33 ms·

I'm really glad that people at Mozilla use ridiculous numbers of tabs too. Lazy-loading of tabs is the reason I switched to firefox. I'm not sure if it's still

by huntie 9y ago

I'm really glad that people at Mozilla use ridiculous numbers of tabs too. Lazy-loading of tabs is the reason I switched to firefox. I'm not sure if it's still this way, but Chrome used to load every tab on startup. So even if you only had 100 tabs, you were looking at 5+ minute startup time. God-forbid that any of them were Youtube, or you'd have to go through and pause them all. I've just updated to Firefox 55 to test this, and the improvement is ridiculous. I hope that Firefox focuses more on power users in the future. I'm curious what the author uses to manage all of these tabs. I use Tab Groups, but I think they won't work in a few Firefox versions so I'm looking for alternatives.

wging 9y ago
YouTube is a bit smarter these days: they defer playback until the tab first gets focus. So you have to pause at most as many videos as there are separate windows, not tabs. I believe Chrome is not nearly as smart as it could be about deferring loading of tabs, though.
- tokenizerrr 9y ago
  It's not youtube doing that, but chrome. The html5 video element doesn't start playback until the tab first gets focus.
  - FreeFull 9y ago
    Firefox has the same thing, but you have to enable it in about:config
    - kibwen 9y ago
      Do you have to enable it? I use Firefox Nightly, and have been observing this behavior for a long, long time. It's one of those things that's so minor and yet so important that I wonder how I went without it for so long.
      - fiveseven_ 9y ago
        I believe it is enabled by default now, and the value in about:config is `media.block-autoplay-until-in-foreground`
        cpeterso 9y ago
        Thanks for the pref name. The feature is currently enabled by default only in the Firefox Nightly channel but you can use the pref to enable it in the Beta or Release channels. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1352014 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1352014
        bigbugbag 9y ago
        It's disabled by default on regular firefox. I prefer to disable media.autoplay.enabled which is enabled by default.
laythea 9y ago
Yes but I have found that if you "open in new tab" then it loads the page even though it is in the background. It should do as it does as startup but doesn't.
- JoshTriplett 9y ago
  This, exactly. I'd love to open half a dozen tabs pointing at videos, without having to wait for each one to load and then quickly pause it. (Related: I'd also really like to middle-click video annotations to open them in a tab. No, I don't want to replace the current video with them.)
  - mccr8 9y ago
    Some sites, such as YouTube, don't start playing a video until you switch to the tab.
    - JoshTriplett 9y ago
      That hasn't been my experience with YouTube; middle-clicking to open a half-dozen videos in tabs starts all the videos playing at once.
      - pfranz 9y ago
        Not sure if you're using Chrome or Firefox. I just tested FF 54 by alt-clicking a link. It loads and autoplays the non-active tab. Chrome v59, loads the page but doesn't autoplay until you switch to it. Chrome is my daily driver and I really prefer this behavior. But recent performance improvements, especially the handling of many, many tabs has me looking at FF again.
        cpeterso 9y ago
        Firefox has the same feature, though it is currently enabled by default only in the Firefox Nightly channel. You can use the `media.block-autoplay-until-in-foreground` about:config pref to enable it in the Beta or Release channels.
PeterisP 9y ago
For Chrome, the Great Suspender plugin had fixed the resource usage for me, it's kind of like lazy loading + freezing of heavy background tabs, and it enables quick startup even with 100 tabs. But it should be a core feature of the browser itself IMHO.
- surement 9y ago
  A bigger problem with Chrome is that it doesn't support multiple rows of tabs. The usual reasoning is "close some tabs!" For someone who uses a monitor in portrait mode, this is painfully ridiculous.
  - sleepychu 9y ago
    Conform to widescreen! I'm sympathetic, I use my two secondary 1080ps in portrait. I think I used to use a vim plugin on Chrome that had a sublime-ctrl+p-like feature to just search through my open tabs for the one I wanted.
    - surement 9y ago
      Vimium! I use it too, very useful. The command is shift+t to search through open tabs.
    - mistermann 9y ago
      I'd kill for something that could search across Firefox and Chrome tabs - sometimes I know I have something open, but not sure which browser app. I did have an addin like this for FF, but with the performance issues FF already has, it wasn't realistic to run it.
