10 ms·

I feel like my case is an anomaly compared to others on this thread, but this has been a consistent experience for me. I hoard tabs and easily reach 40 tabs in

by sharmi 10y ago

I feel like my case is an anomaly compared to others on this thread, but this has been a consistent experience for me. I hoard tabs and easily reach 40 tabs in a single session. It is typical to have 60-100 tabs open at any point in time. I find that firefox handles this much better than chrome does. Any time the tab count exceeds 15 or so in Chrome, my whole system slows down and freezes. I am forced to close some tabs and restart chrome to get some sanity. Often system reboot is the only option. In firefox the same system slowdown happens, but rarer than chrome, usually I have nearly 200 tabs open and running for a long time. In such cases, I just have to restart firefox. Firefox presents me with the restore window which is a much saner way to select only the tabs I want. Even in that case, when I restore, it does not load all the tabs, only the active ones, so it does not impact system performance. The only time firefox becomes slow even on startup is when I have restore windows several levels deep (yes, there is such a thing :) ) and I believe I am wholly responsible for that and not firefox. So it really surprises me when people say Chrome is more performant. Also, maybe because of familiarity, I find firefox Developer Tools more usable than Chrome's. But what do I know? I am a server side person dabbling in UI for my personal projects, not a web designer :) I dread Firefox following the footsteps of Chrome! Oh, and not to mention the scores of chrome processes that pollute the process list! when I run the `ps` command or the `top` command, it is difficult to locate the process that I am actually looking for. Also, it is much, much harder to estimate how much memory and processor time Chrome is really consuming when there are so many processes of Chrome running. May be I am doing it wrong. Some one please enlighten me.

