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> But I remember the times when we had the amazing Opera browser. In Opera, I could have a hundred open tabs, and it didn’t care, it worked incredibly fast on t

> But I remember the times when we had the amazing Opera browser. In Opera, I could have a hundred open tabs, and it didn’t care, it worked incredibly fast on the hardware of its era, useless today. You may ask: why would a sane person want a hundred open tabs, how would you even manage that? Well, Opera has had a great UI for that, which nobody has ever matched. Working with a hundred tabs in Opera was much easier back then than working with ten in today’s Safari or Chrome. But that’s a whole different story. What would you do today if you opened a link and saw a long article which you don’t have time to read right now, but want to read later? You would save a link and close the tab. But when your browser is fast, you just don’t tend to close tabs which you haven’t dealt with. In Opera, I would let tabs stay open for months without having any impact on my machine’s performance. This is exactly how I'm using Firefox, right now -- 273 tabs open. It's sitting at ~5% of CPU and 450MB of RAM. And switching tabs is instantaneous. And it doesn't reload every page when I quit and restart my browser -- it only loads a tab when I click into that tab. And it has tab groups so that my current group has only about 8 tabs in it, and the other groups are sorted by topic. And on and on. I find it frustrating when people post these articles as if everyone has this problem, and don't provide enough details as to their setup so that people can help them fix it. I promise you -- if everyone around the world right now had the problem the author was having, it would have been solved. No one would stand for it. Rather than assume everyone is suffering just like you, assume that other people either a) don't behave the way you do, or b) have found a way to fix the problem.

