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> 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 pl

> 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...
      - hashhar 10y ago
        I started using Nightly for kicks and giggle around 6 months ago and my about:crashes shows me only 6 crashes (none of which were able to kill anything more than a tab (and in all the cases, the offending website was YouTube)). Nightly is amazingly good even if it is built from the HEAD of the trunk (branch in git terms).
EpicEng 10y ago
I don't imagine many of those tabs are actually loaded.
- 21echoes 10y ago
  Ctrl+tab'd thru all 56 tabs in this group, waited for them to finish loading, opened activity monitor: CPU at 20%, RAM at 811MB. So yea, a fair amount weren't loaded, but loading them didn't make too big of a difference.
  - nothrabannosir 10y ago
    CPU at 20%, "loading didn't make too much of a difference"??? 20% is obscene for a process without interaction. Imagine a paused video player taking 20%, or a minimised word editor. Even at 58 videos or documents.
    - syrrim 10y ago
      You forget that webpages are allowed to do what ever the hell they want, and so each is probably running a script or two in the background. We put up with a lot in webapps that would never stand in a desktop app.
      - jbergens 10y ago
        I never used to start 100+ normal apps. It would have dragged my old computers to a crawl.
      - MustardTiger 10y ago
        This is a huge problem. Javascript has become a blight on the web, and browsers really need to make it easier to manage stopping scripts on background tabs and such.
      - nothrabannosir 10y ago
        I don't forget, I just don't forgive. It's unacceptable either way. Someone has to take responsibility---might as well start with the browser. Then we can push it down from there; maybe if browsers were held accountable for pages' resource usage they'd implement resource controls. Like they currently do with limiting setTimeout on inactive pages, but more comprehensively. And maybe they'd implement better inspection tools for resource usage (chrome was ahead of the game; I'm looking at you, Firefox )
drdeadringer 10y ago
My coworker acts like your OP and has your problem writ large as expected. He knows it but it's his personality.
TwoBit 10y ago
I've had 30 tabs open on Firefox/OSX without detriment.
debacle 10y ago
If you have Flash installed and don't have an adblocker, for most textual content (not Imgur, YouTube), your browser is working 10x harder than it needs to.
- nothrabannosir 10y ago
  not Imgur, YouTube It's depressing that an image viewing site and a video playing site are in the same list of resource uses. YouTube plays 1080p videos. Imgur shows photos. It's a testament to the brazen disrespect of client resources that went into building the latter. If you're viewing imgur without ad blocker your computer isn't working 10x harder than it should, but 100x.
  - CaptSpify 10y ago
    I remember when imgur was started because there were no good image sharing sites. They were all bulky, slow and terrible. imgur came along and made sharing images easy. Now they are one of the ones they set out to fix.
    - Analemma_ 10y ago
      It sucks, but I don't know if they had much choice. Imgur is the classic example of the "treadmill" inherent to business models like image hosting: 1. All the existing image hosting sites suck 2. Someone gets sick enough of it that they launch a new one, with all the features people want: free, direct linking, no/unobtrusive ads, etc. 3. Because this new site is so much better, everyone flicks to it. Bandwidth costs skyrocket. 4. The operators need to cover their costs, so they start adding more ads and blocking direct links. The site starts to suck. Go to step 1. Sometimes investor dollars get involved, but it doesn't change the basic formula. This is why we've seen Photobucket -> minus -> giphy-> imgur -> gfycat, and it will continue in his vein forever. I don't think there's any way to run a site like this profitably without pissing people off sufficiently that they go elsewhere.
      - sametmax 10y ago
chanux 10y ago
I wonder whether these good days would soon come to an end with process per tab model. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis
- detaro 10y ago
  The developer edition was mentioned, and that runs Electrolysis already. Even the normal release does if you don't have incompatible plugins. (FWIW, before electrolysis Firefox was unusuable with many tabs for me, now it is perfectly fine, so either I made a random setup change at the same time, some other optimization landed or it actually helps)
- discreditable 10y ago
  Note that e10s currently only splits the browser into a content process and a browser process. I don't think they will ever move to 1:1 tabs per process.
- pc2g4d 10y ago
  Yeah, to me it seems like a mistake given that such a high performance penalty will likely be incurred, and given the existence of Rust which could address a number of the security problems for which the multi-process model was devised in the first place.
reitanqild 10y ago
Firefox Developer on KDE Neon (stock KDE 5 on Ubuntu LTS). Tab Tree (instead of TreeStyleTabs) and Suspend Tab (instead of UnloadTab.) Edit: and yes, Linux often feels like magic land. I happen to like Windows 10 better than most earlier Windowses but a good Linux is better for me as a developer on every point except support for MS Office and (niche) tools.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  > and yes, Linux often feels like magic land. Yes, the browsers (Chrome, Firefox) work noticeably worse than on Windows for me. Also they tend to freeze the computer completely at some point (after taking all the available RAM for themselves). Browser performance seems to be pretty much as random as printers these days.
jholman 10y ago
400 tabs. Including several active fancy SPAs, like gMail and two copies of Slack, a gDocs or two, sometimes the godawful work LMS. Stock Firefox 50 (32bit), untweaked with no relevant add-ons (well, except AdBlock Plus), Windows 10, just over 400 tabs open, under 10% CPU, under 2GB of RAM (on a 16GB machine). If I freak it out by doing a bunch of flipping through dormant tabs, I can spike CPU pretty good as it does layout on fifty tabs at once, but who cares, I don't do that. I do find that I need to restart my browser every few hundred tab open/close cycles, which takes under 30 seconds (just did the restart, that dropped RAM use to 1.3GB, but it'll get back up to 1.9 pretty soon). Restarts used to be a lot less frequent, and a lot faster, before work required me to keep two slack clients open. Running multiple YouTube windows at once seems to be bad for uptime. Regarding OP's complaints, opening a new tab take imperceptible time, a new window is about half a second (only marginally slower than notepad), and switching tabs can be done several times per second. I have put ZERO effort into make Firefox run faster, unless you count running AdBlock. I haven't even bothered to figure out which is the best adblocker. Why do people use Chrome, again? (edit to add a few details)
- Fnoord 10y ago
  Try uBlock Origin. It performs even better than ABP, and hasn't sold out.
  - rekshaw 10y ago
    I myself made the switch from both Adblock and Adblock Plus to uBlock Origin, best decision ever!
  - _asummers 10y ago
    uBlock Matrix is good too, if you want to manage all the things. You basically white/blacklist all the image, css, xhr, etc. requests on the page and can set up rules like allow iframe from youtube.com on all sites, to allow the embed youtube frame to show up on pages. Many sites are broken on first load until you get your rules straight but they're trivially fixed. You just click on boxes to allow or deny the particular thing. HN looks like: http://i.imgur.com/lfjkhkl.png http://i.imgur.com/lfjkhkl.png
rangibaby 10y ago
Horrible Firefox performance on OSX was a symptom of a bad stick of RAM on a Mac at our company.
LoSboccacc 10y ago
> on OS X About that, I've noticed some weird stuff as well while debugging why our web app was crashing the tab on chrome after extended use without a page reload. After a hour normal workload, chrome on mac used almost a GB ram, while on windows was at 120mb. Same page, similar workflow etc. I still have no idea what's going on but there's definitely something about how memory is handled across platforms.
user5994461 10y ago
Windows 7. Cheap laptop. I never have less than 15 tabs opened.

