4 ms·

yeah, performance-wise I can't complain :) I'm a compulsive tab hoarder with about 400 open (admittedly, have to enable the "don't load until focused"-setting)

yeah, performance-wise I can't complain :) I'm a compulsive tab hoarder with about 400 open (admittedly, have to enable the "don't load until focused"-setting) on a 5 yo laptop with lots of other stuff running. No problem at all.

logicallee 8y ago
(withdrawn)
- detaro 8y ago
  I'm writing this from a 2016 Thinkpad with 508 open tabs in Chrome. works. (wouldn't work if turned off the ad-blocker, but why would I do that...) Firefox does it at least as well, just having both open is a bit much.
  - logicallee 8y ago
    (withdrawn)
    - keypress 8y ago
      I have a Chromium install without an ad blocker. And it takes one bad out of control page with a shitty advert, to down my entire machine. Something like: outlook.com. (Doesn't matter if I have 2 or 100 tabs if there is one bad apple.)
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
    - detaro 8y ago
      Opened up Firefox too and ctrl-tabbed around a bit to cause it to actually load some pages (hundreds of open tabs too, similar uBlock setup), and Windows reports Chrome 5.3 GB Firefox 4.2 GB I couldn't find a tally of where Windows applies its "memory compression" logic, to be honest I don't even know what exactly it does, but let's assume it's some background task and it did more to Chrome than to Firefox since Chrome had been running longer. So yes, Chrome needs noticeably more memory, and I prefer Firefox overall, but both can handle tons of tabs in my experience. Chrome also appears to be more responsive under pressure, I assume this is because it splits work into lots more processes than Firefox does, which is both probably a memory drain and a security benefit.
      - logicallee 8y ago
        Can you repeat without ctrl-tabbing? What was Firefox usage then?
        detaro 8y ago
        Jumped to 950 MB, settled at ~800 MB. Deferred loading seems to do a lot, so I could imagine that different usage patterns make a big difference, but that would need a detailed look into how Firefox and Chrome manage memory for "stale" tabs. If I remember right Mozilla recently added improvements there, getting rid of their memory more aggressively?
        logicallee 8y ago
        So, under actual usage (not ctrl-tabbing around to aggressively force-load things) it is 950 MB vs 5.3 GB. (I imagine for a comparable number of tabs?) ------ EDIT in response to your reply: Please do! I agree that logging would be interesting. Do you know, does Firefox defer/discard tabs again if they do fully load but you don't use them for a long time? Or are the only deferred tabs, ones that you never looked at this session?
        detaro 8y ago
        I don't think you can count a freshly started browser that has only loaded 7 tabs (one per window) as "actual usage". I'd guess tabbing around triggered <50 tabs, that doesn't seem like a totally unrealistic working set, at least not when I'm actively researching something. Maybe I should set up logging for this, might be interesting.
        logicallee 8y ago
        Please do! I agree that logging would be interesting. Do you know, does Firefox defer/discard tabs again if they do fully load but you don't use them for a long time? Or are the only deferred tabs, ones that you never looked at this session?
paulintrognon 8y ago
I am genuinely interested: why so many and how can you handle 400 open tabs?? How do you navigate between them? I am lost as soon as I have more than 10 tabs open at the same time...
- hd4 8y ago
  On Firefox at least, it doesn't actually load those tabs until you click on them. I have about 400 tabs on this session of FF Nightly, on a 2010 4GB Ubuntu laptop.
- andrewl-hn 8y ago
  Oh, that's not hard. First, Firefox doesn't squeeze tabs past certain limit, so you don't have these tiny-tiny tabs that you can't click. You get the scrolling, but it won't bother you after a while. Thus, visually even with 1000 or 2000 tabs browser UI stays clean. Second, when you type stuff into the address bar Firefox searches through opened tabs and suggests switching to that. This minimizes the number of times you'd open a new tab. Third, there are many addons that help you organize your tabs. There are ways to search for tab content, group them into containers, find duplicates, etc. How to start having many tabs open? Just change your MO when you use the browser. Want to search for something? Hit new tab and go. Researching something? Open every link you find somewhat promising in a new tab. When you have 200+ tabs opened, another 8-12 won't be a big change. Done with your research? Why close tabs? Just keep them open in case you'll need them later. Often when I work on a project for, say, half a year I don't close tabs at all, and keep getting back to stuff I accidentally stumbled upon 2-3 months ago. It's very helpful at times to be able to dig stuff up one tab away. One could argue that bookmarks and history could be as helpful, but in practice when you switch to an old tab you see the context around it. What else I was looking at at that time, often information in the neighboring tabs is relevant, yet bookmarks and browser history don't have a good UI to surface it if front of you. Yes, your browser becomes a memory hog, but as people noticed Firefox has means to compensate that. At 200+ tabs it consumes significantly less memory than Chrome (even with Chrome's load on demand turned on). It takes time to get used to, and ones or twice a year you'd be doing tab cleaning, but I've being using browsers like this for 15+ years and really see benefits in this workflow. For context: right now I have 330 tabs opened, Firefox consumes 1.8 GiB of RAM
samplesizeme 8y ago
I am a tab hoarder as well and switched to Firefox last year for this reason. I have a 16GB MBP and I had to restart Chrome twice a day due to memory usage. The most I saw was 25GB of RAM used by Chrome (thank you solid state swap!) When Quantum was released, I did a side by side comparison, opening the exact same tabs in each browser, switching browsers each day, manually keeping tabs in sync. Did this for about two weeks. For my use case at that time, Firefox's memory usage was 1/4 of Chrome's right off the bat. After a full day of use, Firefox's memory would double, while Chrome's would triple. Given the starting numbers, this meant at the end of the day, Firefox would be using 4-6GB of RAM, while Chrome's memory usage would be something like 16-24GB. By the time I switched, I had already moved to Rambox for Hangouts and Gmail and stopped using Keep, in an effort to reduce Chrome memory usage. Rambox mem usage was about half of what I saw with the Chrome Hangouts plugin. Although I use FF 90% of the time now, I still prefer Chrome, probably due to using it for so long. I especially prefer the Chrome bookmark manager. I really wish I could find a good way to keep bookmarks in sync between browsers! Any suggestions?? A big bonus has been the huge improvement in battery life. I had no idea how much I was losing to Chrome. Safari is supposed to be great for that, but plugins and the fact I'm an Android user means it doesn't offer me much. The downside is that FF has made my tab hoarding worse. Still, despite doubling the number of tabs, mem usage is still half of what I saw with Chrome. As for the unused memory is wasted memory argument (which may be tongue in cheek re: browsers), my browser is not my OS and I have a lot more going on than just a browser. 32GB MBP can't come soon enough.....or a touchpad experience on any other hardware+Linux experience+lots'o'RAM. 3 yrs ago, I finally gave in and tried Mac. Touchpad experience is probably the number 1 thing that keeps me here.
- dep_b 8y ago
  > A big bonus has been the huge improvement in battery life. I had no idea how much I was losing to Chrome. Safari is supposed to be great for that, but plugins and the fact I'm an Android user means it doesn't offer me much. Firefox is still bad compared to Safari.
- Fej 8y ago
  For bookmark sync, use, well, Firefox Sync. It's built-in.