cpeterso 10y ago
I know many Mozilla developers are "tab hoarders" with hundreds of tabs, so I am confident that your use case will get plenty of attention. :)
- Grue3 10y ago
  How do they manage all these tabs without Tab Groups then (which they removed)?
  - rhelmer 10y ago
    Tab Groups was moved to an extension, and has had a lot of nice improvements: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-groups-panorama/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-groups-pa... A lot of folks use https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta... Personally I use separate windows for separate tasks, so I can close a whole window when I am done with something (research, work, tabs from HN, etc.)
newscracker 10y ago
I don't think your usage is an anomaly at all. People use open tabs like a read-it-later list, and so far I couldn't get used to a service like that (or bookmarks) because I forget that I even added them in the first place (out of sight, out of mind). Right now, Tree Style Tabs, Tab Mix Plus, Session Manager and loading tabs on demand are what help me manage my tabs well. I have had several hundred tabs open in Firefox many a times (yes, there are valid reasons), and that affects startup time (even with loading tabs on demand) and exit time (the time taken for process to terminate after the windows disappear). I have read about people who do the same (or a lot more). In my observation over several years, Firefox has been able to handle many more tabs with lesser CPU and memory usage (aka sluggishness) than Chrome ever could. Chrome is always sluggish after opening several tabs and consumes a lot more memory. What's worse is recovery in Chrome. Restoring sessions and tabs in Firefox has been a breeze for a long time, and even as recent as a few days ago, I had to struggle doing that in Chrome (the session manager extension there is not reliable at all, nor is Chrome's own crash recovery). On the multi-process model, Firefox is now using one process for the entire browser chrome (UI) and one process for the content. I have also dreaded that Firefox multi-process would become sluggish like Chrome, but we'll have to wait and see how the development progresses. The Firefox developers do know a lot more about Chrome's issues on this front, and I'm sure they will tread cautiously and adopt some kind of trade-offs that provide adquate security (better sandboxing), stability and performance. To check memory use in Chrome, go to about:memory and you should be able to get details of all Chrome processes and the totals. Pressing Shift+Esc when in Chrome would also show all the Chrome tab stats (similar to a task manager window).
- tracker1 10y ago
  Thanks so much for about:memory and shift+esc ... I always forget about them.
- flushandforget 10y ago
  Periodically I keep coming back to HN to pretty much say the same thing. Which is that tabs are used as a replacement for bookmarks. And that's pretty much because of the failing of a good browser bookmark UI. I've tried many tab extensions and haven't been happy with any of them. You can easily leapfrog Chrome with a better web interface and web page helpers. I see no radically visible innovation with Firefox or Chrome for that matter. I had an Apple Powerbook, that with age couldn't cope with 'modern' web sites. So I took great pains to make browsing easier. Now I notice the same creep on 'modern' machines. JS may be processed faster, and pages rendered quicker, but many web resources are becoming more bloated and this ruins the browsing experience. I have gone back to having one browser with no javascript running, just so I can read some pages, as I'm fed up with the inherent slow down. Yeah some 'appy' sites/pages are impressive. But the bog standard web pages that eat my computer's resources to display a few adverts alongside a passage of text or a picture is pretty dreadful. Being able to easily identify and manage these laggy sites would be a help. There are tools but they aren't that accessible or easy to read or use. And after running Windows 10 for the first time at the weekend, I can see how the Desktop UI and admin interface is still comparatively stuck in the stone age. So in short I think there is plenty of room for improvement, across the board.
bad_user 10y ago
I keep switching between Firefox and Chrome. I want to be using Firefox, except I cannot. Chrome is designed for web apps. If you keep several apps open in Firefox, like say Gmail, FastMail, Slack, Gitter, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp Web and Google Music or YouTube, pretty soon Firefox ends up being really, really sluggish. And I keep these apps pinned, and the startup experience for Firefox gets horrible. Firefox also has problems with many services, where loading a single link can make your whole browser unresponsive for a long time or even crash it. To see what I mean, load this Travis log in Firefox and compare with Chrome: https://travis-ci.org/monixio/monix/builds/148774867 https://travis-ci.org/monixio/monix/builds/148774867 ; and this is just one sample, there are others that bother me, like the OpenTSDB UI. Personally I don't keep 200 tabs open, because I'm focusing on just a few at a time. If I want to go back to something valuable, I use bookmarks (or more recently Pinboard.in). This is because tabs are hard to manage and search, unless you have one of those fancy extensions, but I dislike those as well. On add-ons, I very much appreciate Mozilla having a good review process, but those add-ons have no isolation and everything is allowed to run even in private mode. The fact is, if I can't comfortably run my web apps in Firefox, I'll keep going back to Chrome. And yes I keep trying using native apps, like Thunderbird and Adium/Pidgin. It isn't working out.
- the8472 10y ago
  > On add-ons, I very much appreciate Mozilla having a good review process, but those add-ons have no isolation and everything is allowed to run even in private mode. To me, that's a good thing. I don't like walled gardens because then you, the commoner, have to beg your benevolent ruler to please allow a particular use-case to be supported in their fiefdom.
- ploxiln 10y ago
  Notice also that the Raw Log loads instantly and is very responsive, in the same Firefox that struggles so much with the fancy travis log page. I think it is unfortunate that insanely heavy web applications, which can kinda get away with it in Chrome, are forcing everyone to Chrome.
  - tracker1 10y ago
ww520 10y ago