  - nol13 9y ago
    na the usual reasoning is "use vertical tab bar and tab groups and dont put your monitor n portrait mode"
- pfranz 9y ago
  I used the Great Suspender for a few months and thought it was great. Unfortunately, at some point tabs I came back to were 404ed =/ It's also why I switched away from bookmarks to Evernote (and later Bear) so I could capture the page in addition to the address for reference. I guess I should use it in tandem with that plugin that replaces 404 pages with archive.org links...
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
hammock 9y ago
Firefox lazy loads tabs on startup, but not otherwise. So if you open a YouTube in a new tab it will start playing. Chrome, on the other hand, will not start playing the video, which is nice. I'm a Firefox user though so that's where my chrome knowledge starts and ends.
- glogla 9y ago
  Is that a Chrome feature or Chrome-only Youtube feature?
  - jchw 9y ago
    It's Chrome's lazy-loading of tabs. YouTube could presumably implement this on all browsers by detecting if the user is focused or not, but I don't know that it's always desirable.
  - pfranz 9y ago
    I'm pretty sure it's a Chrome-specific lazy autoplaying of html5 video. I really like to alt-click Youtube links (so the page is loaded and queued), put my headphones on and switch over when I'm ready.
    - cyphar 9y ago
      Firefox does this too. It's on by default for Firefox Nightly and an opt-in preference in the other update channels.
      - bigbugbag 9y ago
        So what you say is that firefox does not do this. (unless you go deep in about:config which is highly discouraged by mozilla).
        cyphar 9y ago
        Firefox Nightly does, and it's not done by default in non-nightly (but you can enable it with "media.block-autoplay-until-in-foreground"). I imagine it will become the default eventually. "Firefox doesn't do this" is not a valid one-sentence summary of what I just said.
elorant 9y ago
So even if you only had 100 tabs This is fucking surreal. Why on Earth would anyone want 100 open tabs, besides testing? What's the real life scenario we're looking at here?
- archagon 9y ago
  Speaking strictly for me: tabs with articles I urgently need to read, tabs with articles that I really ought to have read, tabs with articles that I've long since forgotten to close. All the same, really, just with varying degrees of guilt. Also, um, Google searches for quick notes that I couldn't be bothered to open an actual note-taking application for.
  - Twirrim 9y ago
    I start doing that, but have made an effort to always start a week with a fresh browser, one tab open. If I haven't read the article before the week was up, clearly it wasn't important enough.
    - archagon 9y ago
      In principle I agree, but in practice... I can't let go of my hoarding ways. What if there's a nugget of information hiding in all those tabs that could ︎change my life?
      - chasote 9y ago
        Do you folks happen to have Kindles? I use instapaper to save articles as I come across them and then have it all wrapped up and sent to my Kindle once a week. My own customized magazine to read throughout the week as I see fit on an easy on the eyes e-ink format.
      - sn9 9y ago
        I call it "information hoarding". The struggle is real.
      - 9y ago
rplnt 9y ago
Old Opera simply used to load cache. So if you opened a tab, it was there.. for days, weeks, months, through restarts and all. I loved that. Now everything I open to "check out later" is getting lost.
- ajmurmann 9y ago
  This really was one of the things that Opera got better. I don't understand what the reasoning is to do this any other way.
  - Tomis02 9y ago
    There is no reasoning, it's only cargo-cult mentality and fashion choices. Old Opera got almost everything better, but it lost to inferior alternatives because users aren't rational when it comes to their choices. Chrome and Firefox are the OOP of browsers.
archagon 9y ago
YES, I'm not the only one who uses this! As a compulsive tab-opener (I really gotta work on this...) and also a cellular hotspot user, both Safari and Chrome eat up, like, a gigabyte of traffic as soon as I open them. Firefox behaves much more reasonably, but until recently it's been very slow with 50+ tabs. I'm glad to hear this use case is (apparently) getting some close attention!
nevi-me 9y ago
Chrome has supported lazy loading for a while now. I unfortunately can't find this reference, but I remember it being announced as part of release notes many months ago. I have the problem of moving a tab to a new window, and then 15 minutes later I have 15 tabs open. So I often have a few Chrome windows open at any point. If I restart Chrome, only the focused tabs on each window are loaded.
