though.
wiremine 11y ago
> It's certainly snappier than the alternatives. I recently got a new, high-end Macbook Pro (16GB, 1TB SSD, i7 2.8Gz). I've been a long-time Chrome user, but I figured this would be a good time to try Safari: I've heard good things about it's energy usage. I used Safari as my primary browser for about 2 weeks, and just switched back to Chrome. Safari wasn't bad, but it seems to take a LONG time to make connections to websites. And sometimes it would just hang indefinitely. At first I thought this was a machine issue, but all my other networking apps (Chrome, Postman, etc.) return immediately. Like parent comment, I really want to like Safari...
- mhb 11y ago
  Energy usage? What would the difference in energy used be for Chrome vs. Safari vs. Firefox?
  - wiremine 11y ago
    Check out this article, or google around for others. Apple has spent a lot of time making Safari more efficient to extend battery life: http://bgr.com/2015/08/05/google-chrome-vs-safari-battery-life/ http://bgr.com/2015/08/05/google-chrome-vs-safari-battery-li...
    - mhb 11y ago
      Ah. I wasn't thinking of batteries.
iamben 11y ago
'The Great Suspender' has been invaluable for me (a heavy tab user) in clawing back some system resources. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspender/klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspende...
QuantumCookie 11y ago
Firefox's tab groups, combined with "Don't load tabs until I click on them", are what I use to deal with dozens of tabs. Though being able to have more groups sat in the background with comparatively little performance hit definitely feeds my tab addiction...
rconti 11y ago
I really like Safari on OS X. It's my go-to browser on my personal machine, and on my work machine, it's my "personal" browser (I'm typing this into safari). I use Chrome for my work stuff. But maybe this is down to your tab preferences. I simply hate tabs. To me, they're the sign of a failed window manager. I don't feel it's the job of every application to reinvent the UX wheel and implement tab functions differently from every other application. Maybe some day an operating system will support tabs natively?
jacobolus 11y ago
> For whatever reason, chrome is simply the best browser for those 50 tab research sessions Wait, what? For me, Chrome is utterly unusable for “research sessions” (aka routine browsing). It starts chewing up resources like crazy and completely falls over when I try using it for any amount of time with 25+ tabs open. Google’s non-search webapps seem to be particular offenders: more than a few tabs of them open in Chrome brings my fast laptop to its knees. Firefox is good up to about 100 tabs, but becomes a big CPU and memory hog and inevitably crashes after a day or two. In Safari, I routinely keep 200+ tabs open for weeks at a time with no problem (though eventually I start running out of system memory; not sure if there’s a slow memory leak, or if badly written websites just require indefinitely large amounts when kept open, or what; usually by that point there’s a new security update to install in any case).
- TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
  Right now I have an insane 503 tabs open in Chrome. (Sometimes I'm lazy, and I forget to clean up.) But I have 32GB RAM. And The Great Suspender, which is a must-have for anyone who uses Chrome.

diggan 11y ago

I can't ditch Firefox for the exact same reason! I NEED to have my tabs on the left side or the right side. I can't have it in the top because I end up not seeing any titles, just favicons, and that doesn't really give me anything. Try the Firefox Developer Edition or Aurora (Alpha channel, rarely crashes but the performance is much better than current stable) together with TreeStyleTabs. Maybe that will help you out. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

FungalRaincloud 11y ago
I recently installed vimium on chrome, and being able to quick navigate to a specific tab via keyboard (by typing the title or selecting it from a list) has completely eradicated my issue with finding tabs on chrome. There's something like vimium on Firefox, but I haven't really looked into it. I mainly use chrome because I use chrome. I just don't feel like putting the energy into setting up Firefox how I like it. currently, my chrome history is synced between a bunch of devices nicely. Between setting up that and having to find alternatives to all the addons I use, making the switch just doesn't sound fun.
- darkr 11y ago
  > There's something like vimium on Firefox Vimperator. It offers more functionality/hackability than Vimium as well (not that vimium is bad - I'm a happy user of both firefox/vimperator and chrome/vimium).