I noticed that Chrome is more performant when heavy Javascript is involved. Firefox works better with heavy tab usage. I usually run Firefox for general browsing and Chrome for one-off dedicated app.
- sharmi 10y ago
  yes, I too find that Google Drive apps works better under chrome and leads to weird errors in Firefox. So I have Chrome hanging around just for this case.
  - Sylos 10y ago
    Not terribly representative, though, that browser A would do worse than browser B on browser B's vendor's web property...
j45 10y ago
I usually leave several hundred tabs open across multiple browsers at the same time. New window for each project, and tabs within them. Between my own projects, and clients, and research on the go, I find it works for me. I would get little done if I wasn't using the vimium plugin to search my tabs much like Alfred let's me search my mac. Another use case for lots of tabs is using the great Spaces feature in Firefox. You can fire up and maintain multiple groups of tabs and windows per project. It's a great way to switch contexts. The main reason I used Chrome/Chromium was to have a sense of which Tab was a runaway process. Hoping Firefox v48 is a step in teh right direction.
tracker1 10y ago
I use a tab suspender that will suspend background tabs after a couple minutes... I'll whitelist internal apps, and lighter pages (like HN). It helps quite a bit. I have to agree on it being harder to track how much memory chrome is really using... also, hard to tell which process is for what tab or extension. I haven't been a heavy Firefox user for a while, I find the opposite case when trying to debug in Firefox. For me the bigger draw to chrome is I happen to like the UI more... I no longer see the need for the separate search input, sometimes the fast paced changes to chome's UI can be cumbersome. That said, I work in OSX, Windows and Linux (Ubuntu Unity) pretty regularly, so it's always different somewhere.
sideproject 10y ago
60-100!! That's (personally) so many. How do you know which tab is which and where it is? My colleague has about 20 or 30 tabs open on Chrome and each time he wants me to look over his chrome for any debugging purpose, I get frusrated that I can't find where the right tab is! (I'm assuming there is a better tab management tool out there).
- ivanche 10y ago
  TabMixPlus to the rescue :) I set all tabs to have fixed width (so around 8 tabs per row) and to show 3 rows of tabs. Also unread tabs have title in red italic, current tab in blue bold and read tabs in black regular. Works for me :)
- akerro 10y ago
  I use TreeStyleTab [1] and usually have more than 150 tabs at the same time on my PC and around 60-100 on my professional computers (at home and at work). I sort them by category, then when I have a spare day I read dozens of news one by one, or when I'm in a mood, I read by categories what I like. In the last 3 years I tried to switch to Opera and Chome a few times, but they... they just suck for my requirements. Firefox lets you search by bookmark, history and open tabs, which is really useful in my cases (I also have hundreds of bookmarks). [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
- bzbarsky 10y ago
  > and where it is? Firefox has UI for searching your tabs. You focus the location bar, type "% " followed by a string (but don't hit enter!) and it searches the urls and titles of the things in your tabs for that string and shows you a list of results. Selecting one of those results will select the corresponding tab. If you leave out the "% " it will still search your open tabs, but also your history; some of the history results can appear above some of the tab results, depending on how often you visit pages vs selecting their tabs and whatnot. >How do you know which tab is which Firefox always shows the site icon and first word or two of the page title in the tab; unlike Chrome it has a minimal tab size (precisely so you can see what the tab is!) and a scrolling UI so you can go swipe through the list when there are too many to fit in the window and look for the one you want if you don't want to use the text search option. There are also various extensions that help people manage tabs, but even the built-in setup is quite usable (speaking as someone who has a lot of tabs open and does not use those extensions). I agree that Chrome's non-scrolling UI, which just shrinks the tabs until nothing is visible in the tab and then starts not showing the later ones at all so you have to use keyboard shortcuts to even consider trying to get to them, makes using more than about 10 tabs pretty much impossible. But that's just because the UI sucks, not an inherent property of having many tabs open.
lucian1900 10y ago
Why not use bookmarks instead? That's what they're for.
- sharmi 10y ago
  Trust me I tried it! Only the bookmarks became a forest I could not find my way in or out. Atleast when they are tabs, when firefox starts slowing down, i realize there is too much and trim some down. That said, I use evernote to clip urls that will be useful in the future. The tabs that are open are transient ones, that are required only in the context of a current research or feature implementation and would not be needed once concluded. I suppose, I am a pathological reader and researcher who needs to look at all opinions, find all apps that provide a feature and try them all, dig deep into each solution etc etc. Sometimes that leads to analysis paralysis. Not at all a good thing.
- petval 10y ago
  You can't see the page from the bookmark and you forget the content just from the bookmark title. Well maybe not you but many people including me do.
- superkuh 10y ago
  Bookmarks don't save the per-tab history. With tab sessions you can go back and see what search terms and sites you used to get somewhere.
piyush_soni 10y ago
I am another user with similar habits. I think separating the UI process from contents is still required (since you use so many tabs as well, you must have faced UI blocking problems) - though not so sure about having a separate process for each page.
petval 10y ago
Don't dread it, it got better :) See my other post here.
oevi 10y ago
You can use the excellent OneTab extension for Chrome: https://www.one-tab.com/ https://www.one-tab.com/ Just click on the button if you notice a slow down and restore the tabs later either selectively or as group.
Vendan 10y ago
I regularly have 200~300 tabs open in a single session in chrome. Yes, it gets a little hard to find what I want, but it still runs excellent.

