11 ms·

Firefox’s speed with large numbers of tabs leaves Chrome in the dust

230 points by philnash 9y ago

roryisok 9y ago
Correct me if I'm wrong but hasn't Mozilla been rewriting parts of Firefox in Rust lately?
- the8472 9y ago
  https://wiki.mozilla.org/Oxidation#Rust_components_in_Firefox https://wiki.mozilla.org/Oxidation#Rust_components_in_Firefo...
pavel_lishin 9y ago
This is very neat from a technological point of view, but: who are these people who have hundreds and thousands of tabs open, and how can we get them the help they need?
- sp332 9y ago
  At this point it's not that much different from bookmarks.
  - krzyk 9y ago
    Almost. It is more like a temporary bookmark with an instant on feature. It is so easy to use and useful (and doesn't use much ram 8n Firefox) that I frequently hit 1000 tabs open. In Chrome it was impossible.
- overcast 9y ago
  While thousands is ridiculous, a hundred isn't that unreasonable. I often keep open many as I'm researching new things, or putting sites in my to follow up, or read later queue.
  - jrimbault 9y ago
    That's why "bookmarks" were invented for... I never understand any of my friends who keep having tens of tabs open. Just bookmark the thing and free up some CPU/RAM. It's a keystroke away.
    - wvenable 9y ago
      No bookmarks are for things I want to save; tabs are temporary. If I'm reading hacker news, I'll open all the articles I want to read in new tabs (maybe with their comments in yet another tab) and then go through them one at time. Obviously this is unmanageable in Chrome from the UI but with the right extensions (tab mix plus w/ multi row tabs) in Firefox it's pretty usable.
      - Karunamon 9y ago
        Tree tabs are godly for this because it lets you retrace your steps. Say you start on HN and open five articles. You've now got HN/Site1, HN/Site2, and so on. Then you find an interesting link on 3 of those 5 sites. With normal tabbing, you now have 9 tabs open and a majority of the text hidden on one line, where with a proper tree view, you can see the entire site, and how you got there, which is probably more valuable to me than the actual content.
    - soapdog 9y ago
      From what I have seen, it is like RAM vs HD usage. You bookmark things that are going to be useful in the future, long term, while you keep tabs open while they are in current use such as when researching a topic. For example, when someting here breaks or I want to learn more about a given topic, it is not uncommon for me to use hundreds of tabs open while I triage what is useful and what is not. Some of those will be added to the bookmarks (or pocket, or pinboard, depending on how I like them). My personal workflow usually involves opening huge number of tabs researching something, then closing most of them later. So we can say that there are peaks of tab usage followed by a phase of organizing stuff. The advances in the recent Firefox releases really help me. But this is my own personal way of working, others may have different views.
- craptocurrency 9y ago
  Haha. That's insane. For me 4-5 tabs are enough. Going beyond the limits and claiming the victory is nonsensical.
  - andrethegiant 9y ago
    "I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail." I bet Henry David Thoreau would say the same about browser tabs.
  - aquadrop 9y ago
    Well, for example when I go into Wikipedia frenzy, I can easily open 10-20 tabs, terminology, graphs, tables, nested articles etc. It's much faster to switch between tabs than close and open them constantly. Why should I limit myself to 5? And yes, after an hour or two I usually get them off the stack one by one, collapsing back to first one, knowing much more about the history of Parliament in Canada.
- basch 9y ago
  tabs combine bookmarks with back and forward buttons. if i open a new tab and want to go "back" I switch tabs. now i have both states saved, which is good for speed and keeping my location on a page. tabs dont do a good job of showing me "how" i got somewhere", especially once I convert them to bookmarks. to "solve" the tab problem, you need to combine tabs, history, bookmarks, back/forward buttons, pinboard/tags/pagecache into groups that are instantly rearrangable by their proximity to each other: spatially, by topic, or temporally. i should be able to, in one command, show only tabs that are hacker news or originated from hacker news, but maybe something i googled while on one of those pages deserves to be related. now the machine should be making inferences on what goes where, and i give it feedback when it is wrong. tabs should be more like a wiki document, where as i accumulate more about, say, stagecoaches, or good reads from redef, those metadata relationships to topics and origins are preserved. i should be able to go back and show only bookmarks from only hackernews/redef/longreads combined, and only the ones about stagecoaches. i know mozilla has shown a demo of something like this, but its a long way from being more useful than tabs, because it neglects the content of the page itself.
  - vannevar 9y ago
    Tabs seem like a poor visualization of your browsing history. A history tree of your last N sites seems like it would be a lot more useful and informative (not to mention compact). Tabs don't show the tree relationship.
    - infogulch 9y ago
      True, but right now it's the only way to access it. History itself is useless for this purpose.
      - seanp2k2 9y ago
        You really need a graph with a timeline / histogram or similar. See my previous comment which has more ideas. I hope someone builds this, but I know that the way to see it happen is to go do it.
    - 9y ago
- msla 9y ago
  I know you're joking, but the "You're holding it wrong" mentality is one reason I'll probably never go back to proprietary software: The style of software which attempts to prescribe certain workflows and proscribe others inevitably reaches a point where it pisses me off.
  - Macha 9y ago
    Yeah, getting a bit of: "Chrome is so much better for my usecase. Look how much Firefox usage has declined, Firefox should just die" "Here's my use case which Firefox is better at" "Your use case is invalid!" from HN comments this week.
- denzil_correa 9y ago
  I personally know many people with approx. 50 tabs open. The reason was that they opened the tabs, want to read but haven't got around to reading it yet. They wouldn't want to invest time in maintaining it into a Reading List software.
  - tangent128 9y ago
    Knowing myself, if I kept a separate reading list, I would never revisit it. Leaving a tab open means I'll actually stumble across the page again.
  - aquadrop 9y ago
    I tried reading lists, didn't work. I treat tabs as pieces of information fighting for my attention. Some win, some don't and get closed after several weeks or months... :)
- maxerickson 9y ago
  The link describes the Firefox devs helping by improving performance for their use case.
- Arcsech 9y ago
  The use of what most HN users would consider an absurd number of tabs is shockingly (to me anyway) common among the non-tech-worker crowd. I'd say about half of my family members that don't work in tech have at least dozens and probably hundreds of tabs open at any given time. I think it's the sort of thing where this works well enough for the same purpose that other people use a read-later or bookmarking system for, and it's reliable enough that people don't care to switch (or don't know there's an alternative). It's good that Firefox is trying to adapt to the way people use technology, rather than trying to force people to adapt to how the technology works - I think that's a much faster road to widespread adoption, and it creates more goodwill on the part of their users.
  - xbmcuser 9y ago
    I can understand opening 20-30 tabs but with 100 or so it would take me longer to find the tab then just searching it for in Google or history. I went from Netscape/internet explorer to Firefox then because of the frequent crashes and how slow it was to Chrome. I am to entrenched in the Google eco system to change now so just can hope this will make Chrome cut down on the bloat.
    - eitland 9y ago
      > but with 100 or so it would take me longer to find the tab then just searching it for in Google or history. With FF when you start to type it intelligently suggests tabs you already have open. Perfect for keyboard lovers like me :)
  - weaksauce 9y ago
    I think this is a pretty common practice. I know I have hundreds of tabs open as a temporary bookmark system over many windows(48 windows, 354 tabs right now) ... to the point that I made a simple extension to find what I am looking for visually and have links on the page that focus that window and tab. I find it pretty useful in practice. firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabist/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabist/ chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabist/hdjegjggiogfkaldbfphfdkpggjemaha https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabist/hdjegjggiog... source: https://github.com/fiveNinePlusR/tabist https://github.com/fiveNinePlusR/tabist
- Yoric 9y ago
  Well, I am. I often use tabs as my todo/toread list. I generally have ~100 of them open, on Firefox.
- reifnir 9y ago
  Hi, I'm Jim and I'm a tabaholic. It's been 3 months since I cleaned-up my tabs
- azinman2 9y ago
  I worked on a prototype new browser that understood this exact need -- visualizing browsing sessions -- so that you can quickly go to where you need. We used additional information, such as how long you spent on a page, to avoid cluttering it with less important information. Ultimately we were convinced by a former Mozilla C-type that getting people to switch their browsers was a herculean task (especially on the iPad where you can't change default browsers) and we moved on. http://www.azinman.com/stateless http://www.azinman.com/stateless