vcarl 11y ago

Fun trick I learned with Chrome: Click a tab, then shift-click another tab. The tabs should darken, and if you drag them, they all move as a unit. Very handy when you have sessions that kind of diverged and you'd like to mentally separate them.

sawwit 11y ago
I can't recommend the Tree Style Tabs FF add-on enough for these kinds of "large sessions that diverge into many sub-sessions". If you ctrl-click a link, this add-on creates a new child-tab of the current tab and loads the link there. It kind of builds little spanning trees of the WWW graph, which seems to be a very natural way of browsing the web, but you can also organize these tab trees completely freely with drag & drop.
DiabloD3 11y ago
You can select tabs using your normal item selecting techniques, including control and shift. I wish all browsers would inherit this, that is a very powerful thing.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

harryf 11y ago

For me it's the address bar - (desktop) Safaris hiding of everything to the right domain name annoys me - over hiding useful info

untog 11y ago
You can change that - "Show full website address" in Advanced options.
germanier 11y ago
You can change that by going to settings. In the "Advanced" tab you can check "Show full website address".

rangibaby 11y ago

I think you're just used to Chrome. There isn't really that much seperating Chrome, Safari, and Firefox these days.

e40 11y ago
Not true. I went from Chrome to FF, but after 6 months on FF I was just too annoyed to stay on FF. It was mainly the crashes in one tab taking down the entire browser, but there were a lot of things that annoyed the crap out of me. Going back to Chrome felt like a weight was lifted from my shoulders.
- rangibaby 11y ago
  Did you find out what was causing the crashes? I'm curious because FF is rock solid for me. I'm sorry to hear that it didn't work out for you. Having used Firefox since it was Firebird (lol), I can tell you it goes through noticeable cycles of being awesome and just plain bad. Working hard to become the fastest browser an example of the former, and the whole Pocket fiasco being an example of the latter. ATM I use Safari as my main browser, Firefox for testing websites and some other plugins, and Chrome for the built-in Flash (I don't have Flash on my system).
xyzzy4 11y ago
Chrome forced the rest to become better.
- rangibaby 11y ago
  That's a good point. The emergence of Chrome certainly lit a fire under Firefox's ass. Being "just" better than IE6 was no longer good enough.

untog 11y ago

I was the same, but eventually Chrome's slowness and resource-intensiveness (this is on OS X, of course) drove me to Safari. Chrome is still my 'dev' browser though, and having the two separate is actually quite nice.

paulojreis 11y ago
That's my setup, essentially. Chrome as my 'dev' browser, as I'm too familiar with its devs tools. Another nice thing about having a browser only for development is that, when you're demo'ing, there's less of a risk to show unwanted stuff (e.g. address bar suggestions). :)
- culturestate 11y ago
  > Another nice thing about having a browser only for development is that, when you're demo'ing, there's less of a risk to show unwanted stuff I go a little further and use distinct Chrome profiles for every project to avoid this. It also helps to keep saved credentials for e.g. client-specific SaaS accounts separate without commingling them with my own 1Password vault. *I know 1Password now supports multiple vaults, but I haven't had a chance to try that workflow yet.

vlunkr 11y ago

This is me exactly. I can't stand the UI in FF. It seems to change too much and it's ugly. There are probably plugins to help with that, but I haven't invested the time to look into it. It's also hard to kick the Chrome dev tools.