- frakr 9y ago
  How do I enable that? I can't find it anywhere.
  - damandloi 9y ago
    There is no switch. It's an inbuilt feature with the Chrme 57+
mokame 9y ago
g
yagyu 9y ago
Long time user of Tree Style Tabs. Works great for me. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
- nialv7 9y ago
  Too bad it won't work on Firefox 57
sorenjan 9y ago
> I hope that Firefox focuses more on power users in the future. I got 8 extensions installed at the moment, 6 of those are marked as legacy and will stop working before the end of the year. I also hope Mozilla focuses more on power users, but I think a lot of them will leave when their favorite extensions stops working and Google keeps favoring Chrome on their sites.
- Animats 9y ago
  It irks me that they're not just dumping the XUL extensions, but the Jetpack extensions as well. I've already converted my extensions once, from Greasemonkey to Jetpack, and now I have to convert to WebExtensions. And no, Firefox WebExtensions are not compatible with Google Chrome WebExtensions. They're close, but not compatible.
- bigbugbag 9y ago
  Hope is not enough, it's clear that mozilla has a strong stance against power users.
joboyx 9y ago
YouTube don't autoplay when not the active tab.
- bigbugbag 9y ago
  So you're a google chrome user, because this only happens in chrome.
  - harrygeez 9y ago
    Safari had this first
hrjet 9y ago
> I'm not sure if it's still this way, but Chrome used to load every tab on startup. I used to avoid Chrome for the same reasons, but then I found an extension and, uh, extended it, to create: https://github.com/hrj/sloth/ https://github.com/hrj/sloth/ It forces all tabs into inactive state on startup. Also creates a new tab page (or switches to an existing one) to avoid loading the focussed historical tab.
ianamartin 9y ago
This is not just for power users. My mother is about the most opposite of power user that there is. But she constantly has hundreds of tabs open when I go to visit her and do my obligatory tech support duties. She uses tabs like bookmarks, even though she bookmarks everything. I've tried to coach her on working with the bookmarks better, but she has her system, and she's sticking to it. And to be fair, I don't know how I would manage bookmarks in any web browser trying to deal with them at her level. She has > 30k things bookmarked that are "important" to her. You know that feeling you get when you're watching a user do something and he or she right clicks and selects copy and then goes through the dock to find the next application and then right clicks to paste, but the target area isn't focused, so it doesn't work. So then it's back to the dock to find the prior app and then reselect the text and right-click, copy, etc. etc. etc.? You know that feeling. It hits you in the pit of your stomach like the first time you saw the alien burst out of John Hurt's chest in Alien, or the red wedding from Game of Thrones, or every time you're in a meeting with a product manager. First, there's the shock of it. The horror. Oh. My. God. WTF is happening here? Then there's the reality setting in. Holy shit. This is real. This is actually a thing that's happening, and there is literally nothing I can do about it. Then there is the sadness. I used to think of this thing in front of me as a person. Now all I see is a dead, empty, hopeless, useless, lifeless husk of a human. An end user. With a product manager alien screeching as it runs away from the lifeless corpse of the user it just murdered. Not by intent. Simply because that's what it is: a fully alien form of life that can only exist by killing humans. Sorry about the vivid imagery, and I'm hoping this comes across as a joke about the friction between PMs and developers. I don't actually think they are that bad. But every time I watch my mom try to scroll through 30k bookmarks to find a link, I get that feeling magnified by about 50.
- keithpeter 9y ago
  OK, I'll put my hand up here. I bookmark sites reflexively, probably a hangover from the days before Google when things were harder to find and we had dial up that you paid for by the minute. Bookmarks | Show All Bookmarks then keywords in the 'Search Bookmarks' is useful. I have actually set the bookmark.html file as my start page. I can then use 'find in page' if I can remember any keywords about the page I am looking for, or just scroll down. Ms Martin Senior needs to have her bookmarks backed up as well or there will be gnashing of teeth at some point in the future. Imagery fine!
bigbugbag 9y ago
The fun part is that opera did this and did it better years ago, but sadly it came to stop the day they decided quarterly profits were the new priority and switched to become a google chrome skin.

