6 ms·

I have no idea what you people are doing. I use FF with my mid spec, 4th generation i5 with 500+ tabs and haven't experienced any of your problems.

by 1ris 8y ago

stdclass 8y ago
I had the exact same experience as the grand parent comment. Seriously wanted to switch to Firefox after the browser-sign-in "feature" but the performance on my high-end 2018 macbook pro with 16gb ram was just abysmal (20 tabs open tops).
- hellofunk 8y ago
  Do you use your Mac with the default screen resolution setting, or have you tweaked that setting?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - stdclass 8y ago
    I also use the "more space" setting. Haven't tried it with the normal scaling though.
    - hellofunk 8y ago
      In my case I am actually going in the other direction, towards the "larger text" scaling.
kossTKR 8y ago
I think there should be some kind of survey. Every thread on HN has these posts complaining about this problem, and every thread has people like you insinuating we are doing something "whacky" or "crazy" with our laptops. To me it seems that a large segment of users using the Retina screens (most people on the osx platform) has severe performance problems. Some people have no problems. And that is just the state of affairs. The weird thing for me is that there is no official "issue" or information about the problems since so many experience it.
kace91 8y ago
I do know what he's talking about, as I've had the same exact problem. When I did research about it (about a year ago) it seemed the devs were considering retina macbooks with a non-default resolution as origin of the bug for some reason - I'm referring to the display setting that appears as "more space" in the regular OSX settings menu, not some arcane hidden configuration. I regularly check back because I love the idea of using their open source, somewhat privacy-focused alternative to chrome, but it's been years and still not a fix in sight.
- jasin 8y ago
  Me too, and as it happens, I'm running on retina with "more space" enabled. Firefox is unusably slow, to the point where I'm probably abandoning it after a few weeks of really trying to get into it. Which is a shame, because I love the idea of multi-account containers and other privacy features.
  - retSava 8y ago
    So if you disable the "more space" configuration, does it work better? If this is the primo hypothesis, it sounds easy enough to check.
    - jasin 8y ago
      It certainly does seem to work better with default resolution.
hellofunk 8y ago
I’m curious, how is it manageable to have a browser open with 500 tabs? How do you even navigate between the tabs or know what’s on those tabs?
- detaro 8y ago
  Having a bunch of windows, human spacial memory works surprisingly well for recognizing sequences of tabs. And Firefox allows you to search through the titles of all open tabs in the URL bar.
- konart 8y ago
  I'm a different person, but usually have hundreds of tabs too. I'm using Tridactyl for navigation, so i just press 'b' (:buffer) and start typing tab title or whatever. In a moment I'm on the tab that I needed. There are a few handfull addons for tab management available. >know what’s on those tabs? I was the one who opened them, of course I know what's on those tabs.
  - wastedhours 8y ago
    > I was the one who opened them, of course I know what's on those tabs. I rarely have more than 10 open at a time and sometimes completely forget what's there or why I opened it - I find uber-tabbing impressive and baffling in equal measure. If you know what you're looking for, what does having it open (but probably knocked out of memory?) have over using search/URL autosuggest? Just a workflow thing, or is it faster?
    - speedplane 8y ago
      Some sites, like gmail, and many technical sites (google cloud console) still take a good amount of time to load. Keeping a bunch of them open in tabs cuts down on the 10 seconds it'll take to open again.
    - detaro 8y ago
      > If you know what you're looking for, what does having it open (but probably knocked out of memory?) have over using search/URL autosuggest? I typically have related tabs around the one I find. E.g. recently I researched some details about the python requests library, but haven't finished implementing it yet. I can go back to that group of tabs that's in a somewhat logical order. Autocomplete wouldn't have that, and also suggest links I've already discarded as not interesting. I've tried a few times to replace this workflow with bookmark groups etc, but I never got that to work in a way I'm completely happy with, and making my own extension that does it exactly like I want it to would be an interesting project, but too much work for now. What I find useful is a browser extension that lets me copy-paste a list of all URLs in a window with their titles, so at the end of a research session I can move the entire list quickly to a markdown file and save it with a few notes.