by sharmi 10y ago

cpeterso 10y ago

I know many Mozilla developers are "tab hoarders" with hundreds of tabs, so I am confident that your use case will get plenty of attention. :)

Grue3 10y ago
How do they manage all these tabs without Tab Groups then (which they removed)?
- rhelmer 10y ago
  Tab Groups was moved to an extension, and has had a lot of nice improvements: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-groups-panorama/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-groups-pa... A lot of folks use https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta... Personally I use separate windows for separate tasks, so I can close a whole window when I am done with something (research, work, tabs from HN, etc.)

newscracker 10y ago

I don't think your usage is an anomaly at all. People use open tabs like a read-it-later list, and so far I couldn't get used to a service like that (or bookmarks) because I forget that I even added them in the first place (out of sight, out of mind). Right now, Tree Style Tabs, Tab Mix Plus, Session Manager and loading tabs on demand are what help me manage my tabs well. I have had several hundred tabs open in Firefox many a times (yes, there are valid reasons), and that affects startup time (even with loading tabs on demand) and exit time (the time taken for process to terminate after the windows disappear). I have read about people who do the same (or a lot more). In my observation over several years, Firefox has been able to handle many more tabs with lesser CPU and memory usage (aka sluggishness) than Chrome ever could. Chrome is always sluggish after opening several tabs and consumes a lot more memory. What's worse is recovery in Chrome. Restoring sessions and tabs in Firefox has been a breeze for a long time, and even as recent as a few days ago, I had to struggle doing that in Chrome (the session manager extension there is not reliable at all, nor is Chrome's own crash recovery). On the multi-process model, Firefox is now using one process for the entire browser chrome (UI) and one process for the content. I have also dreaded that Firefox multi-process would become sluggish like Chrome, but we'll have to wait and see how the development progresses. The Firefox developers do know a lot more about Chrome's issues on this front, and I'm sure they will tread cautiously and adopt some kind of trade-offs that provide adquate security (better sandboxing), stability and performance. To check memory use in Chrome, go to about:memory and you should be able to get details of all Chrome processes and the totals. Pressing Shift+Esc when in Chrome would also show all the Chrome tab stats (similar to a task manager window).

tracker1 10y ago
Thanks so much for about:memory and shift+esc ... I always forget about them.
flushandforget 10y ago
Periodically I keep coming back to HN to pretty much say the same thing. Which is that tabs are used as a replacement for bookmarks. And that's pretty much because of the failing of a good browser bookmark UI. I've tried many tab extensions and haven't been happy with any of them. You can easily leapfrog Chrome with a better web interface and web page helpers. I see no radically visible innovation with Firefox or Chrome for that matter. I had an Apple Powerbook, that with age couldn't cope with 'modern' web sites. So I took great pains to make browsing easier. Now I notice the same creep on 'modern' machines. JS may be processed faster, and pages rendered quicker, but many web resources are becoming more bloated and this ruins the browsing experience. I have gone back to having one browser with no javascript running, just so I can read some pages, as I'm fed up with the inherent slow down. Yeah some 'appy' sites/pages are impressive. But the bog standard web pages that eat my computer's resources to display a few adverts alongside a passage of text or a picture is pretty dreadful. Being able to easily identify and manage these laggy sites would be a help. There are tools but they aren't that accessible or easy to read or use. And after running Windows 10 for the first time at the weekend, I can see how the Desktop UI and admin interface is still comparatively stuck in the stone age. So in short I think there is plenty of room for improvement, across the board.