by huntie 9y ago

wging 9y ago

YouTube is a bit smarter these days: they defer playback until the tab first gets focus. So you have to pause at most as many videos as there are separate windows, not tabs. I believe Chrome is not nearly as smart as it could be about deferring loading of tabs, though.

tokenizerrr 9y ago
It's not youtube doing that, but chrome. The html5 video element doesn't start playback until the tab first gets focus.
- FreeFull 9y ago
  Firefox has the same thing, but you have to enable it in about:config
  - kibwen 9y ago
    Do you have to enable it? I use Firefox Nightly, and have been observing this behavior for a long, long time. It's one of those things that's so minor and yet so important that I wonder how I went without it for so long.
    - fiveseven_ 9y ago
      I believe it is enabled by default now, and the value in about:config is `media.block-autoplay-until-in-foreground`
      - cpeterso 9y ago
        Thanks for the pref name. The feature is currently enabled by default only in the Firefox Nightly channel but you can use the pref to enable it in the Beta or Release channels. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1352014 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1352014
      - bigbugbag 9y ago
        It's disabled by default on regular firefox. I prefer to disable media.autoplay.enabled which is enabled by default.

laythea 9y ago

Yes but I have found that if you "open in new tab" then it loads the page even though it is in the background. It should do as it does as startup but doesn't.

JoshTriplett 9y ago
This, exactly. I'd love to open half a dozen tabs pointing at videos, without having to wait for each one to load and then quickly pause it. (Related: I'd also really like to middle-click video annotations to open them in a tab. No, I don't want to replace the current video with them.)
- mccr8 9y ago
  Some sites, such as YouTube, don't start playing a video until you switch to the tab.
  - JoshTriplett 9y ago
    That hasn't been my experience with YouTube; middle-clicking to open a half-dozen videos in tabs starts all the videos playing at once.
    - pfranz 9y ago
      Not sure if you're using Chrome or Firefox. I just tested FF 54 by alt-clicking a link. It loads and autoplays the non-active tab. Chrome v59, loads the page but doesn't autoplay until you switch to it. Chrome is my daily driver and I really prefer this behavior. But recent performance improvements, especially the handling of many, many tabs has me looking at FF again.
      - cpeterso 9y ago
        Firefox has the same feature, though it is currently enabled by default only in the Firefox Nightly channel. You can use the `media.block-autoplay-until-in-foreground` about:config pref to enable it in the Beta or Release channels.

PeterisP 9y ago

For Chrome, the Great Suspender plugin had fixed the resource usage for me, it's kind of like lazy loading + freezing of heavy background tabs, and it enables quick startup even with 100 tabs. But it should be a core feature of the browser itself IMHO.

surement 9y ago
A bigger problem with Chrome is that it doesn't support multiple rows of tabs. The usual reasoning is "close some tabs!" For someone who uses a monitor in portrait mode, this is painfully ridiculous.
- sleepychu 9y ago
  Conform to widescreen! I'm sympathetic, I use my two secondary 1080ps in portrait. I think I used to use a vim plugin on Chrome that had a sublime-ctrl+p-like feature to just search through my open tabs for the one I wanted.
  - surement 9y ago
    Vimium! I use it too, very useful. The command is shift+t to search through open tabs.
  - mistermann 9y ago
    I'd kill for something that could search across Firefox and Chrome tabs - sometimes I know I have something open, but not sure which browser app. I did have an addin like this for FF, but with the performance issues FF already has, it wasn't realistic to run it.
- nol13 9y ago
  na the usual reasoning is "use vertical tab bar and tab groups and dont put your monitor n portrait mode"
pfranz 9y ago
I used the Great Suspender for a few months and thought it was great. Unfortunately, at some point tabs I came back to were 404ed =/ It's also why I switched away from bookmarks to Evernote (and later Bear) so I could capture the page in addition to the address for reference. I guess I should use it in tandem with that plugin that replaces 404 pages with archive.org links...

