6 ms·

Firefox: Averages ~5MB/tab (200 tabs, 1GB memory) Chrome: Anywhere from 50MB/tab up. A much better performance fix would be to suspend javascript execution on

Firefox: Averages ~5MB/tab (200 tabs, 1GB memory) Chrome: Anywhere from 50MB/tab up. A much better performance fix would be to suspend javascript execution on tabs that aren't visible.

hippich 12y ago
I am not questioning reasons to have 200 open tabs, but wonder how do you manage it? I would imagine tab bar become very long?
- adamtulinius 12y ago
  It helps that Firefox offers to change to an existing tab when you try to open the same page in a new tab. Another suggestion is to not manage it. I create tabs all the time, and often have many similar tabs. There's no need to manage it, only to clean up once in a while. (I like many tabs. A few weeks ago I performed some tab-cleaning -- 550 tabs were a bit much, as it made Firefox start slower.) Personally i just use it for things I would like to read at some point, instead of filling up my bookmarks with 50-10 entries every day.
  - blueskin_ 12y ago
    >It helps that Firefox offers to change to an existing tab when you try to open the same page in a new tab. Disabled that as soon as it was dumped on me. There are an almost infinite list of reasons to have multiple copies of tabs. Honestly, I cleanup every week or two, and it works fine. Windows are by category of different things I do, and I tend to leave frequent sites open all the time.
  - silon3 12y ago
    I wish it had an option to reorder that tab (move it to end / bottom in TreeStyleTabs). (also, reverse order of tabs in TreeStyleTabs would be great).
  - daxelrod 12y ago
    The TabPolish Chrome extension implements similar behavior (in a slightly different way; it doesn't hook into the suggestion menu, and duplicate detection is per window, rather than per browser instance). I find it essential to manage the mess that is my Chrome tabs.
- mmebane 12y ago
  The Tree Style Tab extension [1] makes a world of difference here. My tab bar basically becomes a stack of ephemeral bookmarks. [1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
- JackC 12y ago
  With high-res, widescreen monitors, it makes a lot more sense to have tabs in a vertical stack. Check out Tree Style Tabs for Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta... This is the must-have feature that keeps me using Firefox -- especially when I'm doing research, which has a naturally tree-like pattern. Apparently, from the Chromium bug, it's a dealbreaker for lots of other people as well: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=344870 https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=344870
- ANTSANTS 12y ago
  I deal by creating multiple windows, ideally one per general topic/use case. This works great with Chromium because you can easily drag multiple tabs between windows to organize things, and the shrinking tab bar encourages you to close things you don't need. Doesn't work so well in Firefox, where you have to manually drag each tab over one by one, doing so is kinda glitchy, and the scrolling tab bar makes it easier to just fill a window with a ton of unrelated tabs.
  - icebraining 12y ago
    There's an addon for that: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multiple-tab-handler/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multiple-tab-...
- sergiosgc 12y ago
  Although I don't get anywhere near 200 tabs, I hit the same type of UI management issue. I use contextualized "sessions" using panorama in Firefox (Ctrl-Shift-E). I have 10-20 tabs per context, and somewhere between 6 and 10 contexts. Between Panorama and TreeStyle tabs (a plugin), everything is neatly organized. Panorama is a life-saver if you have to context-switch between projects regularly. TreeStyle, really, I use more as a means to move screen real-estate to horizontal usage on my laptop's 16:9 screen. Tab organization is a side benefit.
taeric 12y ago
Right, this is just memory, though. And I am curious on whether or not this counts shared memory correctly between tabs. My point for performance, though, was mainly that if you have 200+ tabs that are actively doing something, then you are thrashing even in firefox. It isn't like they just do their work for free depending on the process model. Also, 200 is not exactly a large N when we are too worried about scheduling, is it? (That is, unless all 200 are cpu bound, in which case, again, firefox would already be thrashing.)
lern_too_spel 12y ago
On Chrome, the OS can page all those other tabs to disk without affecting performance of the current tab. On Firefox, you're going to feel it.
- umanwizard 12y ago
  Why can't the OS page Firefox's memory to disk too? Paging is done at much finer granularity than per-process.
  - lern_too_spel 12y ago
    Because, as I said earlier, "you're going to feel it." If your tabs are allocating in the same process address space as each other, accessing your current tab's data is likely to cause swapping. The key point is that electrolysis and chromium-based browsers can page inactive tabs "without affecting performance of the current tab."
    - taeric 12y ago
      This isn't really intuitive, though. When you switch to a tab, either you page in that tab's memory for the current process. Or you page in that tab's process and memory. That is, by going to a "per process" approach, the amount of memory that gets paged in almost certainly went up. No?
      - lern_too_spel 12y ago
        The amount of memory that gets paged in went up, but the whole point is that you never have to page any of the current tab's memory while you're using it, unlike with the monolithic 1 GB Firefox process today. I feel like I must not have been clear earlier because I have made just a single point, and both of you are discussing things not related to that point. Let me try one more time: it's all about performance of the current tab.
        taeric 12y ago
tonyplee 12y ago
Hmmm, I have 10 tabs now and Mac's "Activity Monitor" shows FF is using 571MB of RAM. Not sure about the ~5MB/tab figure.... This is FF 32.0.
jgraham 12y ago
Talking about "memory usage per tab" doesn't make much sense unless you talk about what's in the tabs. It's rather like talking about "memory usage per application" on your desktop and not mentioning whether the application is ed or OpenOffice. Suspending JS execution in invisible tabs seems highly unlikely to be web-compatible; you wouldn't want YouTube or Spotify to stop playing just because you focused a different tab. On the other hand, with technologies like requestAnimationFrame, we can make it possible for well designed applications to work well when in the background.