prewett 10y ago
I'm assuming you don't have a GMail tab open. My Firefox memory usage steadily climbs if I have a GMail tab open.
- owaislone 10y ago
  or any Google drive document.
- 21echoes 10y ago
  Mmmm that's true, I don't. I tend to close GMail tabs once I'm done with them because I also noticed they tend to leak and are poorly optimized for non-Chrome browsers.
  - candiodari 10y ago
    Happens to my chrome as well.
- superkuh 10y ago
  I run a similar number of tabs in Pale Moon (browser) with slightly better performance. But most of this is because I make a choice not to use shitty website that are written in javascript instead of html.
- thecopy 10y ago
  I have started to use HTML version of GMail. Really refreshing to have a snappy interface again. Manual Ctrl+R to refresh though. That tab is using 1.4MB of RAM.
owaislone 10y ago
> This is exactly how I'm using Firefox, right now -- 273 tabs open. It's sitting at ~5% of CPU and 450MB of RAM. And switching tabs is instantaneous. Which platform are you on? Which Firefox version? Stock or tweaked? Any special add-ons? I use Firefox on OS X and it crawls after 10-15 tabs. Consumes many gigs of memory. Chrome isn't any better. It just splits the memory consumption among multiple processes. I don't remember browsers being this slow on Linux. Time to go back to the magic land.
- 21echoes 10y ago
  Mac El Capitan, FirefoxDeveloperEdition (which iirc is basically equivalent to Firefox Beta), not many addons (Tab Groups, uBlock Origin, No More 404s).
  - abrowne 10y ago
    > FirefoxDeveloperEdition (which iirc is basically equivalent to Firefox Beta) The Developer Edition replaced Aurora, which was the alpha release, one version between the beta and Nightly.
    - lagadu 10y ago
      AKA: the alpha :) Credit to them though, Aurora was surprisingly stable for most of its lifetime, despite not even being a beta.
      - nicoburns 10y ago
        Even more impressive, the Nightly versions of both Chrome and Firefox are (almost always) stable enough for daily use. I use them as my everyday browsers at work, and they probably crash / have bugs about 1 day out of every 2 months.
        abrowne 10y ago
        Agreed. I started using Nightly — instead of my usually Beta¹ — for the up-to-date GTK+ 3.2x compatibility, but I like some of the pre-release features, and it almost never crashes on me 1: On Ubuntu you can use their Firefox Beta PPA² as long as you don't mind that it replaces release-version Firefox. 2: https://launchpad.net/~mozillateam/+archive/ubuntu/firefox-next https://launchpad.net/~mozillateam/+archive/ubuntu/firefox-n...
vacri 10y ago
Yeah, the article got up my nose as well. I've got a couple of hundred tabs in tab groups in FF, probably about 50 have something in them (the others aren't loaded until I navigate to them). Opening a new tab is instant. I get a fair bit more resource usage than you're reporting, though...
StavrosK 10y ago
I don't know which Firefox you're using, but I want it. Mine is super laggy all the time, even with one or two tabs open. Opening a new tab takes half a second, visiting a new page takes half a second, going back takes half a second. It's extremely frustrating to use, and I don't even have that many extensions or history pages.
- semicolon_storm 10y ago
  6 tabs, 1GB of RAM, ~20% CPU usage for me on Firefox. I have a few basic QoL plugins like LastPass, uBlock, and NoScript. It's absolutely ridiculous. I want to keep using FireFox, but it's forcing me to consider moving to another browser.
  - mkj 10y ago
    If there are only 6 tabs it should be easy to narrow down which is a problem?
  - mixmastamyk 10y ago
    Vacuuming your profile might help: #!/bin/bash killall firefox for file in ~/.mozilla/firefox/*.default/*.sqlite; do echo sqlite3 "$file" VACUUM sqlite3 "$file" VACUUM done I do it in my once-a-month cleanup script.
    - na85 10y ago
      I remember the days when leaving Windows meant not having to futz with cleanup scripts. What happened?
      - sp332 10y ago
        Firefox and SQLite have actually improved a lot since those days. And it's not like Firefox uses a different database system on different platforms, it's all exactly the same.
      - mgurlitz 10y ago
chongli 10y ago
It's interesting how tabs have supplanted bookmarks for a lot of people. Neither one is a particularly good UI, mind you, but tabs are a little bit better than bookmarks. I wish something even better would come along but I don't really know what that would look like.
- smhenderson 10y ago
  I love "bookmark all tabs" commands. I tend to open a lot of related tabs and run out of time like the OP but I don't leave the all open, I bookmark them all with a few clicks and move on... But I agree about the UI in general. My habit seems to require some monthly to quarterly clean up to keep it from getting to be too much.
- 21echoes 10y ago
  Firefox with Tab Groups and AwesomeBar fits very nicely with my workflow-- 1. I dont have to think. I Cmd+Click links as I find them interesting, switch tabs as my attention changes, etc. and the tabs just stay there, waiting. 2. AwesomeBar searches over open tabs by default, and selecting a suggestion switches to that open tab rather than opening a new one. 3. When I have time, I can sort my tabs into labelled groups ("Work", "Research", "Shopping", "Politics", etc.) 4. Tabs are sync'd to and from my Firefox for Android automatically, so if I'm on the move and I want to pull up that thing on the tip of my tongue, it's right there on my phone as well. I'm sure it's not perfect for everyone, but it works for me /shrug
  - weaksauce 10y ago
    You might (might not) find my extension useful. I made it for people that horde tabs like you and me. It's a page that lists tabs per window visually and if you click on one of the links it focuses the tab for you. Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabist/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabist/ and chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabist/hdjegjggiogfkaldbfphfdkpggjemaha https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabist/hdjegjggiog... It's also open source: https://github.com/fiveNinePlusR/tabist https://github.com/fiveNinePlusR/tabist If you end up trying it, let me know if you find it useful/hate it or have something that should be added :)
jdright 10y ago
I really doubt you and you dont provide any details about your setup either. I have exactly the same issues as the poster. I have about 20 tabs and it is costing 1.7GB ram. Note that I almost never reboot, so it may well be leaks, but even so, on eventual crashes, reloading my tabs is painfully slow.
- 21echoes 10y ago
  Mac El Capitan, FirefoxDeveloperEdition (which iirc is basically equivalent to Firefox Beta), not many addons (Tab Groups, uBlock Origin, No More 404s). I can screenshot my Activity Monitor if that'd help?
  - jdright 10y ago