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

hammock 9y ago

Firefox lazy loads tabs on startup, but not otherwise. So if you open a YouTube in a new tab it will start playing. Chrome, on the other hand, will not start playing the video, which is nice. I'm a Firefox user though so that's where my chrome knowledge starts and ends.

glogla 9y ago
Is that a Chrome feature or Chrome-only Youtube feature?
- jchw 9y ago
  It's Chrome's lazy-loading of tabs. YouTube could presumably implement this on all browsers by detecting if the user is focused or not, but I don't know that it's always desirable.
- pfranz 9y ago
  I'm pretty sure it's a Chrome-specific lazy autoplaying of html5 video. I really like to alt-click Youtube links (so the page is loaded and queued), put my headphones on and switch over when I'm ready.
  - cyphar 9y ago
    Firefox does this too. It's on by default for Firefox Nightly and an opt-in preference in the other update channels.
    - bigbugbag 9y ago
      So what you say is that firefox does not do this. (unless you go deep in about:config which is highly discouraged by mozilla).
      - cyphar 9y ago
        Firefox Nightly does, and it's not done by default in non-nightly (but you can enable it with "media.block-autoplay-until-in-foreground"). I imagine it will become the default eventually. "Firefox doesn't do this" is not a valid one-sentence summary of what I just said.

elorant 9y ago

So even if you only had 100 tabs This is fucking surreal. Why on Earth would anyone want 100 open tabs, besides testing? What's the real life scenario we're looking at here?

archagon 9y ago
Speaking strictly for me: tabs with articles I urgently need to read, tabs with articles that I really ought to have read, tabs with articles that I've long since forgotten to close. All the same, really, just with varying degrees of guilt. Also, um, Google searches for quick notes that I couldn't be bothered to open an actual note-taking application for.
- Twirrim 9y ago
  I start doing that, but have made an effort to always start a week with a fresh browser, one tab open. If I haven't read the article before the week was up, clearly it wasn't important enough.
  - archagon 9y ago
    In principle I agree, but in practice... I can't let go of my hoarding ways. What if there's a nugget of information hiding in all those tabs that could ︎change my life?
    - chasote 9y ago
      Do you folks happen to have Kindles? I use instapaper to save articles as I come across them and then have it all wrapped up and sent to my Kindle once a week. My own customized magazine to read throughout the week as I see fit on an easy on the eyes e-ink format.
    - sn9 9y ago
      I call it "information hoarding". The struggle is real.
    - 9y ago

rplnt 9y ago

Old Opera simply used to load cache. So if you opened a tab, it was there.. for days, weeks, months, through restarts and all. I loved that. Now everything I open to "check out later" is getting lost.

ajmurmann 9y ago
This really was one of the things that Opera got better. I don't understand what the reasoning is to do this any other way.
- Tomis02 9y ago
  There is no reasoning, it's only cargo-cult mentality and fashion choices. Old Opera got almost everything better, but it lost to inferior alternatives because users aren't rational when it comes to their choices. Chrome and Firefox are the OOP of browsers.

archagon 9y ago

YES, I'm not the only one who uses this! As a compulsive tab-opener (I really gotta work on this...) and also a cellular hotspot user, both Safari and Chrome eat up, like, a gigabyte of traffic as soon as I open them. Firefox behaves much more reasonably, but until recently it's been very slow with 50+ tabs. I'm glad to hear this use case is (apparently) getting some close attention!

nevi-me 9y ago

Chrome has supported lazy loading for a while now. I unfortunately can't find this reference, but I remember it being announced as part of release notes many months ago. I have the problem of moving a tab to a new window, and then 15 minutes later I have 15 tabs open. So I often have a few Chrome windows open at any point. If I restart Chrome, only the focused tabs on each window are loaded.

