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Agreed that Firefox gets less credit than it deserves. But Google realized with Chrome that the biggest part of the browsing experience is not the browser chro

Agreed that Firefox gets less credit than it deserves. But Google realized with Chrome that the biggest part of the browsing experience is not the browser chrome or features, but speed. The single greatest user experience enhancement is responsiveness. Anecdotally, there was a year or two where Chrome (and Safari, by extension) were lightening-quick. Firefox felt like it was crawling, by comparison, and gave up a good chunk of its market share. I've heard Firefox is snappy again, though I haven't seriously used it myself, but the damage is done.

Silhouette 14y ago
I've heard Firefox is snappy again, though I haven't seriously used it myself, but the damage is done. Firefox still doesn't isolate separate web pages in different tabs from each other and the main browser UI. If you open a group of tabs and one of the pages is slow to load, or later you have an AJAX request going on in some tab that takes a long time to get a response, your whole browser UI will often go into a trance. In fairness, they are working to improve this, but Firefox is several years behind the curve in this area. Until this is fixed, it really hurts any benefits from otherwise useful features like having tabs and bookmark folders in the first place.
- cpeterso 14y ago
  The biggest challenge with per-tab processes (Firefox's Electrolysis or e10s feature) is maintaining add-on compatibility. Chrome didn't have add-ons at first and didn't need to worry about backwards compatibility (at the time). Firefox is also working on per-tab event queues to improve UI responsiveness. In the meantime, I recommend Firefox users check out the experimental "Suspend Background Tabs" add-on. Written by the author of Adblock Plus, Suspend Background Tabs will pause JavaScript execution and timers for background tabs. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/suspend-background-tabs/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/suspend-backg...
- Erunno 14y ago
  I know I start sounding like a broken record for those who read my comments regularly in these kind of threads, but I always feel inclined to point out that Chrome's much-lauded architecture has clear limitations once you start to push it too hard. I'm certainly not a typical user as I exhibit heavy tab usage. And I've used Chrome for weeks at times as my primary browser so I've come to know its advantages and disadvantages. Web pages may be given their own processes but they are not completely isolated from the browser process (containing the UI) since they have to communicate in order for the user to have something to see and interact with. And there are bottle-necks in the browser process. With too many open, active tabs the interface starts to stall badly. And the memory usage goes through the roof which causes the OS to swap pages from other applications out of memory which really hampers performance of the entire system. Chrome is optimized for the common case (very few tabs) but it doesn't scale well (i.e. at all) beyond this. Whatever Mozilla will do to lessen the impact of content on the interface, I hope that they won't go down the same disastrous path as Chrome and make the browser unusable for any use other than the browser is optimized for. Right now I can have ~100 tabs open with Firefox thanks to excellent memory usage (including suspending tabs) and an interfaces which scales well (Panorama, switch to tab, tab overflow, etc.) But I can see why Chrome is so attractive for many users. If you stay within its comfort zone the responsiveness is extremely pleasant in day-to-day usage.
  - Silhouette 14y ago
    Just to be clear, I didn't say anything about Chrome in my GP post. In fact, basically every other browser is much better than Firefox in this respect, and has been for a long time now. I do take your point about using tabs heavily and the limitations of some other browsers. I too will often use many tabs if I'm researching something or just browsing social news/comment sites like HN. On the other hand, I typically load a tab group of about half a dozen such news sites a couple of times a day, and Firefox goes into a trance for quite a while every time until those pages have all finished doing their thing, so it's not exactly performing well with even a few tabs either.
    - dbaupp 14y ago
      Standard questions: Are you on the latest version? Do you have a lot of extensions? Does it exhibit the same behaviour in safe mode? (I don't get the UI stalling for very long ever, and I have tens and tens of tabs open always.)
- sp332 14y ago
  On the plus side, you can have hundreds more tabs open in FF than Chrome for the same amount of RAM. And recent versions won't even load tabs you're not using, they act more like bookmarks.

Silhouette 14y ago

I've heard Firefox is snappy again, though I haven't seriously used it myself, but the damage is done. Firefox still doesn't isolate separate web pages in different tabs from each other and the main browser UI. If you open a group of tabs and one of the pages is slow to load, or later you have an AJAX request going on in some tab that takes a long time to get a response, your whole browser UI will often go into a trance. In fairness, they are working to improve this, but Firefox is several years behind the curve in this area. Until this is fixed, it really hurts any benefits from otherwise useful features like having tabs and bookmark folders in the first place.

cpeterso 14y ago
The biggest challenge with per-tab processes (Firefox's Electrolysis or e10s feature) is maintaining add-on compatibility. Chrome didn't have add-ons at first and didn't need to worry about backwards compatibility (at the time). Firefox is also working on per-tab event queues to improve UI responsiveness. In the meantime, I recommend Firefox users check out the experimental "Suspend Background Tabs" add-on. Written by the author of Adblock Plus, Suspend Background Tabs will pause JavaScript execution and timers for background tabs. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/suspend-background-tabs/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/suspend-backg...
Erunno 14y ago
I know I start sounding like a broken record for those who read my comments regularly in these kind of threads, but I always feel inclined to point out that Chrome's much-lauded architecture has clear limitations once you start to push it too hard. I'm certainly not a typical user as I exhibit heavy tab usage. And I've used Chrome for weeks at times as my primary browser so I've come to know its advantages and disadvantages. Web pages may be given their own processes but they are not completely isolated from the browser process (containing the UI) since they have to communicate in order for the user to have something to see and interact with. And there are bottle-necks in the browser process. With too many open, active tabs the interface starts to stall badly. And the memory usage goes through the roof which causes the OS to swap pages from other applications out of memory which really hampers performance of the entire system. Chrome is optimized for the common case (very few tabs) but it doesn't scale well (i.e. at all) beyond this. Whatever Mozilla will do to lessen the impact of content on the interface, I hope that they won't go down the same disastrous path as Chrome and make the browser unusable for any use other than the browser is optimized for. Right now I can have ~100 tabs open with Firefox thanks to excellent memory usage (including suspending tabs) and an interfaces which scales well (Panorama, switch to tab, tab overflow, etc.) But I can see why Chrome is so attractive for many users. If you stay within its comfort zone the responsiveness is extremely pleasant in day-to-day usage.
- Silhouette 14y ago
  Just to be clear, I didn't say anything about Chrome in my GP post. In fact, basically every other browser is much better than Firefox in this respect, and has been for a long time now. I do take your point about using tabs heavily and the limitations of some other browsers. I too will often use many tabs if I'm researching something or just browsing social news/comment sites like HN. On the other hand, I typically load a tab group of about half a dozen such news sites a couple of times a day, and Firefox goes into a trance for quite a while every time until those pages have all finished doing their thing, so it's not exactly performing well with even a few tabs either.
  - dbaupp 14y ago
    Standard questions: Are you on the latest version? Do you have a lot of extensions? Does it exhibit the same behaviour in safe mode? (I don't get the UI stalling for very long ever, and I have tens and tens of tabs open always.)
sp332 14y ago
On the plus side, you can have hundreds more tabs open in FF than Chrome for the same amount of RAM. And recent versions won't even load tabs you're not using, they act more like bookmarks.