    At this exactly time I have 27 tabs, this is the memory usage: Image PID Hard Faults/sec Commit (KB) Working Set (KB) Shareable (KB) Private (KB) firefox.exe 10604 0 1,529,308 1,491,692 62,348 1,429,344 I'm on Windows 7, 39 days and 5 hours up time. This Firefox instance is running since: 8:05:29 AM 05/12/2016 Firefox 50 (with a pending update). Also, I see the process as a 32-bits image but I was sure it was 64-bits, will need to check on this. And I have only: Facebook Ads Block, Ghostery and uBlock Origin. So being Windows 7 and probably an 32bits Firefox install may cause all this difference?
PeCaN 10y ago
Really? You're the first person I've heard that doesn't have that problem. My Firefox gets quite slow on both my home and work computers¹ at ~40+ tabs. The tab groups extension (which they removed from core, I guess to make room for Pocket and Hello²) does make managing lots of tabs much easier however. I regularly have to clean out my tabs or switching takes several seconds. I currently have 37 tabs open and Firefox is using ~800MB of RAM. Basically, either you're doing something really magical with your Firefox, or are just spewing bullshit. Someone's going to say its the fault of extensions (what good is Firefox without extensions, anyway) so let's see: - Decentraleyes (locally emulates CDNs) - HTTPS Everywhere (why is this not the default behavior?) - OverbiteFF (support for the gopher protocol) - Perapera (Mandarin word splitting and Mandarin↔English dictionary) - Pinboard (I can't imagine this uses any significant resources whatsoever) - Random Agent Spoofer (change user agent at random) - Reddit Enhancement Suite - Tab Groups (I miss when tab panorama was default, but I can see why it's an extension) - uBlock Origin - uMatrix (possibly my single favorite Firefox extension; control JS and more, like NoScript on steroids and easier to use) - VimFx That's… actually quite a lot. I wonder if extensions alone are my problem, but then again Firefox without extensions isn't much better than Edge (and Edge seems faster on average). I don't think I've tweaked any settings in about:config. Is that enough details about my setup for people to help fix it? Anecdotally complaints about how slow Firefox is seem fairly common. I think your last paragraph is a bit off the mark. -- 1. Both Windows 10 Pro; 16GB/32GB of RAM respectively; both 4GHz i7-4790k; anyway, point is they're pretty good computers. 2. Kidding, but fuck Mozilla
- minitech 10y ago
  > - Decentraleyes (locally emulates CDNs) has to intercept every request > - HTTPS Everywhere (why is this not the default behavior?) has to intercept every request > - OverbiteFF (support for the gopher protocol) might have to intercept every request, and why do you need this > - Random Agent Spoofer (change user agent at random) has to intercept every request > - uBlock Origin has to intercept every request > - uMatrix (possibly my single favorite Firefox extension; control JS and more, like NoScript on steroids and easier to use) has to intercept every request Stop installing so many stupid extensions. Random UA switching is especially pointless; “Decentraleyes” is a close runner-up. Firefox has performance problems, but I think you’re definitely seeing extension bloat if you have that kind of device.
zie 10y ago
Picture proof of memory usage: http://imgur.com/a/7RgZt http://imgur.com/a/7RgZt FF 1.3GB memory with 10 tabs and 5% of CPU, with FF in the background. Switching tabs is absolutely not instant, opening new tabs is reasonable, bet definitely not instant. I'd love your numbers ;)
- SAI_Peregrinus 10y ago
  I'm in a similar situation to the GP. Addons used to help: BarTab Heavy - Allows unloading of unused tabs. Lets tabs act like temporary bookmarks. Tree Style Tab - Just great tab management. uBlock Origin + uMatrix - Lots less cruft loaded and running to slow things down. Session Manager - Lets me save windows with groups of tabs like bookmarks, works amazingly for looking things up and being able to restore a lot of references at once.
- kpcyrd 10y ago
  Well, one of those tabs is graylog and one is gmail. Do you have e10s enabled? (open about:support, check for "Multiprocess Windows")
  - AstralStorm 10y ago
    This only works properly since 50+ version. You will get many issues if you try it in the old one.
reustle 10y ago
How does someone even begin to function with 273 open tabs, let alone be productive?
- nzp 10y ago
  Back when I used to use tabs as bookmarks, I would routinely get to >700 open tabs accumulating over the months. It was a useless agony. Pocket was a godsend for me. The urge to let tabs linger is still there sometimes, but it doesn't get over 20-ish nowadays. Sticking to GTD workflow helps too.
- 21echoes 10y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13226078 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13226078 When I'm in my working tab group, that's like 8 tabs or so. Most of the tabs in the storage groups are months old (more like bookmarks I didn't have to hit Cmd+D to save)
kilroy123 10y ago
While I don't have _that_ many tabs open. I do usually keep 20 - 50 open in chrome. Same experience, with low / no memory foot-print; using The Great Suspender. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspender/klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspende... I'm on a 2015 MBP with 16 GB of ram and like 20 extensions installed.
- rpwverheij 10y ago
  tnx for the tip, installed it. 1 million users, so it must be doing somethign right
- olejorgenb 10y ago
  Similar firefox extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/suspend-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/suspend-tab/
  - reitanqild 10y ago
    I also use it, thanks to a tip from HN :-)
- Keyframe 10y ago
  I vouch for The Great Suspender. Awesome extension.
MustardTiger 10y ago
You have a magic firefox then. I try to use it that way too, but its sitting at 1.8GB of RAM and 25-30% CPU usage with 103 tabs and it routinely bombs on me after a week or two when it gets up to 2.5GB or so.
ChuckMcM 10y ago
firefox 50.1 on Xubuntu - currently at 6GB of memory, when it gets above 12GB I euthanize it and restart it. About 36 open tabs.
- AstralStorm 10y ago
  If you're using an integrated Intel GPU, immediately switch to modesetting X driver. Intel DDX leaks surfaces and that is attributed to process which allocated them. Modesetting is faster too.
adventured 10y ago
That's pretty astounding to me. Firefox instantly eats 500+ mb of ram the moment I open it on Windows (16gb ram, i7 processor, ok video card). If I leave it open with one or two tabs (usually doesn't matter what sites), for about an hour, it goes up to 1.2gb to 1.4gb of ram consumption while doing nothing. If I close all tabs, the ram consumption doesn't drop, I have to close Firefox and restart it to accomplish that. It would be amazing to run more than 30 tabs. Once I leave Firefox open for a few hours, it basically becomes unusable performance wise. I've been using Firefox since it was released initially; Chrome never gives me this performance erosion problem, constantly tempts me to switch, I just happen to enjoy Firefox more. The sole extension I'm using is an ad blocker and my Firefox is always self-updated.