frakr 9y ago
How do I enable that? I can't find it anywhere.
- damandloi 9y ago
  There is no switch. It's an inbuilt feature with the Chrme 57+

mokame 9y ago

yagyu 9y ago

Long time user of Tree Style Tabs. Works great for me. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

nialv7 9y ago
Too bad it won't work on Firefox 57

sorenjan 9y ago

> I hope that Firefox focuses more on power users in the future. I got 8 extensions installed at the moment, 6 of those are marked as legacy and will stop working before the end of the year. I also hope Mozilla focuses more on power users, but I think a lot of them will leave when their favorite extensions stops working and Google keeps favoring Chrome on their sites.

Animats 9y ago
It irks me that they're not just dumping the XUL extensions, but the Jetpack extensions as well. I've already converted my extensions once, from Greasemonkey to Jetpack, and now I have to convert to WebExtensions. And no, Firefox WebExtensions are not compatible with Google Chrome WebExtensions. They're close, but not compatible.
bigbugbag 9y ago
Hope is not enough, it's clear that mozilla has a strong stance against power users.

joboyx 9y ago

YouTube don't autoplay when not the active tab.

bigbugbag 9y ago
So you're a google chrome user, because this only happens in chrome.
- harrygeez 9y ago
  Safari had this first

hrjet 9y ago

> I'm not sure if it's still this way, but Chrome used to load every tab on startup. I used to avoid Chrome for the same reasons, but then I found an extension and, uh, extended it, to create: https://github.com/hrj/sloth/ https://github.com/hrj/sloth/ It forces all tabs into inactive state on startup. Also creates a new tab page (or switches to an existing one) to avoid loading the focussed historical tab.

ianamartin 9y ago

This is not just for power users. My mother is about the most opposite of power user that there is. But she constantly has hundreds of tabs open when I go to visit her and do my obligatory tech support duties. She uses tabs like bookmarks, even though she bookmarks everything. I've tried to coach her on working with the bookmarks better, but she has her system, and she's sticking to it. And to be fair, I don't know how I would manage bookmarks in any web browser trying to deal with them at her level. She has > 30k things bookmarked that are "important" to her. You know that feeling you get when you're watching a user do something and he or she right clicks and selects copy and then goes through the dock to find the next application and then right clicks to paste, but the target area isn't focused, so it doesn't work. So then it's back to the dock to find the prior app and then reselect the text and right-click, copy, etc. etc. etc.? You know that feeling. It hits you in the pit of your stomach like the first time you saw the alien burst out of John Hurt's chest in Alien, or the red wedding from Game of Thrones, or every time you're in a meeting with a product manager. First, there's the shock of it. The horror. Oh. My. God. WTF is happening here? Then there's the reality setting in. Holy shit. This is real. This is actually a thing that's happening, and there is literally nothing I can do about it. Then there is the sadness. I used to think of this thing in front of me as a person. Now all I see is a dead, empty, hopeless, useless, lifeless husk of a human. An end user. With a product manager alien screeching as it runs away from the lifeless corpse of the user it just murdered. Not by intent. Simply because that's what it is: a fully alien form of life that can only exist by killing humans. Sorry about the vivid imagery, and I'm hoping this comes across as a joke about the friction between PMs and developers. I don't actually think they are that bad. But every time I watch my mom try to scroll through 30k bookmarks to find a link, I get that feeling magnified by about 50.

keithpeter 9y ago
OK, I'll put my hand up here. I bookmark sites reflexively, probably a hangover from the days before Google when things were harder to find and we had dial up that you paid for by the minute. Bookmarks | Show All Bookmarks then keywords in the 'Search Bookmarks' is useful. I have actually set the bookmark.html file as my start page. I can then use 'find in page' if I can remember any keywords about the page I am looking for, or just scroll down. Ms Martin Senior needs to have her bookmarks backed up as well or there will be gnashing of teeth at some point in the future. Imagery fine!

bigbugbag 9y ago

The fun part is that opera did this and did it better years ago, but sadly it came to stop the day they decided quarterly profits were the new priority and switched to become a google chrome skin.