- the8472 9y ago
  Easy recipe to accumulate tabs: - make a habit of Ctrl+T before googling something - open all outgoing links in new background tabs so you can continue reading the current page - leave several pages of reference material open (e.g. docs, issue trackers, random blog posts relevant to whatever you're doing) - open links that someone sends you to work on them later And once the inevitable distraction hits you you might forget closing some.
  - nice_byte 9y ago
    I have all of these habits, yet my number of open tabs never goes over ~20. I just garbage-collect often :)
- huntie 9y ago
  I have >450 tabs open right now, so I guess this is me. I said this the other day, but I use the Tab Groups plugin, and I have a different group for each project I work on. For example, I have a keyboard group with pages related to DIY keyboards. I don't have the resources to make my own keyboard right now, but I don't want to lose the research I've done. My keyboard group lets me keep my research available in the state I left it, allowing me to quickly get up to speed when I have time to work on it. It's not as though I have hundreds of tabs in one group, it would be inconvenient to access all but 20-30 of them. I think most users with similar amounts of tabs use plugins like tab groups or tree-based tabs to manage their tabs.
- mikeash 9y ago
  I don't usually get to hundreds, but it does happen sometimes, and for me it's just a matter of forgetfulness or laziness. It's easy to open new tabs, and easy to forget to close old ones, so they tend to accumulate. Eventually I'll try to find something I already had open, realize I have way too many tabs open, and go through and close all the ones I no longer need, and then the cycle repeats.
- Macha 9y ago
  Yo. Reasons I have a lot of tabs open: 1. Google searching problem. The first result is rarely a complete solution to a problem if I've resorted to Google. Maybe it's a partial solution, maybe it's no good at all. Usually I'll open anything looking relevant from the first page, skim through them, if they don't have a quick answer I'll check the next. Then I'll eliminate any that are totally not relevant. If any have partial answers, I'll keep them around while searching related search terms. See also searching our jira instance for related issues when I know this is very similar to something that's came up before. 2. Programming docs have this annoying habit of sticking one class per page, meaning I usually have to have multiple pages open to understand some area of a library if I'm unfamiliar with it. 3. Reddit/HN threads often send me on tangents down links while I keep the parent threads open. 4. Sometimes I'll go on an aside and do something else while keeping my previous context open for when I return. Yes, I could bookmark them, but bookmarks are a lot more awkward to load back and also mentally feel like they're for something a lot more permanent than "I might need in 3-4 hours but won't need it tomorrow". Plus when it's not costing me much to not have to put up with the reload time... 5. Sometimes I open new windows to view multiple pieces of content at once. Sometimes I end up following links in these new windows. 6. Sometimes I open new windows to create a seperate context for a new piece of research when the previous one might be still relevant. I have tried pinboard, pocket when it was readitlater, browser bookmarks, etc. None of them have really solved this use case and I tend to forget about using them after a while. I tend to idle in the 5-20 range, go up to the 50s when researching. Hitting 100+ happens many days, and my record is closing out a browser with 354 open tabs.
- riquito 9y ago
  Why do you think they need help? If their memory works differently and they have everything organized, what's there to fix? Just enjoy that Firefox is faster and less memory hungry for everybody.
- dbalbright 9y ago
  ::waves:: It's generally from researching a topic while working on a project. It's a bit like a cache of bookmarks, you don't really know what you're going to need until you've made some headway and found what was truly helpful that you may need later versus what you can safely close.
- navinsylvester 9y ago
  The subtitle even mentions the term 'power user' but still. Cheesy comments on top - way to go fanboys. But seriously why do HN folks love chrome?. We talk about privacy as fundamental right but are ok with chrome. We all know it's a memory hog but still are ok with it.
- ssivark 9y ago
  Tab-o-phile reporting! I currently have ~500 tabs open, unevenly distributed among 20 "tab groups". It's very much like expecting your editor/IDE to open a bunch of files and git status when you switch to a "project". - I'm pursuing a multi-pronged agenda which requires context switches to get different things done (multiple projects/activities, each with their own group eg: communication, project1 at work, project2 at work, paying my bills, topic FOO that I've been reading about in the evenings, HN content, etc. ). I prefer for my browser to display the state at which I left things, including the possible resources I was consulting -- so that I can continue from exactly where I left off. Also, one might actually want to save the state of the javascript objects on the page or something, rather than just the URL! - A lot of my browser activity has the flavor of research. A lot of searching, consulting references, trying out things in Jupyter notebooks, etc. - A large part of it is keeping track of interesting things to look into. Whether you call those "bookmarks" or "open tabs" is just jargon, since Firefox only loads tabs on demand. So, for all practical purposes, it has an amazingly convenient way to save context, without having to click once for each page. And closing a tab feels easier than deleting a bookmark. I sometimes think that this might be the electronic analogue of some (creative?) people who have messy offices and are able to get along just fine. As an example, refer to the recent discussions about Claude Shannon's style: 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14819377 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14819377 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14774163 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14774163 3. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14776520 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14776520
- setr 9y ago
  I have the opposing opinion Who are these people with a shockingly low number of tabs, and how do we get them the help they need? Those I usually see with few tabs are either those who only browse the web for extremely simple things (ie facebook, netflix and google for very simple questions), or those who only just maintain like a single docs page at any given moment. The hell kind of absurd usage pattern is that? Do you keep one book on your shelf too? Do you just not have any interests? Nothing but one thing at a time? I keep around ~300 tabs and a heavily organized bookmarks storage with some 400 links; tabs are ram and bookmarks are disk. How else would you naturally organize your web-information? I can only imagine you have very little information to organize...
  - pavel_lishin 9y ago
    > Do you keep one book on your shelf too? I would argue that 300 tabs is like having 300 open books piled on your desk. > Do you just not have any interests? Yes, and my bookshelves - and bookmarks - are crammed full of them. But I don't need to have every project I'm working on on my desk. I guess it's pretty arbitrary, but I find it easier to organize things in bookmarks - for certain things, hierarchically in folders; for others, with tags - but if I'm done working on Thing X, and want to start working on Thing Y, I don't want to have to search through my 300 open tabs to figure out where things are. An advantage of many open tabs, I will freely admit, is that they're typically scrolled to where you last left off, sometimes with information pre-filled if it's something interactive.
    - saurik 9y ago
      There is absolutely no technical reason why bookmarks and tabs are separate concepts: if there is a way to search and organize bookmarks more easily that should be applied to tabs, and the idea that a tab has to be some kind of constantly-open running program burning RAM and CPU is essentially a mistake made only by Google (and we can probably guess why they like that), as the only permanent state of a tab is the history of URLs it represented (which can be easily verified by rebooting: if the browser doesn't save it to disk it isn't part of the semantic state).
- Mithaldu 9y ago
  Who are you, why are you so cruel, and how can i get you help to be not cruel?
- eitland 9y ago
  > who are these people who have hundreds and thousands of tabs open, I'm one! I'm a happy software/systems/knowledge engineer. > and how can we get them the help they need? Thanks for asking! Here is my idea: Make an even better solution! What I need: An effortless[0] way to research big topics. This includes - multi-path discovery (currently solved by ctrl-clicking to open links that looks useful or interesting in a sub-tab-tree while continuing to read the piece I'm already reading.) - possibility to bookmark stuff I work on effortlessy and with cross-device sync. I currently use pinboard which is great. I'm not even fully utilizing it (.tags for instance is a part I'm sure I'm not utilizing as much as I should.) My current setup has a few weaknesses, e.g.: - I want a way to stash away everything down to the position of the windows (no, I actually don't think I need that, but I really would like: the current windows, the current tabs, nested the way they are etc etc). Why? In case I want to switch to another task (e.g. urgent request). - I want an even better "OneNote" that integrates effortlessly with FF (or whatever you create to replace it). - A tool to automatically transcribe booooring videos or at least extract the juicy few seconds that I need :-P Feel free to suggest more great ideas here. [0]: Yep, if you want a chance to replace my exiting system effortless is your goal.