Terr_ 10y ago
Hah, I'm still using an old version of Opera, but the #1 speedup is simply using it's built-in (and easy to tweak) site-preferences so that only certain sites are whitelisted for Javascript. Some sites are just ridiculously faster and more-responsive, especially general news sites where all I really want is some text I can immediately read and scroll through.
olejorgenb 10y ago
The http://piro.sakura.ne.jp/xul/_suspendtab.html.en http://piro.sakura.ne.jp/xul/_suspendtab.html.en extension also help keeping cpu and memory down when using lots of tabs. (of course when a tab become suspended the state is at least partially lost)
roel_v 10y ago
I used to do this too, and as of ~ 2 weeks ago, about half of all my stored tabs are replaced with 'New tab' after restarting the browser. No amount of screwing around in the profile and session_store or whatever it's called, or with plugins, will fix it. So now I'm weaning myself off 'tabs as bookmarks', and going back (after, what, 10 years?) to using bookmarks the way they were meant.
- the8472 10y ago
  the session manager addon would have helped in that situation. it creates regular snapshots of your session which can be used to restore things if something like that happens (which is rare in my experience)
  - roel_v 10y ago
    Well from the comments on the addon page, it seems it has the same problems with multi process as the built-in session manager, and tab mix plus' session manager, have (blank windows after restoring). But I haven't tried this particular addon, it might work.
miguelrochefort 10y ago
I have ~1000 open tabs (across 50 windows) in Chrome on Windows. I have ~300 open tabs in Chrome on Android. Although they're probably not all loaded, I don't notice any major performance problem.
Elvewyn 10y ago
I'd love to know how. My Firefox, with 4 tabs open, will use up a gig of memory.
mwill 10y ago
How is this possible? I'm sitting here with an i5-4690, 32GB RAM, Firefox 50 with about 50 tabs open 1.5GB RAM usage, about half a second to get a usable new tab, and it crashes at least once every few days. Literally the only reason I'm on Firefox is tab groups, but my performace is basically identical with tab groups disabled.
- wutbrodo 10y ago
  There are factors other than browser choice that can affect this. For example, which OS are you on?
  - mwill 10y ago
    Win 10 / Arch on the same hardware, slightly better performance booted into Win 10. Used to run Win8.1 on this machine, Win 10 runs it better. Used to run Ubuntu on this machine, Arch runs it better. It would make my day if there was a silver bullet that made FF fast, or at least not crash all the time. The same machine can handle literally 10 times more Chrome tabs without any trace of struggle. But I prefer FF for a few things, so sort of stuck in between.
    - govg 10y ago
      Funny. I use Firefox on my Arch system, and at times I had to stop and remove tabs because they were becoming an unorganized mess (>600 tabs). I've never had much issues with responsiveness unless some particular website I've opened locks up, and with tab groups and tab load only on click, I can easily manage a lot of tabs without much memory use. You could try checking your RAM, I used to have an issue with FF crashing quite frequently, but found that it was part of a larger issue of having corrupt RAM on board.
      - mwill 10y ago
        I will definately look into this, because the Firefox that others are describing in this thread seems totally foreign to me.
Yizahi 10y ago
Unfortunately mine is usually climbing to 2.5 Gb with 20-30 tabs if left open for several days. As a side effect it starts using 12% CPU constantly and any script heavy page load just sends it into (Not Responding) state for 30-60 seconds. uBlock and LastPass only now, too lazy to reinstall all the other addons :) . But it is still better then Chrome performance vise. Chrome is just generally laggy and unresponsive often (no idea why).
- jsjohnst 10y ago
  LastPass seems to be a common cause among my friends and others in this thread.
shipintbrief 10y ago
that's Ilia Birman. He have all his blog written with this set of mind. God knows why people read him and why they share articles like this.
agumonkey 10y ago
Firefox is a nice workhorse. Lots to like about it. One problem is the GUI latency. Between Chrome instantaneous response and Firefox jitter I always end up back to Chrome.
nothis 10y ago
Oh, so I'm not alone in wondering what the hell he was talking about. I often have like 50 tabs open in Firefox when researching something. I notice no delay when opening an empty tab. If browsers are slow, it's mostly because of some horrible JavaScript running in the background, i.e. poorly optimized websites.
botexpert 10y ago
I use Firefox on Mac and it's extremely slow. It's laggy, it's constantly freezing for seconds or two. Having that many tabs opened is practically impossible. On Ubuntu, the behavior is vastly different.
dom0 10y ago
> This is exactly how I'm using Firefox, right now -- 273 tabs open. It's sitting at ~5% of CPU and 450MB of RAM. And switching tabs is instantaneous. Marvellous. By the time I get to maybe 70-90 open tabs Firefox will consume 4-6 GB RAM and constantly hog a CPU core. Some pages with JS cause the usual instant entire-browser lock-up. And I admit I miss the days when Opera 10 was still an up to date browser. I don't think I ever had a (subjectively) faster browser.
ianai 10y ago
I feel like OP needs to reimage his machine.
rasz_pl 10y ago
>I'm using Firefox, right now -- 273 tabs open no, you have 273 labels displayed in your browser UI, not open tabs. Opera 12.x can hold >100 real loaded and rendered tabs open at 1-2GB ram with ZERO influence on browser responsiveness. Nowadays every single tab in Chrome/Opera 40.something/Vivaldi progressively slows down UI. ~50 tabs means about 1 second UI delay when going fullscreen on YT. Not to mention the most trivial website takes ~100MB of ram, while Opera 12.x was somehow able to do the same thing in ~10MB per website.
hashhar 10y ago
Same here, at the start of August I had a total of around 350 tabs, divided into 8 groups according to topics (General, Entertainment, GitHub, Firefox Dev, GNOME Dev, Thesis, Interview Preps etc.) and my CPU idled at around 4% (2.2GHz - 2.7GHz i5 laptop) with RAM at around 1.6GB when started and routinely reached 3GB by the end of the day. It did occansionally crash the tabs while switching between too many YouTube tabs too fast. Took about 4 seconds to start a new instance (meaning that getting a usable instance, the UI came in under 2 secs), shutdown instantly.