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...
    - hashhar 10y ago
      I started using Nightly for kicks and giggle around 6 months ago and my about:crashes shows me only 6 crashes (none of which were able to kill anything more than a tab (and in all the cases, the offending website was YouTube)). Nightly is amazingly good even if it is built from the HEAD of the trunk (branch in git terms).

EpicEng 10y ago

I don't imagine many of those tabs are actually loaded.

21echoes 10y ago
Ctrl+tab'd thru all 56 tabs in this group, waited for them to finish loading, opened activity monitor: CPU at 20%, RAM at 811MB. So yea, a fair amount weren't loaded, but loading them didn't make too big of a difference.
- nothrabannosir 10y ago
  CPU at 20%, "loading didn't make too much of a difference"??? 20% is obscene for a process without interaction. Imagine a paused video player taking 20%, or a minimised word editor. Even at 58 videos or documents.
  - syrrim 10y ago
    You forget that webpages are allowed to do what ever the hell they want, and so each is probably running a script or two in the background. We put up with a lot in webapps that would never stand in a desktop app.
    - jbergens 10y ago
      I never used to start 100+ normal apps. It would have dragged my old computers to a crawl.
    - MustardTiger 10y ago
      This is a huge problem. Javascript has become a blight on the web, and browsers really need to make it easier to manage stopping scripts on background tabs and such.
    - nothrabannosir 10y ago
      I don't forget, I just don't forgive. It's unacceptable either way. Someone has to take responsibility---might as well start with the browser. Then we can push it down from there; maybe if browsers were held accountable for pages' resource usage they'd implement resource controls. Like they currently do with limiting setTimeout on inactive pages, but more comprehensively. And maybe they'd implement better inspection tools for resource usage (chrome was ahead of the game; I'm looking at you, Firefox )

drdeadringer 10y ago

My coworker acts like your OP and has your problem writ large as expected. He knows it but it's his personality.