  - badloginagain 9y ago
    Tab trees would be pretty cool, especially if you list tabs in column view like I do. Opening a link in a new tab would list as a child tab, and the list of child tabs could be collapsed/hidden. Drag child tabs out of the tree to become parents themselves. This would be great for dynamic research tasks. You could collapse trees and get a top level view, useful if you're in the weeds; you could close trees by parent, great for killing avenues of research you no long need. It would also be good for when you need to quickly check the syntax of something or fix a minor bug without disrupting the larger project you're focusing on. From a Dev/LiveOps perspective, it would be huge- grouping all my AWS pages, CMS pages, custom dashboards, would be a huge help. I can easily sprawl tens of separate tabs to get different services to talk to eachother.
    - eitland 9y ago
      This is exactly what we are used to in FF! Currently we are in a position where we'll push for devs to provide the necessary APIs going forward and I'll be happy to have more people along to push for that. (Also, AFAIK Mozilla will provide a LTS version of the last version that will work with real extensions.)
- BeetleB 9y ago
  >and how can we get them the help they need By telling them about OneTab.
- DennisP 9y ago
  Here's the help I need: make a button I can push to save the urls of all open tabs to a separate history, and close the tabs. There's too much noise in the regular history. Bonus points if the saved urls are grouped by the window they were in. I tried making a chrome plugin for this, but with a lot of tabs it didn't work reliably, and I didn't have time to put more work into it.
  - pkkm 9y ago
    You can create a "to read later" folder in your bookmarks, then right click the tab bar in each window and select "Bookmark All Tabs". That's fairly close to what you're describing, and also works with Firefox Sync (though in my experience it's best to keep the number of bookmarks below 5000 for Sync to work well).
frinks2000 9y ago
This is all fine if you are running Windows. On a mac it will spin the fan faster than anything else... with two tabs open. Firefox has become a Windows browser, if anything
- pbiggar 9y ago
  Weird. When I was at Mozilla (2011), almost everyone had a Mac.
- bjpbakker 9y ago
  I'm using FF as my main browser on both Linux and macOS and never had any issues like that. Most of the people I work with use macOS, a lot of them use FF and never heard anyone complain about that. Maybe there are some other things that cause this on your machine?
- dm319 9y ago
  Just an anecdote, but back in my Windows XP days, I tried out firefox and found it pretty slow, seemed even worse than IE (in 2004ish?), whereas chrome was lightning quick. Fast forward several years and using gnome 2 on linux, and I found firefox felt snappier overall than chrome. I still do find firefox quicker for most thing (not google maps), though they have various add-ons which doesnt make it a fair comparison.
  - soperj 9y ago
    You found Chrome lightning quick in 2004? Must have been since it was released in 2008. Firefox 1.0 was released in November 2004 by the way.
    - dm319 9y ago
      Thanks - my memory is a poor witness!
- michaelmrose 9y ago
  I'm curious if this has something to do with video. Do you experience much more power when consuming video on the browser and is there a difference between how firefox, chrome, and safari use the gpu while decoding video? This might be interesting to quantify.
overcast 9y ago
Now if they can only fix the memory leak, that chews up gigs of RAM in only an hour.
- sp332 9y ago
  If you can reproduce the issue with a clean profile or in Safe Mode, please file a bug report.
  - geokon 9y ago
    I've narrowed it down to specific webpages - but how can I know if the leak is the pages' fault or the browser's fault? (Biggest culprits are Discourse forums.. which is a shame b/c I really like the platform)
    - nicoburns 9y ago
      You could try leaving the same website open in Chrome
    - dblohm7 9y ago
      about:memory will help you there. Save those reports (you can even anonymize them) and include them in a bug report.
    - jamesgeck0 9y ago
      A couple weeks ago I'd've advised reporting those pages with the Pulse extension [1], but it looks like it's recently been retired. 1. https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/pulse https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/pulse
      - sp332 9y ago
        Download Developer Edition https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/developer/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/developer/ (or Nightly), load up the page, and in the browser menu click "Report Site Issue".
- 9y ago
syshum 9y ago
>>Mozilla will be hoping to attract power users They already had the power users, which they have now told to get screwed when they killed the extensions to chase the performance benchmark Trading Usability and the ability to customize the browser for something that is "fast" but you cant do anything with it... Useless is what it is IMO This is the difference between a sports car and a truck. Me I drive a truck, it might be slow and cumbersome but it is versatile and customizable, I haul people and things, I can add a camper, I can do all kinds of things with my truck. If I had a sports car it might be fast but I would be limited in the places I could go and the things I could do They are taking the FF Pickup and turning it into a FF Sports car... I have no interest in a sports car
- Ar-Curunir 9y ago
  The new system is more secure. There'll be some initial pain as new APIs are stabilized and new extensions are created, but I'm willing to give Mozilla the chance, they're the only major browser that's not making a browser with a secondary, ulterior motive.
  - syshum 9y ago
    The problem is that the new API are not and can not be as powerful as the XUL based system. It is impossible. The new Chrome Replica Web Extensions can never be as powerful as the old system.
    - staticassertion 9y ago
      What power, specifically, are you missing in extensions?
      - interfixus 9y ago
        How about the power to customize every goddamn aspect of the UI? The power to make my browser behave the way I want it to behave? This is what made Firefox worth the while for thirteen, fourteen years or however long it's been. I really have no idea where to go from here.
supremesaboteur 9y ago
Previously : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14823807 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14823807
- cl0rkster 9y ago
  I originally read about this in the post you linked. There were some great charts in that article showing how performance has changed throughout the version of Firefox. I only clicked this article because I was hoping to see a direct comparison to Chrome laid out in similar fashion. Unfortunately, the title is purely click bait and the only mention of Chrome is that anecdotally, "Chrome has something of a reputation for being a resource hog". The article that was originally posted was certainly more interesting and informative.
SubiculumCode 9y ago
I must say that Firefox's last couple of version feel blazing fast.
- masthead 9y ago
  Maybe the placebo effect?
  - kannanvijayan 9y ago
    I hope not. We've been working our butts off optimizing stuff across the board. The big projects (Stylo, WebRender) are ongoing and awesome, but there's also a legion of people working on eliminating boring papercut performance issues (a few milliseconds here, a few milliseconds there). Still have more stuff to land, so expect things to keep getting better.
  - Manishearth 9y ago
    There's been a big push of perf fixes in Firefox lately.
  - callahad 9y ago
    It's real. We've landed enormous performance improvements this year, including migrating most Firefox users to a full multi-process architecture, as well as integrating parts of the Servo parallel browser engine project into Firefox. There are still many improvements yet-to-land, but in most cases we're on track for Firefox 57 in November.
roryisok 9y ago
I wonder, if there was a fork of electron using Firefox instead of chromium, what would the ram usage be like? Mozilla really paved the way for electron with prism, shame it never really took off
- ZenoArrow 9y ago
  I believe you're looking for Positron: https://github.com/mozilla/positron https://github.com/mozilla/positron
  - roryisok 9y ago
    Very interesting, thanks. Apparently its been discontinued and replaced by qbrt https://mykzilla.org/2017/03/15/introducing-qbrt/ https://mykzilla.org/2017/03/15/introducing-qbrt/
- Macha 9y ago
  Gecko is apparently pretty painful to embed, with most other Gecko based browsers (that weren't firefox forks a la Pale Moon) having long since stopped development or switched to Webkit/Chromium.
  - kuschku 9y ago
    That’ll be fixed once Servo is finished, though, as that has easy APIs for embedding.
    - pspeter3 9y ago
      Yeah, I'm really interested to see that happen. Any idea of when?
- vatotemking 9y ago
  I think Komodo IDE was built on top of Mozilla codebase. But im not sure if its related to positron
Tomis02 9y ago
Meh, Opera was easily handling huge numbers of tabs a decade ago, while providing the option for vertical tabs, tab stacking and a tab scroller so that you could comfortably switch between them. By comparison, Chrome and Firefox have always appeared as dilettantes.
- esMazer 9y ago
  vertical tabs: It seems you are taking of an extension? (I got excited for a second but I couldn't find the option under settings). If you are talking about an extension then Firefox also has a similar extension that works very well.