prewett 10y ago

I'm assuming you don't have a GMail tab open. My Firefox memory usage steadily climbs if I have a GMail tab open.

owaislone 10y ago
or any Google drive document.
21echoes 10y ago
Mmmm that's true, I don't. I tend to close GMail tabs once I'm done with them because I also noticed they tend to leak and are poorly optimized for non-Chrome browsers.
- candiodari 10y ago
  Happens to my chrome as well.
superkuh 10y ago
I run a similar number of tabs in Pale Moon (browser) with slightly better performance. But most of this is because I make a choice not to use shitty website that are written in javascript instead of html.
thecopy 10y ago
I have started to use HTML version of GMail. Really refreshing to have a snappy interface again. Manual Ctrl+R to refresh though. That tab is using 1.4MB of RAM.

owaislone 10y ago

> This is exactly how I'm using Firefox, right now -- 273 tabs open. It's sitting at ~5% of CPU and 450MB of RAM. And switching tabs is instantaneous. Which platform are you on? Which Firefox version? Stock or tweaked? Any special add-ons? I use Firefox on OS X and it crawls after 10-15 tabs. Consumes many gigs of memory. Chrome isn't any better. It just splits the memory consumption among multiple processes. I don't remember browsers being this slow on Linux. Time to go back to the magic land.

21echoes 10y ago
Mac El Capitan, FirefoxDeveloperEdition (which iirc is basically equivalent to Firefox Beta), not many addons (Tab Groups, uBlock Origin, No More 404s).
- abrowne 10y ago
  > FirefoxDeveloperEdition (which iirc is basically equivalent to Firefox Beta) The Developer Edition replaced Aurora, which was the alpha release, one version between the beta and Nightly.
  - lagadu 10y ago
    AKA: the alpha :) Credit to them though, Aurora was surprisingly stable for most of its lifetime, despite not even being a beta.
    - nicoburns 10y ago
      Even more impressive, the Nightly versions of both Chrome and Firefox are (almost always) stable enough for daily use. I use them as my everyday browsers at work, and they probably crash / have bugs about 1 day out of every 2 months.
      - abrowne 10y ago
        Agreed. I started using Nightly — instead of my usually Beta¹ — for the up-to-date GTK+ 3.2x compatibility, but I like some of the pre-release features, and it almost never crashes on me 1: On Ubuntu you can use their Firefox Beta PPA² as long as you don't mind that it replaces release-version Firefox. 2: https://launchpad.net/~mozillateam/+archive/ubuntu/firefox-next https://launchpad.net/~mozillateam/+archive/ubuntu/firefox-n...

vacri 10y ago

Yeah, the article got up my nose as well. I've got a couple of hundred tabs in tab groups in FF, probably about 50 have something in them (the others aren't loaded until I navigate to them). Opening a new tab is instant. I get a fair bit more resource usage than you're reporting, though...

StavrosK 10y ago

I don't know which Firefox you're using, but I want it. Mine is super laggy all the time, even with one or two tabs open. Opening a new tab takes half a second, visiting a new page takes half a second, going back takes half a second. It's extremely frustrating to use, and I don't even have that many extensions or history pages.

semicolon_storm 10y ago
6 tabs, 1GB of RAM, ~20% CPU usage for me on Firefox. I have a few basic QoL plugins like LastPass, uBlock, and NoScript. It's absolutely ridiculous. I want to keep using FireFox, but it's forcing me to consider moving to another browser.
- mkj 10y ago
  If there are only 6 tabs it should be easy to narrow down which is a problem?
- mixmastamyk 10y ago
  Vacuuming your profile might help: #!/bin/bash killall firefox for file in ~/.mozilla/firefox/*.default/*.sqlite; do echo sqlite3 "$file" VACUUM sqlite3 "$file" VACUUM done I do it in my once-a-month cleanup script.
  - na85 10y ago
    I remember the days when leaving Windows meant not having to futz with cleanup scripts. What happened?
    - sp332 10y ago
      Firefox and SQLite have actually improved a lot since those days. And it's not like Firefox uses a different database system on different platforms, it's all exactly the same.
    - mgurlitz 10y ago

chongli 10y ago

It's interesting how tabs have supplanted bookmarks for a lot of people. Neither one is a particularly good UI, mind you, but tabs are a little bit better than bookmarks. I wish something even better would come along but I don't really know what that would look like.