bad_user 10y ago

I keep switching between Firefox and Chrome. I want to be using Firefox, except I cannot. Chrome is designed for web apps. If you keep several apps open in Firefox, like say Gmail, FastMail, Slack, Gitter, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp Web and Google Music or YouTube, pretty soon Firefox ends up being really, really sluggish. And I keep these apps pinned, and the startup experience for Firefox gets horrible. Firefox also has problems with many services, where loading a single link can make your whole browser unresponsive for a long time or even crash it. To see what I mean, load this Travis log in Firefox and compare with Chrome: https://travis-ci.org/monixio/monix/builds/148774867 https://travis-ci.org/monixio/monix/builds/148774867 ; and this is just one sample, there are others that bother me, like the OpenTSDB UI. Personally I don't keep 200 tabs open, because I'm focusing on just a few at a time. If I want to go back to something valuable, I use bookmarks (or more recently Pinboard.in). This is because tabs are hard to manage and search, unless you have one of those fancy extensions, but I dislike those as well. On add-ons, I very much appreciate Mozilla having a good review process, but those add-ons have no isolation and everything is allowed to run even in private mode. The fact is, if I can't comfortably run my web apps in Firefox, I'll keep going back to Chrome. And yes I keep trying using native apps, like Thunderbird and Adium/Pidgin. It isn't working out.

the8472 10y ago
> On add-ons, I very much appreciate Mozilla having a good review process, but those add-ons have no isolation and everything is allowed to run even in private mode. To me, that's a good thing. I don't like walled gardens because then you, the commoner, have to beg your benevolent ruler to please allow a particular use-case to be supported in their fiefdom.
ploxiln 10y ago
Notice also that the Raw Log loads instantly and is very responsive, in the same Firefox that struggles so much with the fancy travis log page. I think it is unfortunate that insanely heavy web applications, which can kinda get away with it in Chrome, are forcing everyone to Chrome.
- tracker1 10y ago

ww520 10y ago

I noticed that Chrome is more performant when heavy Javascript is involved. Firefox works better with heavy tab usage. I usually run Firefox for general browsing and Chrome for one-off dedicated app.

sharmi 10y ago
yes, I too find that Google Drive apps works better under chrome and leads to weird errors in Firefox. So I have Chrome hanging around just for this case.
- Sylos 10y ago
  Not terribly representative, though, that browser A would do worse than browser B on browser B's vendor's web property...

j45 10y ago

I usually leave several hundred tabs open across multiple browsers at the same time. New window for each project, and tabs within them. Between my own projects, and clients, and research on the go, I find it works for me. I would get little done if I wasn't using the vimium plugin to search my tabs much like Alfred let's me search my mac. Another use case for lots of tabs is using the great Spaces feature in Firefox. You can fire up and maintain multiple groups of tabs and windows per project. It's a great way to switch contexts. The main reason I used Chrome/Chromium was to have a sense of which Tab was a runaway process. Hoping Firefox v48 is a step in teh right direction.

tracker1 10y ago

I use a tab suspender that will suspend background tabs after a couple minutes... I'll whitelist internal apps, and lighter pages (like HN). It helps quite a bit. I have to agree on it being harder to track how much memory chrome is really using... also, hard to tell which process is for what tab or extension. I haven't been a heavy Firefox user for a while, I find the opposite case when trying to debug in Firefox. For me the bigger draw to chrome is I happen to like the UI more... I no longer see the need for the separate search input, sometimes the fast paced changes to chome's UI can be cumbersome. That said, I work in OSX, Windows and Linux (Ubuntu Unity) pretty regularly, so it's always different somewhere.