logicallee 8y ago

(withdrawn)

detaro 8y ago
I'm writing this from a 2016 Thinkpad with 508 open tabs in Chrome. works. (wouldn't work if turned off the ad-blocker, but why would I do that...) Firefox does it at least as well, just having both open is a bit much.
- logicallee 8y ago
  (withdrawn)
  - keypress 8y ago
    I have a Chromium install without an ad blocker. And it takes one bad out of control page with a shitty advert, to down my entire machine. Something like: outlook.com. (Doesn't matter if I have 2 or 100 tabs if there is one bad apple.)
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - detaro 8y ago
    Opened up Firefox too and ctrl-tabbed around a bit to cause it to actually load some pages (hundreds of open tabs too, similar uBlock setup), and Windows reports Chrome 5.3 GB Firefox 4.2 GB I couldn't find a tally of where Windows applies its "memory compression" logic, to be honest I don't even know what exactly it does, but let's assume it's some background task and it did more to Chrome than to Firefox since Chrome had been running longer. So yes, Chrome needs noticeably more memory, and I prefer Firefox overall, but both can handle tons of tabs in my experience. Chrome also appears to be more responsive under pressure, I assume this is because it splits work into lots more processes than Firefox does, which is both probably a memory drain and a security benefit.
    - logicallee 8y ago
      Can you repeat without ctrl-tabbing? What was Firefox usage then?
      - detaro 8y ago
        Jumped to 950 MB, settled at ~800 MB. Deferred loading seems to do a lot, so I could imagine that different usage patterns make a big difference, but that would need a detailed look into how Firefox and Chrome manage memory for "stale" tabs. If I remember right Mozilla recently added improvements there, getting rid of their memory more aggressively?
        logicallee 8y ago
        So, under actual usage (not ctrl-tabbing around to aggressively force-load things) it is 950 MB vs 5.3 GB. (I imagine for a comparable number of tabs?) ------ EDIT in response to your reply: Please do! I agree that logging would be interesting. Do you know, does Firefox defer/discard tabs again if they do fully load but you don't use them for a long time? Or are the only deferred tabs, ones that you never looked at this session?
        detaro 8y ago
        I don't think you can count a freshly started browser that has only loaded 7 tabs (one per window) as "actual usage". I'd guess tabbing around triggered <50 tabs, that doesn't seem like a totally unrealistic working set, at least not when I'm actively researching something. Maybe I should set up logging for this, might be interesting.
        logicallee 8y ago
        Please do! I agree that logging would be interesting. Do you know, does Firefox defer/discard tabs again if they do fully load but you don't use them for a long time? Or are the only deferred tabs, ones that you never looked at this session?