  - Symbiote 9y ago
    I think it means this [1], which is a screenshot from Opera 12 in 2011, but looks pretty much the same as I remember the tab sidebar working in 2004-ish. I haven't used Opera for a decade, so I don't know if the feature still exists. [1] http://forums.opera.com/discussion/1866076/tab-stacks-in-side-bar/p1 http://forums.opera.com/discussion/1866076/tab-stacks-in-sid...
  - Tomis02 9y ago
    Opera 12 (pre-Chromium) used to have the features I mentioned built-in, which meant they were faster, fit in with the browser seamlessly and you didn't have to worry about security. Best of all, you didn't need to use them if you didn't have to. Unfortunately the new Opera is missing most of old Opera's features, but you can give Vivaldi a try.
superkuh 9y ago
As someone that switched to Pale Moon (FF fork) because of the loss of large tab session performance in post-v30 builds this is great to hear. Now all they have to do is kill the walled garden and Firefox might be worth trying again.
- BeetleB 9y ago
  >As someone that switched to Pale Moon (FF fork) because of the loss of large tab session performance in post-v30 builds this is great to hear. I tried Pale Moon about a year ago. It had a nasty memory leak (my browser stays open for weeks). I really wanted to like it, but this was a serious problem.
- robin_reala 9y ago
  What walled garden?
stewbrew 9y ago
IMHO there is something wrong when people leave tens+ tabs open. There are bookmarks for keeping references to pages. FF also has Pocket for keeping references to pages I want to read later. So, this is a benchmark that should not be relevant in real life if the GUI offers the right solution for the problem of keeping references to pages.
- PKop 9y ago
  Isn’t it akin to the difference between hard disk storage and RAM? A temporal difference regarding access patterns specifically.
  - stewbrew 9y ago
    For whatever reason this make me think of my swap partition. :-)
- sixothree 9y ago
  I often open 80+ tabs during the normal course of a day. Often times 5 of those are spreadsheets in one window with a few pdf spec documents, reference sites, handfuls a internet searches, a few for different version/pages of the application under test, and boom. Why would I want any of those in bookmarks when I can have them open when I need them, which is now.
  - stewbrew 9y ago
    Well but ... In the course of a day, I often realize that I have the same URL opened in 2+ tabs. There of course are use cases where I want to have more views on the same page but usually, that's not the default behaviour I want. > open when I need them Well, what do you mean with "open". As I said IMHO there is something wrong here.
    - sixothree 9y ago
      By open I mean that they require no additional navigation or credential, other than clicking on the correct tab.
seanwilson 9y ago
For people that have hundreds of tabs open...how do you find anything? I generally have about 5 frequently used tabs pinned in Chrome (so they take up minimal space) and up to 10 or so other ones open. Once I have more than that many tabs open I can't see the tab titles anymore which frustrates me so I'll close some. I'm in the camp that cannot understand how having hundreds of tabs open can be practical...to me it would be like having hundreds of files open in an IDE or file browser, hundreds of terminals open, or hundreds of documents scattered across my desk. At some point the number of things you have in front of you becomes overwhelming to keep in your head and you have to clear away the things you don't need right now.
- Manishearth 9y ago
  If you type in the URL bar firefox will show results from open tabs. You can also force this by typing `%` before the search term. Chrome's UI is terrible for multiple tabs. Chrome will shrink tabs down as much as possible. Firefox stops shrinking once they're like 75% of their original width, and lets you scroll instead. On top of that, addons like Tab Center Redux make it much easier to manage things by putting them on the side (so they don't get shrunk at all) and adding a dedicated search box.
  - seanwilson 9y ago
    > Chrome's UI is terrible for multiple tabs. I'm pretty sure that's because Chrome's UX team don't expect you to have hundreds of tabs open. Why does your workflow require you to have that many tabs? Hundreds of tabs just seems an insane number to me. Even if you could search by tab you'd likely forget the names of the ones that were there in the first place. Can you think of another app where you would have that many things open at once? If not, why are browsers with tabs different? The rule of thumb with UI design is that users can remember about 7 things in their short term memory.
    - kuschku 9y ago
      It also searches URLs and in some cases fulltext.
dannysu 9y ago
I feel like with a bit more improvements to Firefox Snooze Tab [1] and Container Tab [2] extensions the need to have tons of tabs open could be solved. What if it's easy to easily have multiple "Research containers"? Container tab allows you to hide all tabs related to a particular container, so I feel like you can easily improve your workflow. What about combining that functionality with snooze tab extension? But instead of snoozing individual tabs, snooze a container. [1]: https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/snooze-tabs [2]: https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/containers
- kasabali 9y ago
  it is possible today using tab groups and tab groups helper extensions. tab groups provides tab groups and the helper provides suspend/resume of individual groups. sadly they will stop functioning after Firefox 57, because progress, yeah.
clairity 9y ago
for those commenting about how unhygenic having many tabs open is, why bother trying to cajole others into having just a few tabs open? it's such a weird social norming behavior (to me). i can understand asking why others do it because it is not your norm, but why the addition of trying to force others to conform to your behavior? (i'm genuinely asking, as this kind of stuff is fascinating to me.) why not take the 30 seconds to mull it over to at least develop a sense of understanding/empathy before throwing out a micro agression around something so frivolous? i mean, if it's not hurting you, then let other people be, right? and besides, shouldn't the computer conform to how the human wants to work and not the other way around?
- graphitezepp 9y ago
  Personally tab bloat reeks of stemming from internet addiction and/or attention span issues. Would hazard a guess that this is the source of anti-tab sentiment.
  - colanderman 9y ago
    Tabs left open don't feed internet addiction/ADHD. The act of opening a new tab does. ("Ooh I wonder if there's anything new on FB/HN/etc.?") I leave about a dozen or so tabs open; they track projects I'm in the middle of but can't complete right now for whatever reason. Leaving them put is organizationally helpful to my brain. (I do the same with physical items as well.) But the few sites I'm addicted to… those stay closed until I need a fix.
    - graphitezepp 9y ago
      Yeah "the act of opening a new tab does" I agree with. My original statement is based from my own behavior which I was projecting on to others (which I suspect others who are judging people in this thread may be doing), I don't leave my machine on overnight so the over 100 tab numbers being talked about freak me out.
    - joombaga 9y ago
      They certainly feed my ADHD. If I have an HN tab open between the the AWS console I have up currently, and that API documentation I need, HN may get some attention before I hit CMD+[ again.
pkamb 9y ago
I started using the "Firefox Focus" browser for iOS a lot specifically because it has one tab. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/firefox-focus-the-privacy-browser/id1055677337?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/firefox-focus-the-privacy-br... Removing the ability to even make tabs (which I love and hoard) is nice. Big button to delete your current page, which you have to do if you want something else. You're constantly at "inbox zero" for your tabs. Will look through the comments here for similar solutions on the desktop. Perhaps something that limits the number of tabs you can open. Or automatically closes old tabs if they're on the website's "home page" as opposed to a specific article.
scott_karana 9y ago
Didn't we just discuss this on the front page two days ago? Seems like a dupe/linkspam post to me... Thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14823807 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14823807 Original blog post: https://metafluff.com/2017/07/21/i-am-a-tab-hoarder/ https://metafluff.com/2017/07/21/i-am-a-tab-hoarder/
- jessaustin 9y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14849247 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14849247
phasnox 9y ago
Curious, how many tabs do you have open right now? Me: 17
- jumbopapa 9y ago
  11 here. StackOverflow at 5, Google at 3, HackerNews at 1, MvvmCross Documentation at 1, and Vivaldi Start Page at 1.
digitalshankar 9y ago
Firefox Rocks! #FirefoxMasterRace
eitland 9y ago
But why is this on the bottom of the front page now after 3 hours and 169 points? Is someone flagging this or has it triggered a flamewar-detector?
foota 9y ago
I use a plug-in called fresh start to manage saving large number of tabs.
pspeter3 9y ago
Our page load performance numbers collected from real users show the following performance ranking: 1. Chrome 2. Safari 3. Explorer 4. Firefox
- tyrw 9y ago
  Yes, but did those users have 1,600 tabs open? That seems to be the use case Firefox is going all in on lately.
romanovcode 9y ago
I hope this is correct. I would gladly switch to Firefox and forget about google forever. But firefox is just too slow for me.