sideproject 10y ago

60-100!! That's (personally) so many. How do you know which tab is which and where it is? My colleague has about 20 or 30 tabs open on Chrome and each time he wants me to look over his chrome for any debugging purpose, I get frusrated that I can't find where the right tab is! (I'm assuming there is a better tab management tool out there).

ivanche 10y ago
TabMixPlus to the rescue :) I set all tabs to have fixed width (so around 8 tabs per row) and to show 3 rows of tabs. Also unread tabs have title in red italic, current tab in blue bold and read tabs in black regular. Works for me :)
akerro 10y ago
I use TreeStyleTab [1] and usually have more than 150 tabs at the same time on my PC and around 60-100 on my professional computers (at home and at work). I sort them by category, then when I have a spare day I read dozens of news one by one, or when I'm in a mood, I read by categories what I like. In the last 3 years I tried to switch to Opera and Chome a few times, but they... they just suck for my requirements. Firefox lets you search by bookmark, history and open tabs, which is really useful in my cases (I also have hundreds of bookmarks). [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
bzbarsky 10y ago
> and where it is? Firefox has UI for searching your tabs. You focus the location bar, type "% " followed by a string (but don't hit enter!) and it searches the urls and titles of the things in your tabs for that string and shows you a list of results. Selecting one of those results will select the corresponding tab. If you leave out the "% " it will still search your open tabs, but also your history; some of the history results can appear above some of the tab results, depending on how often you visit pages vs selecting their tabs and whatnot. >How do you know which tab is which Firefox always shows the site icon and first word or two of the page title in the tab; unlike Chrome it has a minimal tab size (precisely so you can see what the tab is!) and a scrolling UI so you can go swipe through the list when there are too many to fit in the window and look for the one you want if you don't want to use the text search option. There are also various extensions that help people manage tabs, but even the built-in setup is quite usable (speaking as someone who has a lot of tabs open and does not use those extensions). I agree that Chrome's non-scrolling UI, which just shrinks the tabs until nothing is visible in the tab and then starts not showing the later ones at all so you have to use keyboard shortcuts to even consider trying to get to them, makes using more than about 10 tabs pretty much impossible. But that's just because the UI sucks, not an inherent property of having many tabs open.

lucian1900 10y ago

Why not use bookmarks instead? That's what they're for.

sharmi 10y ago
Trust me I tried it! Only the bookmarks became a forest I could not find my way in or out. Atleast when they are tabs, when firefox starts slowing down, i realize there is too much and trim some down. That said, I use evernote to clip urls that will be useful in the future. The tabs that are open are transient ones, that are required only in the context of a current research or feature implementation and would not be needed once concluded. I suppose, I am a pathological reader and researcher who needs to look at all opinions, find all apps that provide a feature and try them all, dig deep into each solution etc etc. Sometimes that leads to analysis paralysis. Not at all a good thing.
petval 10y ago
You can't see the page from the bookmark and you forget the content just from the bookmark title. Well maybe not you but many people including me do.
superkuh 10y ago
Bookmarks don't save the per-tab history. With tab sessions you can go back and see what search terms and sites you used to get somewhere.

piyush_soni 10y ago

I am another user with similar habits. I think separating the UI process from contents is still required (since you use so many tabs as well, you must have faced UI blocking problems) - though not so sure about having a separate process for each page.

petval 10y ago

Don't dread it, it got better :) See my other post here.

oevi 10y ago

You can use the excellent OneTab extension for Chrome: https://www.one-tab.com/ https://www.one-tab.com/ Just click on the button if you notice a slow down and restore the tabs later either selectively or as group.

Vendan 10y ago

I regularly have 200~300 tabs open in a single session in chrome. Yes, it gets a little hard to find what I want, but it still runs excellent.