TwoBit 10y ago

I've had 30 tabs open on Firefox/OSX without detriment.

debacle 10y ago

If you have Flash installed and don't have an adblocker, for most textual content (not Imgur, YouTube), your browser is working 10x harder than it needs to.

nothrabannosir 10y ago
not Imgur, YouTube It's depressing that an image viewing site and a video playing site are in the same list of resource uses. YouTube plays 1080p videos. Imgur shows photos. It's a testament to the brazen disrespect of client resources that went into building the latter. If you're viewing imgur without ad blocker your computer isn't working 10x harder than it should, but 100x.
- CaptSpify 10y ago
  I remember when imgur was started because there were no good image sharing sites. They were all bulky, slow and terrible. imgur came along and made sharing images easy. Now they are one of the ones they set out to fix.
  - Analemma_ 10y ago
    It sucks, but I don't know if they had much choice. Imgur is the classic example of the "treadmill" inherent to business models like image hosting: 1. All the existing image hosting sites suck 2. Someone gets sick enough of it that they launch a new one, with all the features people want: free, direct linking, no/unobtrusive ads, etc. 3. Because this new site is so much better, everyone flicks to it. Bandwidth costs skyrocket. 4. The operators need to cover their costs, so they start adding more ads and blocking direct links. The site starts to suck. Go to step 1. Sometimes investor dollars get involved, but it doesn't change the basic formula. This is why we've seen Photobucket -> minus -> giphy-> imgur -> gfycat, and it will continue in his vein forever. I don't think there's any way to run a site like this profitably without pissing people off sufficiently that they go elsewhere.
    - sametmax 10y ago

chanux 10y ago

I wonder whether these good days would soon come to an end with process per tab model. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis

detaro 10y ago
The developer edition was mentioned, and that runs Electrolysis already. Even the normal release does if you don't have incompatible plugins. (FWIW, before electrolysis Firefox was unusuable with many tabs for me, now it is perfectly fine, so either I made a random setup change at the same time, some other optimization landed or it actually helps)
discreditable 10y ago
Note that e10s currently only splits the browser into a content process and a browser process. I don't think they will ever move to 1:1 tabs per process.
pc2g4d 10y ago
Yeah, to me it seems like a mistake given that such a high performance penalty will likely be incurred, and given the existence of Rust which could address a number of the security problems for which the multi-process model was devised in the first place.

reitanqild 10y ago

Firefox Developer on KDE Neon (stock KDE 5 on Ubuntu LTS). Tab Tree (instead of TreeStyleTabs) and Suspend Tab (instead of UnloadTab.) Edit: and yes, Linux often feels like magic land. I happen to like Windows 10 better than most earlier Windowses but a good Linux is better for me as a developer on every point except support for MS Office and (niche) tools.

TeMPOraL 10y ago
> and yes, Linux often feels like magic land. Yes, the browsers (Chrome, Firefox) work noticeably worse than on Windows for me. Also they tend to freeze the computer completely at some point (after taking all the available RAM for themselves). Browser performance seems to be pretty much as random as printers these days.

jholman 10y ago

400 tabs. Including several active fancy SPAs, like gMail and two copies of Slack, a gDocs or two, sometimes the godawful work LMS. Stock Firefox 50 (32bit), untweaked with no relevant add-ons (well, except AdBlock Plus), Windows 10, just over 400 tabs open, under 10% CPU, under 2GB of RAM (on a 16GB machine). If I freak it out by doing a bunch of flipping through dormant tabs, I can spike CPU pretty good as it does layout on fifty tabs at once, but who cares, I don't do that. I do find that I need to restart my browser every few hundred tab open/close cycles, which takes under 30 seconds (just did the restart, that dropped RAM use to 1.3GB, but it'll get back up to 1.9 pretty soon). Restarts used to be a lot less frequent, and a lot faster, before work required me to keep two slack clients open. Running multiple YouTube windows at once seems to be bad for uptime. Regarding OP's complaints, opening a new tab take imperceptible time, a new window is about half a second (only marginally slower than notepad), and switching tabs can be done several times per second. I have put ZERO effort into make Firefox run faster, unless you count running AdBlock. I haven't even bothered to figure out which is the best adblocker. Why do people use Chrome, again? (edit to add a few details)

Fnoord 10y ago
Try uBlock Origin. It performs even better than ABP, and hasn't sold out.
- rekshaw 10y ago
  I myself made the switch from both Adblock and Adblock Plus to uBlock Origin, best decision ever!
- _asummers 10y ago
  uBlock Matrix is good too, if you want to manage all the things. You basically white/blacklist all the image, css, xhr, etc. requests on the page and can set up rules like allow iframe from youtube.com on all sites, to allow the embed youtube frame to show up on pages. Many sites are broken on first load until you get your rules straight but they're trivially fixed. You just click on boxes to allow or deny the particular thing. HN looks like: http://i.imgur.com/lfjkhkl.png http://i.imgur.com/lfjkhkl.png

rangibaby 10y ago

Horrible Firefox performance on OSX was a symptom of a bad stick of RAM on a Mac at our company.

LoSboccacc 10y ago

> on OS X About that, I've noticed some weird stuff as well while debugging why our web app was crashing the tab on chrome after extended use without a page reload. After a hour normal workload, chrome on mac used almost a GB ram, while on windows was at 120mb. Same page, similar workflow etc. I still have no idea what's going on but there's definitely something about how memory is handled across platforms.

user5994461 10y ago

Windows 7. Cheap laptop. I never have less than 15 tabs opened.