230 points by philnash 9y ago

roryisok 9y ago

Correct me if I'm wrong but hasn't Mozilla been rewriting parts of Firefox in Rust lately?

the8472 9y ago
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Oxidation#Rust_components_in_Firefox https://wiki.mozilla.org/Oxidation#Rust_components_in_Firefo...

pavel_lishin 9y ago

This is very neat from a technological point of view, but: who are these people who have hundreds and thousands of tabs open, and how can we get them the help they need?

sp332 9y ago
At this point it's not that much different from bookmarks.
- krzyk 9y ago
  Almost. It is more like a temporary bookmark with an instant on feature. It is so easy to use and useful (and doesn't use much ram 8n Firefox) that I frequently hit 1000 tabs open. In Chrome it was impossible.
overcast 9y ago
While thousands is ridiculous, a hundred isn't that unreasonable. I often keep open many as I'm researching new things, or putting sites in my to follow up, or read later queue.
- jrimbault 9y ago
  That's why "bookmarks" were invented for... I never understand any of my friends who keep having tens of tabs open. Just bookmark the thing and free up some CPU/RAM. It's a keystroke away.
  - wvenable 9y ago
    No bookmarks are for things I want to save; tabs are temporary. If I'm reading hacker news, I'll open all the articles I want to read in new tabs (maybe with their comments in yet another tab) and then go through them one at time. Obviously this is unmanageable in Chrome from the UI but with the right extensions (tab mix plus w/ multi row tabs) in Firefox it's pretty usable.
    - Karunamon 9y ago
      Tree tabs are godly for this because it lets you retrace your steps. Say you start on HN and open five articles. You've now got HN/Site1, HN/Site2, and so on. Then you find an interesting link on 3 of those 5 sites. With normal tabbing, you now have 9 tabs open and a majority of the text hidden on one line, where with a proper tree view, you can see the entire site, and how you got there, which is probably more valuable to me than the actual content.
  - soapdog 9y ago
    From what I have seen, it is like RAM vs HD usage. You bookmark things that are going to be useful in the future, long term, while you keep tabs open while they are in current use such as when researching a topic. For example, when someting here breaks or I want to learn more about a given topic, it is not uncommon for me to use hundreds of tabs open while I triage what is useful and what is not. Some of those will be added to the bookmarks (or pocket, or pinboard, depending on how I like them). My personal workflow usually involves opening huge number of tabs researching something, then closing most of them later. So we can say that there are peaks of tab usage followed by a phase of organizing stuff. The advances in the recent Firefox releases really help me. But this is my own personal way of working, others may have different views.
craptocurrency 9y ago
Haha. That's insane. For me 4-5 tabs are enough. Going beyond the limits and claiming the victory is nonsensical.
- andrethegiant 9y ago
  "I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail." I bet Henry David Thoreau would say the same about browser tabs.
- aquadrop 9y ago
  Well, for example when I go into Wikipedia frenzy, I can easily open 10-20 tabs, terminology, graphs, tables, nested articles etc. It's much faster to switch between tabs than close and open them constantly. Why should I limit myself to 5? And yes, after an hour or two I usually get them off the stack one by one, collapsing back to first one, knowing much more about the history of Parliament in Canada.
basch 9y ago
tabs combine bookmarks with back and forward buttons. if i open a new tab and want to go "back" I switch tabs. now i have both states saved, which is good for speed and keeping my location on a page. tabs dont do a good job of showing me "how" i got somewhere", especially once I convert them to bookmarks. to "solve" the tab problem, you need to combine tabs, history, bookmarks, back/forward buttons, pinboard/tags/pagecache into groups that are instantly rearrangable by their proximity to each other: spatially, by topic, or temporally. i should be able to, in one command, show only tabs that are hacker news or originated from hacker news, but maybe something i googled while on one of those pages deserves to be related. now the machine should be making inferences on what goes where, and i give it feedback when it is wrong. tabs should be more like a wiki document, where as i accumulate more about, say, stagecoaches, or good reads from redef, those metadata relationships to topics and origins are preserved. i should be able to go back and show only bookmarks from only hackernews/redef/longreads combined, and only the ones about stagecoaches. i know mozilla has shown a demo of something like this, but its a long way from being more useful than tabs, because it neglects the content of the page itself.
- vannevar 9y ago
  Tabs seem like a poor visualization of your browsing history. A history tree of your last N sites seems like it would be a lot more useful and informative (not to mention compact). Tabs don't show the tree relationship.
  - infogulch 9y ago
    True, but right now it's the only way to access it. History itself is useless for this purpose.
    - seanp2k2 9y ago
      You really need a graph with a timeline / histogram or similar. See my previous comment which has more ideas. I hope someone builds this, but I know that the way to see it happen is to go do it.
  - 9y ago
msla 9y ago
I know you're joking, but the "You're holding it wrong" mentality is one reason I'll probably never go back to proprietary software: The style of software which attempts to prescribe certain workflows and proscribe others inevitably reaches a point where it pisses me off.
- Macha 9y ago
  Yeah, getting a bit of: "Chrome is so much better for my usecase. Look how much Firefox usage has declined, Firefox should just die" "Here's my use case which Firefox is better at" "Your use case is invalid!" from HN comments this week.
denzil_correa 9y ago
I personally know many people with approx. 50 tabs open. The reason was that they opened the tabs, want to read but haven't got around to reading it yet. They wouldn't want to invest time in maintaining it into a Reading List software.
- tangent128 9y ago
  Knowing myself, if I kept a separate reading list, I would never revisit it. Leaving a tab open means I'll actually stumble across the page again.
- aquadrop 9y ago
  I tried reading lists, didn't work. I treat tabs as pieces of information fighting for my attention. Some win, some don't and get closed after several weeks or months... :)
maxerickson 9y ago
The link describes the Firefox devs helping by improving performance for their use case.
Arcsech 9y ago
The use of what most HN users would consider an absurd number of tabs is shockingly (to me anyway) common among the non-tech-worker crowd. I'd say about half of my family members that don't work in tech have at least dozens and probably hundreds of tabs open at any given time. I think it's the sort of thing where this works well enough for the same purpose that other people use a read-later or bookmarking system for, and it's reliable enough that people don't care to switch (or don't know there's an alternative). It's good that Firefox is trying to adapt to the way people use technology, rather than trying to force people to adapt to how the technology works - I think that's a much faster road to widespread adoption, and it creates more goodwill on the part of their users.
- xbmcuser 9y ago
  I can understand opening 20-30 tabs but with 100 or so it would take me longer to find the tab then just searching it for in Google or history. I went from Netscape/internet explorer to Firefox then because of the frequent crashes and how slow it was to Chrome. I am to entrenched in the Google eco system to change now so just can hope this will make Chrome cut down on the bloat.
  - eitland 9y ago
    > but with 100 or so it would take me longer to find the tab then just searching it for in Google or history. With FF when you start to type it intelligently suggests tabs you already have open. Perfect for keyboard lovers like me :)
- weaksauce 9y ago
  I think this is a pretty common practice. I know I have hundreds of tabs open as a temporary bookmark system over many windows(48 windows, 354 tabs right now) ... to the point that I made a simple extension to find what I am looking for visually and have links on the page that focus that window and tab. I find it pretty useful in practice. firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabist/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabist/ chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabist/hdjegjggiogfkaldbfphfdkpggjemaha https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabist/hdjegjggiog... source: https://github.com/fiveNinePlusR/tabist https://github.com/fiveNinePlusR/tabist
Yoric 9y ago
Well, I am. I often use tabs as my todo/toread list. I generally have ~100 of them open, on Firefox.
reifnir 9y ago
Hi, I'm Jim and I'm a tabaholic. It's been 3 months since I cleaned-up my tabs
azinman2 9y ago
I worked on a prototype new browser that understood this exact need -- visualizing browsing sessions -- so that you can quickly go to where you need. We used additional information, such as how long you spent on a page, to avoid cluttering it with less important information. Ultimately we were convinced by a former Mozilla C-type that getting people to switch their browsers was a herculean task (especially on the iPad where you can't change default browsers) and we moved on. http://www.azinman.com/stateless http://www.azinman.com/stateless
the8472 9y ago
Easy recipe to accumulate tabs: - make a habit of Ctrl+T before googling something - open all outgoing links in new background tabs so you can continue reading the current page - leave several pages of reference material open (e.g. docs, issue trackers, random blog posts relevant to whatever you're doing) - open links that someone sends you to work on them later And once the inevitable distraction hits you you might forget closing some.
- nice_byte 9y ago
  I have all of these habits, yet my number of open tabs never goes over ~20. I just garbage-collect often :)
huntie 9y ago
I have >450 tabs open right now, so I guess this is me. I said this the other day, but I use the Tab Groups plugin, and I have a different group for each project I work on. For example, I have a keyboard group with pages related to DIY keyboards. I don't have the resources to make my own keyboard right now, but I don't want to lose the research I've done. My keyboard group lets me keep my research available in the state I left it, allowing me to quickly get up to speed when I have time to work on it. It's not as though I have hundreds of tabs in one group, it would be inconvenient to access all but 20-30 of them. I think most users with similar amounts of tabs use plugins like tab groups or tree-based tabs to manage their tabs.