paulintrognon 8y ago

I am genuinely interested: why so many and how can you handle 400 open tabs?? How do you navigate between them? I am lost as soon as I have more than 10 tabs open at the same time...

hd4 8y ago
On Firefox at least, it doesn't actually load those tabs until you click on them. I have about 400 tabs on this session of FF Nightly, on a 2010 4GB Ubuntu laptop.
andrewl-hn 8y ago
Oh, that's not hard. First, Firefox doesn't squeeze tabs past certain limit, so you don't have these tiny-tiny tabs that you can't click. You get the scrolling, but it won't bother you after a while. Thus, visually even with 1000 or 2000 tabs browser UI stays clean. Second, when you type stuff into the address bar Firefox searches through opened tabs and suggests switching to that. This minimizes the number of times you'd open a new tab. Third, there are many addons that help you organize your tabs. There are ways to search for tab content, group them into containers, find duplicates, etc. How to start having many tabs open? Just change your MO when you use the browser. Want to search for something? Hit new tab and go. Researching something? Open every link you find somewhat promising in a new tab. When you have 200+ tabs opened, another 8-12 won't be a big change. Done with your research? Why close tabs? Just keep them open in case you'll need them later. Often when I work on a project for, say, half a year I don't close tabs at all, and keep getting back to stuff I accidentally stumbled upon 2-3 months ago. It's very helpful at times to be able to dig stuff up one tab away. One could argue that bookmarks and history could be as helpful, but in practice when you switch to an old tab you see the context around it. What else I was looking at at that time, often information in the neighboring tabs is relevant, yet bookmarks and browser history don't have a good UI to surface it if front of you. Yes, your browser becomes a memory hog, but as people noticed Firefox has means to compensate that. At 200+ tabs it consumes significantly less memory than Chrome (even with Chrome's load on demand turned on). It takes time to get used to, and ones or twice a year you'd be doing tab cleaning, but I've being using browsers like this for 15+ years and really see benefits in this workflow. For context: right now I have 330 tabs opened, Firefox consumes 1.8 GiB of RAM

samplesizeme 8y ago

I am a tab hoarder as well and switched to Firefox last year for this reason. I have a 16GB MBP and I had to restart Chrome twice a day due to memory usage. The most I saw was 25GB of RAM used by Chrome (thank you solid state swap!) When Quantum was released, I did a side by side comparison, opening the exact same tabs in each browser, switching browsers each day, manually keeping tabs in sync. Did this for about two weeks. For my use case at that time, Firefox's memory usage was 1/4 of Chrome's right off the bat. After a full day of use, Firefox's memory would double, while Chrome's would triple. Given the starting numbers, this meant at the end of the day, Firefox would be using 4-6GB of RAM, while Chrome's memory usage would be something like 16-24GB. By the time I switched, I had already moved to Rambox for Hangouts and Gmail and stopped using Keep, in an effort to reduce Chrome memory usage. Rambox mem usage was about half of what I saw with the Chrome Hangouts plugin. Although I use FF 90% of the time now, I still prefer Chrome, probably due to using it for so long. I especially prefer the Chrome bookmark manager. I really wish I could find a good way to keep bookmarks in sync between browsers! Any suggestions?? A big bonus has been the huge improvement in battery life. I had no idea how much I was losing to Chrome. Safari is supposed to be great for that, but plugins and the fact I'm an Android user means it doesn't offer me much. The downside is that FF has made my tab hoarding worse. Still, despite doubling the number of tabs, mem usage is still half of what I saw with Chrome. As for the unused memory is wasted memory argument (which may be tongue in cheek re: browsers), my browser is not my OS and I have a lot more going on than just a browser. 32GB MBP can't come soon enough.....or a touchpad experience on any other hardware+Linux experience+lots'o'RAM. 3 yrs ago, I finally gave in and tried Mac. Touchpad experience is probably the number 1 thing that keeps me here.

dep_b 8y ago
> A big bonus has been the huge improvement in battery life. I had no idea how much I was losing to Chrome. Safari is supposed to be great for that, but plugins and the fact I'm an Android user means it doesn't offer me much. Firefox is still bad compared to Safari.
Fej 8y ago
For bookmark sync, use, well, Firefox Sync. It's built-in.