smhenderson 10y ago
I love "bookmark all tabs" commands. I tend to open a lot of related tabs and run out of time like the OP but I don't leave the all open, I bookmark them all with a few clicks and move on... But I agree about the UI in general. My habit seems to require some monthly to quarterly clean up to keep it from getting to be too much.
21echoes 10y ago
Firefox with Tab Groups and AwesomeBar fits very nicely with my workflow-- 1. I dont have to think. I Cmd+Click links as I find them interesting, switch tabs as my attention changes, etc. and the tabs just stay there, waiting. 2. AwesomeBar searches over open tabs by default, and selecting a suggestion switches to that open tab rather than opening a new one. 3. When I have time, I can sort my tabs into labelled groups ("Work", "Research", "Shopping", "Politics", etc.) 4. Tabs are sync'd to and from my Firefox for Android automatically, so if I'm on the move and I want to pull up that thing on the tip of my tongue, it's right there on my phone as well. I'm sure it's not perfect for everyone, but it works for me /shrug
- weaksauce 10y ago
  You might (might not) find my extension useful. I made it for people that horde tabs like you and me. It's a page that lists tabs per window visually and if you click on one of the links it focuses the tab for you. Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabist/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabist/ and chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabist/hdjegjggiogfkaldbfphfdkpggjemaha https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabist/hdjegjggiog... It's also open source: https://github.com/fiveNinePlusR/tabist https://github.com/fiveNinePlusR/tabist If you end up trying it, let me know if you find it useful/hate it or have something that should be added :)

jdright 10y ago

I really doubt you and you dont provide any details about your setup either. I have exactly the same issues as the poster. I have about 20 tabs and it is costing 1.7GB ram. Note that I almost never reboot, so it may well be leaks, but even so, on eventual crashes, reloading my tabs is painfully slow.

21echoes 10y ago
Mac El Capitan, FirefoxDeveloperEdition (which iirc is basically equivalent to Firefox Beta), not many addons (Tab Groups, uBlock Origin, No More 404s). I can screenshot my Activity Monitor if that'd help?
- jdright 10y ago
  At this exactly time I have 27 tabs, this is the memory usage: Image PID Hard Faults/sec Commit (KB) Working Set (KB) Shareable (KB) Private (KB) firefox.exe 10604 0 1,529,308 1,491,692 62,348 1,429,344 I'm on Windows 7, 39 days and 5 hours up time. This Firefox instance is running since: 8:05:29 AM 05/12/2016 Firefox 50 (with a pending update). Also, I see the process as a 32-bits image but I was sure it was 64-bits, will need to check on this. And I have only: Facebook Ads Block, Ghostery and uBlock Origin. So being Windows 7 and probably an 32bits Firefox install may cause all this difference?

PeCaN 10y ago

Really? You're the first person I've heard that doesn't have that problem. My Firefox gets quite slow on both my home and work computers¹ at ~40+ tabs. The tab groups extension (which they removed from core, I guess to make room for Pocket and Hello²) does make managing lots of tabs much easier however. I regularly have to clean out my tabs or switching takes several seconds. I currently have 37 tabs open and Firefox is using ~800MB of RAM. Basically, either you're doing something really magical with your Firefox, or are just spewing bullshit. Someone's going to say its the fault of extensions (what good is Firefox without extensions, anyway) so let's see: - Decentraleyes (locally emulates CDNs) - HTTPS Everywhere (why is this not the default behavior?) - OverbiteFF (support for the gopher protocol) - Perapera (Mandarin word splitting and Mandarin↔English dictionary) - Pinboard (I can't imagine this uses any significant resources whatsoever) - Random Agent Spoofer (change user agent at random) - Reddit Enhancement Suite - Tab Groups (I miss when tab panorama was default, but I can see why it's an extension) - uBlock Origin - uMatrix (possibly my single favorite Firefox extension; control JS and more, like NoScript on steroids and easier to use) - VimFx That's… actually quite a lot. I wonder if extensions alone are my problem, but then again Firefox without extensions isn't much better than Edge (and Edge seems faster on average). I don't think I've tweaked any settings in about:config. Is that enough details about my setup for people to help fix it? Anecdotally complaints about how slow Firefox is seem fairly common. I think your last paragraph is a bit off the mark. -- 1. Both Windows 10 Pro; 16GB/32GB of RAM respectively; both 4GHz i7-4790k; anyway, point is they're pretty good computers. 2. Kidding, but fuck Mozilla

minitech 10y ago
> - Decentraleyes (locally emulates CDNs) has to intercept every request > - HTTPS Everywhere (why is this not the default behavior?) has to intercept every request > - OverbiteFF (support for the gopher protocol) might have to intercept every request, and why do you need this > - Random Agent Spoofer (change user agent at random) has to intercept every request > - uBlock Origin has to intercept every request > - uMatrix (possibly my single favorite Firefox extension; control JS and more, like NoScript on steroids and easier to use) has to intercept every request Stop installing so many stupid extensions. Random UA switching is especially pointless; “Decentraleyes” is a close runner-up. Firefox has performance problems, but I think you’re definitely seeing extension bloat if you have that kind of device.