mikeash 9y ago
I don't usually get to hundreds, but it does happen sometimes, and for me it's just a matter of forgetfulness or laziness. It's easy to open new tabs, and easy to forget to close old ones, so they tend to accumulate. Eventually I'll try to find something I already had open, realize I have way too many tabs open, and go through and close all the ones I no longer need, and then the cycle repeats.
Macha 9y ago
Yo. Reasons I have a lot of tabs open: 1. Google searching problem. The first result is rarely a complete solution to a problem if I've resorted to Google. Maybe it's a partial solution, maybe it's no good at all. Usually I'll open anything looking relevant from the first page, skim through them, if they don't have a quick answer I'll check the next. Then I'll eliminate any that are totally not relevant. If any have partial answers, I'll keep them around while searching related search terms. See also searching our jira instance for related issues when I know this is very similar to something that's came up before. 2. Programming docs have this annoying habit of sticking one class per page, meaning I usually have to have multiple pages open to understand some area of a library if I'm unfamiliar with it. 3. Reddit/HN threads often send me on tangents down links while I keep the parent threads open. 4. Sometimes I'll go on an aside and do something else while keeping my previous context open for when I return. Yes, I could bookmark them, but bookmarks are a lot more awkward to load back and also mentally feel like they're for something a lot more permanent than "I might need in 3-4 hours but won't need it tomorrow". Plus when it's not costing me much to not have to put up with the reload time... 5. Sometimes I open new windows to view multiple pieces of content at once. Sometimes I end up following links in these new windows. 6. Sometimes I open new windows to create a seperate context for a new piece of research when the previous one might be still relevant. I have tried pinboard, pocket when it was readitlater, browser bookmarks, etc. None of them have really solved this use case and I tend to forget about using them after a while. I tend to idle in the 5-20 range, go up to the 50s when researching. Hitting 100+ happens many days, and my record is closing out a browser with 354 open tabs.
riquito 9y ago
Why do you think they need help? If their memory works differently and they have everything organized, what's there to fix? Just enjoy that Firefox is faster and less memory hungry for everybody.
dbalbright 9y ago
::waves:: It's generally from researching a topic while working on a project. It's a bit like a cache of bookmarks, you don't really know what you're going to need until you've made some headway and found what was truly helpful that you may need later versus what you can safely close.
navinsylvester 9y ago
The subtitle even mentions the term 'power user' but still. Cheesy comments on top - way to go fanboys. But seriously why do HN folks love chrome?. We talk about privacy as fundamental right but are ok with chrome. We all know it's a memory hog but still are ok with it.
ssivark 9y ago
Tab-o-phile reporting! I currently have ~500 tabs open, unevenly distributed among 20 "tab groups". It's very much like expecting your editor/IDE to open a bunch of files and git status when you switch to a "project". - I'm pursuing a multi-pronged agenda which requires context switches to get different things done (multiple projects/activities, each with their own group eg: communication, project1 at work, project2 at work, paying my bills, topic FOO that I've been reading about in the evenings, HN content, etc. ). I prefer for my browser to display the state at which I left things, including the possible resources I was consulting -- so that I can continue from exactly where I left off. Also, one might actually want to save the state of the javascript objects on the page or something, rather than just the URL! - A lot of my browser activity has the flavor of research. A lot of searching, consulting references, trying out things in Jupyter notebooks, etc. - A large part of it is keeping track of interesting things to look into. Whether you call those "bookmarks" or "open tabs" is just jargon, since Firefox only loads tabs on demand. So, for all practical purposes, it has an amazingly convenient way to save context, without having to click once for each page. And closing a tab feels easier than deleting a bookmark. I sometimes think that this might be the electronic analogue of some (creative?) people who have messy offices and are able to get along just fine. As an example, refer to the recent discussions about Claude Shannon's style: 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14819377 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14819377 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14774163 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14774163 3. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14776520 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14776520
setr 9y ago
I have the opposing opinion Who are these people with a shockingly low number of tabs, and how do we get them the help they need? Those I usually see with few tabs are either those who only browse the web for extremely simple things (ie facebook, netflix and google for very simple questions), or those who only just maintain like a single docs page at any given moment. The hell kind of absurd usage pattern is that? Do you keep one book on your shelf too? Do you just not have any interests? Nothing but one thing at a time? I keep around ~300 tabs and a heavily organized bookmarks storage with some 400 links; tabs are ram and bookmarks are disk. How else would you naturally organize your web-information? I can only imagine you have very little information to organize...
- pavel_lishin 9y ago
  > Do you keep one book on your shelf too? I would argue that 300 tabs is like having 300 open books piled on your desk. > Do you just not have any interests? Yes, and my bookshelves - and bookmarks - are crammed full of them. But I don't need to have every project I'm working on on my desk. I guess it's pretty arbitrary, but I find it easier to organize things in bookmarks - for certain things, hierarchically in folders; for others, with tags - but if I'm done working on Thing X, and want to start working on Thing Y, I don't want to have to search through my 300 open tabs to figure out where things are. An advantage of many open tabs, I will freely admit, is that they're typically scrolled to where you last left off, sometimes with information pre-filled if it's something interactive.
  - saurik 9y ago
    There is absolutely no technical reason why bookmarks and tabs are separate concepts: if there is a way to search and organize bookmarks more easily that should be applied to tabs, and the idea that a tab has to be some kind of constantly-open running program burning RAM and CPU is essentially a mistake made only by Google (and we can probably guess why they like that), as the only permanent state of a tab is the history of URLs it represented (which can be easily verified by rebooting: if the browser doesn't save it to disk it isn't part of the semantic state).
Mithaldu 9y ago
Who are you, why are you so cruel, and how can i get you help to be not cruel?
eitland 9y ago
> who are these people who have hundreds and thousands of tabs open, I'm one! I'm a happy software/systems/knowledge engineer. > and how can we get them the help they need? Thanks for asking! Here is my idea: Make an even better solution! What I need: An effortless[0] way to research big topics. This includes - multi-path discovery (currently solved by ctrl-clicking to open links that looks useful or interesting in a sub-tab-tree while continuing to read the piece I'm already reading.) - possibility to bookmark stuff I work on effortlessy and with cross-device sync. I currently use pinboard which is great. I'm not even fully utilizing it (.tags for instance is a part I'm sure I'm not utilizing as much as I should.) My current setup has a few weaknesses, e.g.: - I want a way to stash away everything down to the position of the windows (no, I actually don't think I need that, but I really would like: the current windows, the current tabs, nested the way they are etc etc). Why? In case I want to switch to another task (e.g. urgent request). - I want an even better "OneNote" that integrates effortlessly with FF (or whatever you create to replace it). - A tool to automatically transcribe booooring videos or at least extract the juicy few seconds that I need :-P Feel free to suggest more great ideas here. [0]: Yep, if you want a chance to replace my exiting system effortless is your goal.
- badloginagain 9y ago
  Tab trees would be pretty cool, especially if you list tabs in column view like I do. Opening a link in a new tab would list as a child tab, and the list of child tabs could be collapsed/hidden. Drag child tabs out of the tree to become parents themselves. This would be great for dynamic research tasks. You could collapse trees and get a top level view, useful if you're in the weeds; you could close trees by parent, great for killing avenues of research you no long need. It would also be good for when you need to quickly check the syntax of something or fix a minor bug without disrupting the larger project you're focusing on. From a Dev/LiveOps perspective, it would be huge- grouping all my AWS pages, CMS pages, custom dashboards, would be a huge help. I can easily sprawl tens of separate tabs to get different services to talk to eachother.
  - eitland 9y ago
    This is exactly what we are used to in FF! Currently we are in a position where we'll push for devs to provide the necessary APIs going forward and I'll be happy to have more people along to push for that. (Also, AFAIK Mozilla will provide a LTS version of the last version that will work with real extensions.)
BeetleB 9y ago
>and how can we get them the help they need By telling them about OneTab.
DennisP 9y ago
Here's the help I need: make a button I can push to save the urls of all open tabs to a separate history, and close the tabs. There's too much noise in the regular history. Bonus points if the saved urls are grouped by the window they were in. I tried making a chrome plugin for this, but with a lot of tabs it didn't work reliably, and I didn't have time to put more work into it.
- pkkm 9y ago
  You can create a "to read later" folder in your bookmarks, then right click the tab bar in each window and select "Bookmark All Tabs". That's fairly close to what you're describing, and also works with Firefox Sync (though in my experience it's best to keep the number of bookmarks below 5000 for Sync to work well).