Firefox: Averages ~5MB/tab (200 tabs, 1GB memory) Chrome: Anywhere from 50MB/tab up. A much better performance fix would be to suspend javascript execution on tabs that aren't visible.

hippich 12y ago

I am not questioning reasons to have 200 open tabs, but wonder how do you manage it? I would imagine tab bar become very long?

adamtulinius 12y ago
It helps that Firefox offers to change to an existing tab when you try to open the same page in a new tab. Another suggestion is to not manage it. I create tabs all the time, and often have many similar tabs. There's no need to manage it, only to clean up once in a while. (I like many tabs. A few weeks ago I performed some tab-cleaning -- 550 tabs were a bit much, as it made Firefox start slower.) Personally i just use it for things I would like to read at some point, instead of filling up my bookmarks with 50-10 entries every day.
- blueskin_ 12y ago
  >It helps that Firefox offers to change to an existing tab when you try to open the same page in a new tab. Disabled that as soon as it was dumped on me. There are an almost infinite list of reasons to have multiple copies of tabs. Honestly, I cleanup every week or two, and it works fine. Windows are by category of different things I do, and I tend to leave frequent sites open all the time.
- silon3 12y ago
  I wish it had an option to reorder that tab (move it to end / bottom in TreeStyleTabs). (also, reverse order of tabs in TreeStyleTabs would be great).
- daxelrod 12y ago
  The TabPolish Chrome extension implements similar behavior (in a slightly different way; it doesn't hook into the suggestion menu, and duplicate detection is per window, rather than per browser instance). I find it essential to manage the mess that is my Chrome tabs.
mmebane 12y ago
The Tree Style Tab extension [1] makes a world of difference here. My tab bar basically becomes a stack of ephemeral bookmarks. [1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
JackC 12y ago
With high-res, widescreen monitors, it makes a lot more sense to have tabs in a vertical stack. Check out Tree Style Tabs for Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta... This is the must-have feature that keeps me using Firefox -- especially when I'm doing research, which has a naturally tree-like pattern. Apparently, from the Chromium bug, it's a dealbreaker for lots of other people as well: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=344870 https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=344870
ANTSANTS 12y ago
I deal by creating multiple windows, ideally one per general topic/use case. This works great with Chromium because you can easily drag multiple tabs between windows to organize things, and the shrinking tab bar encourages you to close things you don't need. Doesn't work so well in Firefox, where you have to manually drag each tab over one by one, doing so is kinda glitchy, and the scrolling tab bar makes it easier to just fill a window with a ton of unrelated tabs.
- icebraining 12y ago
  There's an addon for that: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multiple-tab-handler/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multiple-tab-...
sergiosgc 12y ago
Although I don't get anywhere near 200 tabs, I hit the same type of UI management issue. I use contextualized "sessions" using panorama in Firefox (Ctrl-Shift-E). I have 10-20 tabs per context, and somewhere between 6 and 10 contexts. Between Panorama and TreeStyle tabs (a plugin), everything is neatly organized. Panorama is a life-saver if you have to context-switch between projects regularly. TreeStyle, really, I use more as a means to move screen real-estate to horizontal usage on my laptop's 16:9 screen. Tab organization is a side benefit.

taeric 12y ago

Right, this is just memory, though. And I am curious on whether or not this counts shared memory correctly between tabs. My point for performance, though, was mainly that if you have 200+ tabs that are actively doing something, then you are thrashing even in firefox. It isn't like they just do their work for free depending on the process model. Also, 200 is not exactly a large N when we are too worried about scheduling, is it? (That is, unless all 200 are cpu bound, in which case, again, firefox would already be thrashing.)

lern_too_spel 12y ago

On Chrome, the OS can page all those other tabs to disk without affecting performance of the current tab. On Firefox, you're going to feel it.

umanwizard 12y ago
Why can't the OS page Firefox's memory to disk too? Paging is done at much finer granularity than per-process.
- lern_too_spel 12y ago
  Because, as I said earlier, "you're going to feel it." If your tabs are allocating in the same process address space as each other, accessing your current tab's data is likely to cause swapping. The key point is that electrolysis and chromium-based browsers can page inactive tabs "without affecting performance of the current tab."
  - taeric 12y ago
    This isn't really intuitive, though. When you switch to a tab, either you page in that tab's memory for the current process. Or you page in that tab's process and memory. That is, by going to a "per process" approach, the amount of memory that gets paged in almost certainly went up. No?
    - lern_too_spel 12y ago
      The amount of memory that gets paged in went up, but the whole point is that you never have to page any of the current tab's memory while you're using it, unlike with the monolithic 1 GB Firefox process today. I feel like I must not have been clear earlier because I have made just a single point, and both of you are discussing things not related to that point. Let me try one more time: it's all about performance of the current tab.
      - taeric 12y ago

tonyplee 12y ago

Hmmm, I have 10 tabs now and Mac's "Activity Monitor" shows FF is using 571MB of RAM. Not sure about the ~5MB/tab figure.... This is FF 32.0.

jgraham 12y ago

Talking about "memory usage per tab" doesn't make much sense unless you talk about what's in the tabs. It's rather like talking about "memory usage per application" on your desktop and not mentioning whether the application is ed or OpenOffice. Suspending JS execution in invisible tabs seems highly unlikely to be web-compatible; you wouldn't want YouTube or Spotify to stop playing just because you focused a different tab. On the other hand, with technologies like requestAnimationFrame, we can make it possible for well designed applications to work well when in the background.