I have no idea what you people are doing. I use FF with my mid spec, 4th generation i5 with 500+ tabs and haven't experienced any of your problems.

by 1ris 8y ago

I have no idea what you people are doing. I use FF with my mid spec, 4th generation i5 with 500+ tabs and haven't experienced any of your problems.

stdclass 8y ago

I had the exact same experience as the grand parent comment. Seriously wanted to switch to Firefox after the browser-sign-in "feature" but the performance on my high-end 2018 macbook pro with 16gb ram was just abysmal (20 tabs open tops).

hellofunk 8y ago
Do you use your Mac with the default screen resolution setting, or have you tweaked that setting?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- stdclass 8y ago
  I also use the "more space" setting. Haven't tried it with the normal scaling though.
  - hellofunk 8y ago
    In my case I am actually going in the other direction, towards the "larger text" scaling.

kossTKR 8y ago

I think there should be some kind of survey. Every thread on HN has these posts complaining about this problem, and every thread has people like you insinuating we are doing something "whacky" or "crazy" with our laptops. To me it seems that a large segment of users using the Retina screens (most people on the osx platform) has severe performance problems. Some people have no problems. And that is just the state of affairs. The weird thing for me is that there is no official "issue" or information about the problems since so many experience it.

kace91 8y ago

I do know what he's talking about, as I've had the same exact problem. When I did research about it (about a year ago) it seemed the devs were considering retina macbooks with a non-default resolution as origin of the bug for some reason - I'm referring to the display setting that appears as "more space" in the regular OSX settings menu, not some arcane hidden configuration. I regularly check back because I love the idea of using their open source, somewhat privacy-focused alternative to chrome, but it's been years and still not a fix in sight.

jasin 8y ago
Me too, and as it happens, I'm running on retina with "more space" enabled. Firefox is unusably slow, to the point where I'm probably abandoning it after a few weeks of really trying to get into it. Which is a shame, because I love the idea of multi-account containers and other privacy features.
- retSava 8y ago
  So if you disable the "more space" configuration, does it work better? If this is the primo hypothesis, it sounds easy enough to check.
  - jasin 8y ago
    It certainly does seem to work better with default resolution.

hellofunk 8y ago

I’m curious, how is it manageable to have a browser open with 500 tabs? How do you even navigate between the tabs or know what’s on those tabs?

detaro 8y ago
Having a bunch of windows, human spacial memory works surprisingly well for recognizing sequences of tabs. And Firefox allows you to search through the titles of all open tabs in the URL bar.
konart 8y ago
I'm a different person, but usually have hundreds of tabs too. I'm using Tridactyl for navigation, so i just press 'b' (:buffer) and start typing tab title or whatever. In a moment I'm on the tab that I needed. There are a few handfull addons for tab management available. >know what’s on those tabs? I was the one who opened them, of course I know what's on those tabs.
- wastedhours 8y ago
  > I was the one who opened them, of course I know what's on those tabs. I rarely have more than 10 open at a time and sometimes completely forget what's there or why I opened it - I find uber-tabbing impressive and baffling in equal measure. If you know what you're looking for, what does having it open (but probably knocked out of memory?) have over using search/URL autosuggest? Just a workflow thing, or is it faster?
  - speedplane 8y ago
    Some sites, like gmail, and many technical sites (google cloud console) still take a good amount of time to load. Keeping a bunch of them open in tabs cuts down on the 10 seconds it'll take to open again.
  - detaro 8y ago
    > If you know what you're looking for, what does having it open (but probably knocked out of memory?) have over using search/URL autosuggest? I typically have related tabs around the one I find. E.g. recently I researched some details about the python requests library, but haven't finished implementing it yet. I can go back to that group of tabs that's in a somewhat logical order. Autocomplete wouldn't have that, and also suggest links I've already discarded as not interesting. I've tried a few times to replace this workflow with bookmark groups etc, but I never got that to work in a way I'm completely happy with, and making my own extension that does it exactly like I want it to would be an interesting project, but too much work for now. What I find useful is a browser extension that lets me copy-paste a list of all URLs in a window with their titles, so at the end of a research session I can move the entire list quickly to a markdown file and save it with a few notes.