sawwit 11y ago
How is FF ugly? I don't find the UI very different from Chrome and Safari.
- cptskippy 11y ago
  I don't get how he thinks it's ugly or different. Not only is it very similar but, unlike Chrome or Safari, every aspect of it is customizable so you can make it look however you want. Out of the box you can rearrange the the UI elements to match Chrome or Safari.
  - swozey 11y ago
    I absolutely hate the FF UI. I WANT to use FF, I actually switched a few months ago and did it for a couple of months. I THINK my problem (I say think because I feel like someone will measure the pixel and say I'm wrong) is that it feels like there is a ton of wasted space between the tabs, above the tabs. etc. I can't control the size of the top bars and they're huge compared to chrome. I'm a fan of tiny icons and very, very compact UIs so that I can get more on the screen at once. Here's my comparison on a 28" monitor https://www.dropbox.com/s/k32gln7s3ev5a7t/Screenshot%202016-01-27%2010.51.41.png?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/k32gln7s3ev5a7t/Screenshot%202016-...
    - sawwit 11y ago
      Perhaps give Tree Style Tabs on FF a try.
    - JupiterMoon 11y ago
      Hang on the chrome UI at the top takes up a couple of mm more vertically than the FF one. What other differences are there?

gruez 11y ago

disclosure: I'm a firefox user. >I think it's the tabs. [...] It's also the best file downloader In what way? The only difference I can see is the download status bar, but that's available on firefox as an extension. >the most configurable debatable, considering firefox has a bunch of about:config options, whereas chrome has a few configurable flags. >has the best extension ecosystem. Can you elaborate this? My impression was that firefox's ecosystem was better because addons can do more (thanks to XUL), whereas chrome addons are limited to glorified userscripts.

autoreleasepool 11y ago
> In what way? The only difference I can see is the download status bar, but that's available on firefox as an extension. Yes, I've tried to replicate Chrome's UI with Firefox extension. But it feels like I'm using extensions. Furthermore, I really don't enjoy configuring browsers because between work, school, and hobbies I use a lot of different machine. For this reason, if I'm using firefox, it's usually with the default UI... which is not my personal preference. >> has the best extension ecosystem. > Can you elaborate this? Take a cursory glance at each of the two stores: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/ vs https://chrome.google.com/webstore/category/extensions https://chrome.google.com/webstore/category/extensions Aesthetically speaking, the firefox add ons page is the Tux Racer to chrome's Mario Kart. One has the passion and enthusiasm of well respected open source volunteers behind it, and the other has a sleek high quality shine only our dear corporate overlords could deliver. This is minor, but it sets the mood the for the whole experience of add ons. (Of which, I only need uBlock Origin"). In general, it's easier to find what I'm looking for, see what's trending, and generally browse for extensions in the chrome store. EDIT: The chrome store is also much faster and more responsive. Aside from that, Chrome seems to have more active developers because of it's better brand name. On /r/cscareerqustions, for example, you'll hear people ask about ideas for resume-boosting side projects. One of the first answers is usually "make a chrome extension". I have yet to see anyone say "make a firefox extension" or "make a cross platform browser extension". Either way, it's all personal preference. I'm sure you prefer a different model car, style of clothing, and a favorite color than me too. It's all ok. There's no right answer here.

notwhereyouare 11y ago

>the most configurable, has the best extension ecosystem. that's why I haven't left chrome. I HATE some of the stuff they (google) do, but I can make this my browser and I like the overall appearance

akerro 11y ago
Can you force it not to download binary blobs that turn on your microphone?

overcast 11y ago

I came in here, to share my experience between Safari and Chrome, and it looks like you've iterated exactly the same sentiment. After El Capitan came out, and the changes to Safari, I REALLY gave it a shot. A sleek interface, and certainly fast, but it chews through RAM at an insane rate. There is no rhyme or reason to it, I can have a fresh window open, restore previous session of ten tabs, and after a few hours, each tab starts consuming 5GB+ of RAM until everything is exhausted. Chrome(Canary) on the other hand, twice as many tabs open, and it never runs away with RAM usage. It still uses a hundred megs per tab, but none of them go crazy. I need to have every browser under the sun installed for testing, but Chrome is the only thing I can keep opening without killing my Mac Pro that has 28GB of RAM.