frinks2000 9y ago

This is all fine if you are running Windows. On a mac it will spin the fan faster than anything else... with two tabs open. Firefox has become a Windows browser, if anything

pbiggar 9y ago
Weird. When I was at Mozilla (2011), almost everyone had a Mac.
bjpbakker 9y ago
I'm using FF as my main browser on both Linux and macOS and never had any issues like that. Most of the people I work with use macOS, a lot of them use FF and never heard anyone complain about that. Maybe there are some other things that cause this on your machine?
dm319 9y ago
Just an anecdote, but back in my Windows XP days, I tried out firefox and found it pretty slow, seemed even worse than IE (in 2004ish?), whereas chrome was lightning quick. Fast forward several years and using gnome 2 on linux, and I found firefox felt snappier overall than chrome. I still do find firefox quicker for most thing (not google maps), though they have various add-ons which doesnt make it a fair comparison.
- soperj 9y ago
  You found Chrome lightning quick in 2004? Must have been since it was released in 2008. Firefox 1.0 was released in November 2004 by the way.
  - dm319 9y ago
    Thanks - my memory is a poor witness!
michaelmrose 9y ago
I'm curious if this has something to do with video. Do you experience much more power when consuming video on the browser and is there a difference between how firefox, chrome, and safari use the gpu while decoding video? This might be interesting to quantify.

overcast 9y ago

Now if they can only fix the memory leak, that chews up gigs of RAM in only an hour.

sp332 9y ago
If you can reproduce the issue with a clean profile or in Safe Mode, please file a bug report.
- geokon 9y ago
  I've narrowed it down to specific webpages - but how can I know if the leak is the pages' fault or the browser's fault? (Biggest culprits are Discourse forums.. which is a shame b/c I really like the platform)
  - nicoburns 9y ago
    You could try leaving the same website open in Chrome
  - dblohm7 9y ago
    about:memory will help you there. Save those reports (you can even anonymize them) and include them in a bug report.
  - jamesgeck0 9y ago
    A couple weeks ago I'd've advised reporting those pages with the Pulse extension [1], but it looks like it's recently been retired. 1. https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/pulse https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/pulse
    - sp332 9y ago
      Download Developer Edition https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/developer/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/developer/ (or Nightly), load up the page, and in the browser menu click "Report Site Issue".
9y ago

syshum 9y ago

>>Mozilla will be hoping to attract power users They already had the power users, which they have now told to get screwed when they killed the extensions to chase the performance benchmark Trading Usability and the ability to customize the browser for something that is "fast" but you cant do anything with it... Useless is what it is IMO This is the difference between a sports car and a truck. Me I drive a truck, it might be slow and cumbersome but it is versatile and customizable, I haul people and things, I can add a camper, I can do all kinds of things with my truck. If I had a sports car it might be fast but I would be limited in the places I could go and the things I could do They are taking the FF Pickup and turning it into a FF Sports car... I have no interest in a sports car

Ar-Curunir 9y ago
The new system is more secure. There'll be some initial pain as new APIs are stabilized and new extensions are created, but I'm willing to give Mozilla the chance, they're the only major browser that's not making a browser with a secondary, ulterior motive.
- syshum 9y ago
  The problem is that the new API are not and can not be as powerful as the XUL based system. It is impossible. The new Chrome Replica Web Extensions can never be as powerful as the old system.
  - staticassertion 9y ago
    What power, specifically, are you missing in extensions?
    - interfixus 9y ago
      How about the power to customize every goddamn aspect of the UI? The power to make my browser behave the way I want it to behave? This is what made Firefox worth the while for thirteen, fourteen years or however long it's been. I really have no idea where to go from here.

supremesaboteur 9y ago

Previously : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14823807 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14823807

cl0rkster 9y ago
I originally read about this in the post you linked. There were some great charts in that article showing how performance has changed throughout the version of Firefox. I only clicked this article because I was hoping to see a direct comparison to Chrome laid out in similar fashion. Unfortunately, the title is purely click bait and the only mention of Chrome is that anecdotally, "Chrome has something of a reputation for being a resource hog". The article that was originally posted was certainly more interesting and informative.

SubiculumCode 9y ago

I must say that Firefox's last couple of version feel blazing fast.

masthead 9y ago
Maybe the placebo effect?
- kannanvijayan 9y ago
  I hope not. We've been working our butts off optimizing stuff across the board. The big projects (Stylo, WebRender) are ongoing and awesome, but there's also a legion of people working on eliminating boring papercut performance issues (a few milliseconds here, a few milliseconds there). Still have more stuff to land, so expect things to keep getting better.
- Manishearth 9y ago
  There's been a big push of perf fixes in Firefox lately.
- callahad 9y ago
  It's real. We've landed enormous performance improvements this year, including migrating most Firefox users to a full multi-process architecture, as well as integrating parts of the Servo parallel browser engine project into Firefox. There are still many improvements yet-to-land, but in most cases we're on track for Firefox 57 in November.

roryisok 9y ago

I wonder, if there was a fork of electron using Firefox instead of chromium, what would the ram usage be like? Mozilla really paved the way for electron with prism, shame it never really took off

ZenoArrow 9y ago
I believe you're looking for Positron: https://github.com/mozilla/positron https://github.com/mozilla/positron
- roryisok 9y ago
  Very interesting, thanks. Apparently its been discontinued and replaced by qbrt https://mykzilla.org/2017/03/15/introducing-qbrt/ https://mykzilla.org/2017/03/15/introducing-qbrt/
Macha 9y ago
Gecko is apparently pretty painful to embed, with most other Gecko based browsers (that weren't firefox forks a la Pale Moon) having long since stopped development or switched to Webkit/Chromium.
- kuschku 9y ago
  That’ll be fixed once Servo is finished, though, as that has easy APIs for embedding.
  - pspeter3 9y ago
    Yeah, I'm really interested to see that happen. Any idea of when?
vatotemking 9y ago
I think Komodo IDE was built on top of Mozilla codebase. But im not sure if its related to positron

Tomis02 9y ago

Meh, Opera was easily handling huge numbers of tabs a decade ago, while providing the option for vertical tabs, tab stacking and a tab scroller so that you could comfortably switch between them. By comparison, Chrome and Firefox have always appeared as dilettantes.

esMazer 9y ago
vertical tabs: It seems you are taking of an extension? (I got excited for a second but I couldn't find the option under settings). If you are talking about an extension then Firefox also has a similar extension that works very well.
- Symbiote 9y ago
  I think it means this [1], which is a screenshot from Opera 12 in 2011, but looks pretty much the same as I remember the tab sidebar working in 2004-ish. I haven't used Opera for a decade, so I don't know if the feature still exists. [1] http://forums.opera.com/discussion/1866076/tab-stacks-in-side-bar/p1 http://forums.opera.com/discussion/1866076/tab-stacks-in-sid...
- Tomis02 9y ago
  Opera 12 (pre-Chromium) used to have the features I mentioned built-in, which meant they were faster, fit in with the browser seamlessly and you didn't have to worry about security. Best of all, you didn't need to use them if you didn't have to. Unfortunately the new Opera is missing most of old Opera's features, but you can give Vivaldi a try.

superkuh 9y ago

As someone that switched to Pale Moon (FF fork) because of the loss of large tab session performance in post-v30 builds this is great to hear. Now all they have to do is kill the walled garden and Firefox might be worth trying again.