zie 10y ago

Picture proof of memory usage: http://imgur.com/a/7RgZt http://imgur.com/a/7RgZt FF 1.3GB memory with 10 tabs and 5% of CPU, with FF in the background. Switching tabs is absolutely not instant, opening new tabs is reasonable, bet definitely not instant. I'd love your numbers ;)

SAI_Peregrinus 10y ago
I'm in a similar situation to the GP. Addons used to help: BarTab Heavy - Allows unloading of unused tabs. Lets tabs act like temporary bookmarks. Tree Style Tab - Just great tab management. uBlock Origin + uMatrix - Lots less cruft loaded and running to slow things down. Session Manager - Lets me save windows with groups of tabs like bookmarks, works amazingly for looking things up and being able to restore a lot of references at once.
kpcyrd 10y ago
Well, one of those tabs is graylog and one is gmail. Do you have e10s enabled? (open about:support, check for "Multiprocess Windows")
- AstralStorm 10y ago
  This only works properly since 50+ version. You will get many issues if you try it in the old one.

reustle 10y ago

How does someone even begin to function with 273 open tabs, let alone be productive?

nzp 10y ago
Back when I used to use tabs as bookmarks, I would routinely get to >700 open tabs accumulating over the months. It was a useless agony. Pocket was a godsend for me. The urge to let tabs linger is still there sometimes, but it doesn't get over 20-ish nowadays. Sticking to GTD workflow helps too.
21echoes 10y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13226078 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13226078 When I'm in my working tab group, that's like 8 tabs or so. Most of the tabs in the storage groups are months old (more like bookmarks I didn't have to hit Cmd+D to save)

kilroy123 10y ago

While I don't have _that_ many tabs open. I do usually keep 20 - 50 open in chrome. Same experience, with low / no memory foot-print; using The Great Suspender. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspender/klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspende... I'm on a 2015 MBP with 16 GB of ram and like 20 extensions installed.

rpwverheij 10y ago
tnx for the tip, installed it. 1 million users, so it must be doing somethign right
olejorgenb 10y ago
Similar firefox extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/suspend-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/suspend-tab/
- reitanqild 10y ago
  I also use it, thanks to a tip from HN :-)
Keyframe 10y ago
I vouch for The Great Suspender. Awesome extension.

MustardTiger 10y ago

You have a magic firefox then. I try to use it that way too, but its sitting at 1.8GB of RAM and 25-30% CPU usage with 103 tabs and it routinely bombs on me after a week or two when it gets up to 2.5GB or so.

ChuckMcM 10y ago

firefox 50.1 on Xubuntu - currently at 6GB of memory, when it gets above 12GB I euthanize it and restart it. About 36 open tabs.

AstralStorm 10y ago
If you're using an integrated Intel GPU, immediately switch to modesetting X driver. Intel DDX leaks surfaces and that is attributed to process which allocated them. Modesetting is faster too.

adventured 10y ago

That's pretty astounding to me. Firefox instantly eats 500+ mb of ram the moment I open it on Windows (16gb ram, i7 processor, ok video card). If I leave it open with one or two tabs (usually doesn't matter what sites), for about an hour, it goes up to 1.2gb to 1.4gb of ram consumption while doing nothing. If I close all tabs, the ram consumption doesn't drop, I have to close Firefox and restart it to accomplish that. It would be amazing to run more than 30 tabs. Once I leave Firefox open for a few hours, it basically becomes unusable performance wise. I've been using Firefox since it was released initially; Chrome never gives me this performance erosion problem, constantly tempts me to switch, I just happen to enjoy Firefox more. The sole extension I'm using is an ad blocker and my Firefox is always self-updated.

Terr_ 10y ago

Hah, I'm still using an old version of Opera, but the #1 speedup is simply using it's built-in (and easy to tweak) site-preferences so that only certain sites are whitelisted for Javascript. Some sites are just ridiculously faster and more-responsive, especially general news sites where all I really want is some text I can immediately read and scroll through.

olejorgenb 10y ago

The http://piro.sakura.ne.jp/xul/_suspendtab.html.en http://piro.sakura.ne.jp/xul/_suspendtab.html.en extension also help keeping cpu and memory down when using lots of tabs. (of course when a tab become suspended the state is at least partially lost)

roel_v 10y ago

I used to do this too, and as of ~ 2 weeks ago, about half of all my stored tabs are replaced with 'New tab' after restarting the browser. No amount of screwing around in the profile and session_store or whatever it's called, or with plugins, will fix it. So now I'm weaning myself off 'tabs as bookmarks', and going back (after, what, 10 years?) to using bookmarks the way they were meant.

the8472 10y ago
the session manager addon would have helped in that situation. it creates regular snapshots of your session which can be used to restore things if something like that happens (which is rare in my experience)
- roel_v 10y ago
  Well from the comments on the addon page, it seems it has the same problems with multi process as the built-in session manager, and tab mix plus' session manager, have (blank windows after restoring). But I haven't tried this particular addon, it might work.

miguelrochefort 10y ago

I have ~1000 open tabs (across 50 windows) in Chrome on Windows. I have ~300 open tabs in Chrome on Android. Although they're probably not all loaded, I don't notice any major performance problem.