ZanyProgrammer 11y ago
Its hard to parse these responses because everyone says that their browser that they don't use uses RAM at ridiculous rates.
- overcast 11y ago
  I use every browser, Safari primarily since El Capitan. It was only in the last week or so that I've just had enough of dealing with it killing my machine. I had to systematically kill each tab process on a regular basis.

meburns 11y ago

This is exactly the same experience I have had. I gave Safari a few months, added extensions, etc. I just found myself banging my head against the wall over certain things that Chrome had natively that Safari choose not to have.

forgottenpass 11y ago

I think it's the tabs. For whatever reason, chrome is simply the best browser for those 50 tab research sessions. You might like this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

executive 11y ago

I use Chrome for the Duplicate Tab feature.

thrownaway2424 11y ago

Being logged into chrome is really the best feature they offer. I love having all my tabs on all my devices, and a unified omnibox history and all that.

barrkel 11y ago

Until Chrome has Tree Style Tabs, it's not a viable competitor to FF for me. Chrome is a fine development environment though.

wiremine 11y ago

> It's certainly snappier than the alternatives. I recently got a new, high-end Macbook Pro (16GB, 1TB SSD, i7 2.8Gz). I've been a long-time Chrome user, but I figured this would be a good time to try Safari: I've heard good things about it's energy usage. I used Safari as my primary browser for about 2 weeks, and just switched back to Chrome. Safari wasn't bad, but it seems to take a LONG time to make connections to websites. And sometimes it would just hang indefinitely. At first I thought this was a machine issue, but all my other networking apps (Chrome, Postman, etc.) return immediately. Like parent comment, I really want to like Safari...

mhb 11y ago
Energy usage? What would the difference in energy used be for Chrome vs. Safari vs. Firefox?
- wiremine 11y ago
  Check out this article, or google around for others. Apple has spent a lot of time making Safari more efficient to extend battery life: http://bgr.com/2015/08/05/google-chrome-vs-safari-battery-life/ http://bgr.com/2015/08/05/google-chrome-vs-safari-battery-li...
  - mhb 11y ago
    Ah. I wasn't thinking of batteries.

iamben 11y ago

'The Great Suspender' has been invaluable for me (a heavy tab user) in clawing back some system resources. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspender/klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspende...

QuantumCookie 11y ago

Firefox's tab groups, combined with "Don't load tabs until I click on them", are what I use to deal with dozens of tabs. Though being able to have more groups sat in the background with comparatively little performance hit definitely feeds my tab addiction...

rconti 11y ago

I really like Safari on OS X. It's my go-to browser on my personal machine, and on my work machine, it's my "personal" browser (I'm typing this into safari). I use Chrome for my work stuff. But maybe this is down to your tab preferences. I simply hate tabs. To me, they're the sign of a failed window manager. I don't feel it's the job of every application to reinvent the UX wheel and implement tab functions differently from every other application. Maybe some day an operating system will support tabs natively?

jacobolus 11y ago

> For whatever reason, chrome is simply the best browser for those 50 tab research sessions Wait, what? For me, Chrome is utterly unusable for “research sessions” (aka routine browsing). It starts chewing up resources like crazy and completely falls over when I try using it for any amount of time with 25+ tabs open. Google’s non-search webapps seem to be particular offenders: more than a few tabs of them open in Chrome brings my fast laptop to its knees. Firefox is good up to about 100 tabs, but becomes a big CPU and memory hog and inevitably crashes after a day or two. In Safari, I routinely keep 200+ tabs open for weeks at a time with no problem (though eventually I start running out of system memory; not sure if there’s a slow memory leak, or if badly written websites just require indefinitely large amounts when kept open, or what; usually by that point there’s a new security update to install in any case).

TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
Right now I have an insane 503 tabs open in Chrome. (Sometimes I'm lazy, and I forget to clean up.) But I have 32GB RAM. And The Great Suspender, which is a must-have for anyone who uses Chrome.