BeetleB 9y ago
>As someone that switched to Pale Moon (FF fork) because of the loss of large tab session performance in post-v30 builds this is great to hear. I tried Pale Moon about a year ago. It had a nasty memory leak (my browser stays open for weeks). I really wanted to like it, but this was a serious problem.
robin_reala 9y ago
What walled garden?

stewbrew 9y ago

IMHO there is something wrong when people leave tens+ tabs open. There are bookmarks for keeping references to pages. FF also has Pocket for keeping references to pages I want to read later. So, this is a benchmark that should not be relevant in real life if the GUI offers the right solution for the problem of keeping references to pages.

PKop 9y ago
Isn’t it akin to the difference between hard disk storage and RAM? A temporal difference regarding access patterns specifically.
- stewbrew 9y ago
  For whatever reason this make me think of my swap partition. :-)
sixothree 9y ago
I often open 80+ tabs during the normal course of a day. Often times 5 of those are spreadsheets in one window with a few pdf spec documents, reference sites, handfuls a internet searches, a few for different version/pages of the application under test, and boom. Why would I want any of those in bookmarks when I can have them open when I need them, which is now.
- stewbrew 9y ago
  Well but ... In the course of a day, I often realize that I have the same URL opened in 2+ tabs. There of course are use cases where I want to have more views on the same page but usually, that's not the default behaviour I want. > open when I need them Well, what do you mean with "open". As I said IMHO there is something wrong here.
  - sixothree 9y ago
    By open I mean that they require no additional navigation or credential, other than clicking on the correct tab.

seanwilson 9y ago

For people that have hundreds of tabs open...how do you find anything? I generally have about 5 frequently used tabs pinned in Chrome (so they take up minimal space) and up to 10 or so other ones open. Once I have more than that many tabs open I can't see the tab titles anymore which frustrates me so I'll close some. I'm in the camp that cannot understand how having hundreds of tabs open can be practical...to me it would be like having hundreds of files open in an IDE or file browser, hundreds of terminals open, or hundreds of documents scattered across my desk. At some point the number of things you have in front of you becomes overwhelming to keep in your head and you have to clear away the things you don't need right now.

Manishearth 9y ago
If you type in the URL bar firefox will show results from open tabs. You can also force this by typing `%` before the search term. Chrome's UI is terrible for multiple tabs. Chrome will shrink tabs down as much as possible. Firefox stops shrinking once they're like 75% of their original width, and lets you scroll instead. On top of that, addons like Tab Center Redux make it much easier to manage things by putting them on the side (so they don't get shrunk at all) and adding a dedicated search box.
- seanwilson 9y ago
  > Chrome's UI is terrible for multiple tabs. I'm pretty sure that's because Chrome's UX team don't expect you to have hundreds of tabs open. Why does your workflow require you to have that many tabs? Hundreds of tabs just seems an insane number to me. Even if you could search by tab you'd likely forget the names of the ones that were there in the first place. Can you think of another app where you would have that many things open at once? If not, why are browsers with tabs different? The rule of thumb with UI design is that users can remember about 7 things in their short term memory.
  - kuschku 9y ago
    It also searches URLs and in some cases fulltext.

dannysu 9y ago

I feel like with a bit more improvements to Firefox Snooze Tab [1] and Container Tab [2] extensions the need to have tons of tabs open could be solved. What if it's easy to easily have multiple "Research containers"? Container tab allows you to hide all tabs related to a particular container, so I feel like you can easily improve your workflow. What about combining that functionality with snooze tab extension? But instead of snoozing individual tabs, snooze a container. [1]: https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/snooze-tabs [2]: https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/containers

kasabali 9y ago
it is possible today using tab groups and tab groups helper extensions. tab groups provides tab groups and the helper provides suspend/resume of individual groups. sadly they will stop functioning after Firefox 57, because progress, yeah.

clairity 9y ago

for those commenting about how unhygenic having many tabs open is, why bother trying to cajole others into having just a few tabs open? it's such a weird social norming behavior (to me). i can understand asking why others do it because it is not your norm, but why the addition of trying to force others to conform to your behavior? (i'm genuinely asking, as this kind of stuff is fascinating to me.) why not take the 30 seconds to mull it over to at least develop a sense of understanding/empathy before throwing out a micro agression around something so frivolous? i mean, if it's not hurting you, then let other people be, right? and besides, shouldn't the computer conform to how the human wants to work and not the other way around?

graphitezepp 9y ago
Personally tab bloat reeks of stemming from internet addiction and/or attention span issues. Would hazard a guess that this is the source of anti-tab sentiment.
- colanderman 9y ago
  Tabs left open don't feed internet addiction/ADHD. The act of opening a new tab does. ("Ooh I wonder if there's anything new on FB/HN/etc.?") I leave about a dozen or so tabs open; they track projects I'm in the middle of but can't complete right now for whatever reason. Leaving them put is organizationally helpful to my brain. (I do the same with physical items as well.) But the few sites I'm addicted to… those stay closed until I need a fix.
  - graphitezepp 9y ago
    Yeah "the act of opening a new tab does" I agree with. My original statement is based from my own behavior which I was projecting on to others (which I suspect others who are judging people in this thread may be doing), I don't leave my machine on overnight so the over 100 tab numbers being talked about freak me out.
  - joombaga 9y ago
    They certainly feed my ADHD. If I have an HN tab open between the the AWS console I have up currently, and that API documentation I need, HN may get some attention before I hit CMD+[ again.

pkamb 9y ago

I started using the "Firefox Focus" browser for iOS a lot specifically because it has one tab. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/firefox-focus-the-privacy-browser/id1055677337?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/firefox-focus-the-privacy-br... Removing the ability to even make tabs (which I love and hoard) is nice. Big button to delete your current page, which you have to do if you want something else. You're constantly at "inbox zero" for your tabs. Will look through the comments here for similar solutions on the desktop. Perhaps something that limits the number of tabs you can open. Or automatically closes old tabs if they're on the website's "home page" as opposed to a specific article.

scott_karana 9y ago

Didn't we just discuss this on the front page two days ago? Seems like a dupe/linkspam post to me... Thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14823807 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14823807 Original blog post: https://metafluff.com/2017/07/21/i-am-a-tab-hoarder/ https://metafluff.com/2017/07/21/i-am-a-tab-hoarder/

jessaustin 9y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14849247 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14849247

phasnox 9y ago

Curious, how many tabs do you have open right now? Me: 17

jumbopapa 9y ago
11 here. StackOverflow at 5, Google at 3, HackerNews at 1, MvvmCross Documentation at 1, and Vivaldi Start Page at 1.

digitalshankar 9y ago

Firefox Rocks! #FirefoxMasterRace

eitland 9y ago

But why is this on the bottom of the front page now after 3 hours and 169 points? Is someone flagging this or has it triggered a flamewar-detector?

foota 9y ago

I use a plug-in called fresh start to manage saving large number of tabs.

pspeter3 9y ago

Our page load performance numbers collected from real users show the following performance ranking: 1. Chrome 2. Safari 3. Explorer 4. Firefox

tyrw 9y ago
Yes, but did those users have 1,600 tabs open? That seems to be the use case Firefox is going all in on lately.

romanovcode 9y ago

I hope this is correct. I would gladly switch to Firefox and forget about google forever. But firefox is just too slow for me.