Elvewyn 10y ago

I'd love to know how. My Firefox, with 4 tabs open, will use up a gig of memory.

mwill 10y ago

How is this possible? I'm sitting here with an i5-4690, 32GB RAM, Firefox 50 with about 50 tabs open 1.5GB RAM usage, about half a second to get a usable new tab, and it crashes at least once every few days. Literally the only reason I'm on Firefox is tab groups, but my performace is basically identical with tab groups disabled.

wutbrodo 10y ago
There are factors other than browser choice that can affect this. For example, which OS are you on?
- mwill 10y ago
  Win 10 / Arch on the same hardware, slightly better performance booted into Win 10. Used to run Win8.1 on this machine, Win 10 runs it better. Used to run Ubuntu on this machine, Arch runs it better. It would make my day if there was a silver bullet that made FF fast, or at least not crash all the time. The same machine can handle literally 10 times more Chrome tabs without any trace of struggle. But I prefer FF for a few things, so sort of stuck in between.
  - govg 10y ago
    Funny. I use Firefox on my Arch system, and at times I had to stop and remove tabs because they were becoming an unorganized mess (>600 tabs). I've never had much issues with responsiveness unless some particular website I've opened locks up, and with tab groups and tab load only on click, I can easily manage a lot of tabs without much memory use. You could try checking your RAM, I used to have an issue with FF crashing quite frequently, but found that it was part of a larger issue of having corrupt RAM on board.
    - mwill 10y ago
      I will definately look into this, because the Firefox that others are describing in this thread seems totally foreign to me.

Yizahi 10y ago

Unfortunately mine is usually climbing to 2.5 Gb with 20-30 tabs if left open for several days. As a side effect it starts using 12% CPU constantly and any script heavy page load just sends it into (Not Responding) state for 30-60 seconds. uBlock and LastPass only now, too lazy to reinstall all the other addons :) . But it is still better then Chrome performance vise. Chrome is just generally laggy and unresponsive often (no idea why).

jsjohnst 10y ago
LastPass seems to be a common cause among my friends and others in this thread.

shipintbrief 10y ago

that's Ilia Birman. He have all his blog written with this set of mind. God knows why people read him and why they share articles like this.

agumonkey 10y ago

Firefox is a nice workhorse. Lots to like about it. One problem is the GUI latency. Between Chrome instantaneous response and Firefox jitter I always end up back to Chrome.

nothis 10y ago

Oh, so I'm not alone in wondering what the hell he was talking about. I often have like 50 tabs open in Firefox when researching something. I notice no delay when opening an empty tab. If browsers are slow, it's mostly because of some horrible JavaScript running in the background, i.e. poorly optimized websites.

botexpert 10y ago

I use Firefox on Mac and it's extremely slow. It's laggy, it's constantly freezing for seconds or two. Having that many tabs opened is practically impossible. On Ubuntu, the behavior is vastly different.

dom0 10y ago

> This is exactly how I'm using Firefox, right now -- 273 tabs open. It's sitting at ~5% of CPU and 450MB of RAM. And switching tabs is instantaneous. Marvellous. By the time I get to maybe 70-90 open tabs Firefox will consume 4-6 GB RAM and constantly hog a CPU core. Some pages with JS cause the usual instant entire-browser lock-up. And I admit I miss the days when Opera 10 was still an up to date browser. I don't think I ever had a (subjectively) faster browser.

ianai 10y ago

I feel like OP needs to reimage his machine.

rasz_pl 10y ago

>I'm using Firefox, right now -- 273 tabs open no, you have 273 labels displayed in your browser UI, not open tabs. Opera 12.x can hold >100 real loaded and rendered tabs open at 1-2GB ram with ZERO influence on browser responsiveness. Nowadays every single tab in Chrome/Opera 40.something/Vivaldi progressively slows down UI. ~50 tabs means about 1 second UI delay when going fullscreen on YT. Not to mention the most trivial website takes ~100MB of ram, while Opera 12.x was somehow able to do the same thing in ~10MB per website.

hashhar 10y ago

Same here, at the start of August I had a total of around 350 tabs, divided into 8 groups according to topics (General, Entertainment, GitHub, Firefox Dev, GNOME Dev, Thesis, Interview Preps etc.) and my CPU idled at around 4% (2.2GHz - 2.7GHz i5 laptop) with RAM at around 1.6GB when started and routinely reached 3GB by the end of the day. It did occansionally crash the tabs while switching between too many YouTube tabs too fast. Took about 4 seconds to start a new instance (meaning that getting a usable instance, the UI came in under 2 secs), shutdown instantly.