5 ms·

Firefox is awesome and I love it, but my one complaint after all these years is that I have to restart the browser every day. It's not the end of the world, but

Firefox is awesome and I love it, but my one complaint after all these years is that I have to restart the browser every day. It's not the end of the world, but it's still frustrating, especially when I'm in the throes of debugging or important research. Over the course of a day, the browser becomes unresponsive and CPU usage idles at 10-15%. Restarting with the same tabs brings it down to 0%. Yes, I know, disable addons, blah blah...doesn't work for me. Same problem. I'm really looking forward to the new threading model coming up. I have a feeling that once each tab has a thread, things like this will be much more self-repairing. It's not always easy to kill a rogue execution path in an event loop, but killing a thread is pretty straightforward =]. Also, congrats on the firefox team for really taking performance seriously.

nnethercote 12y ago
Resetting might help: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/reset-firefox-easily-fix-most-problems https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/reset-firefox-easily-fi... It resets your profile while preserving history, cookies, bookmarks, etc. > I'm really looking forward to the new threading model coming up. I have a feeling that once each tab has a thread, things like this will be much more self-repairing. It's not always easy to kill a rogue execution path in an event loop, but killing a thread is pretty straightforward =]. First, it's "process", not "thread" :) The plan is to start with just two main processes -- one for chrome (browser UI, mostly) and one for web content. So no processes will be killed in normal operation. This is because additional processes incur certain extra costs, particularly when it comes to memory consumption. Still, it might help with your problem; it's hard to say for sure.
ibrahima 12y ago
It's not threading, it's processes that's coming up. I would be surprised if each tab didn't already have its own thread, because eg. multiple tabs can load at the same time... And umm, not sure what I'm doing differently but I usually keep Firefox open for weeks at a time and have no issues. Though I cut back a bit on keeping tabs open, I used to keep like 60-80 tabs open all the time but now I usually clean up when I'm done with something (more to reduce cognitive overhead than resource utilization).
- aboodman 12y ago
  All tabs are on the same thread in Firefox. Tabs appear to load concurrently only because io is async.
Igglyboo 12y ago
Genuinely curious if this is a common use case or not. I personally close chrome maybe half a dozen times an hour.
- ooozingly 12y ago
  How old are you? I won't get anything done if I kept re-loading my ~200 tabs.
  - catmanjan 12y ago
    What does age have to do with the number of tabs you keep open? Don't pretend you are perusing the contents of each of those tabs any time soon. Some people prefer to use bookmarks for that sort of workflow (as they are intended)
    - Igglyboo 12y ago
      Yep, everything I need to know is bookmarked and synced to my google account. If something is interesting enough I'll bookmark it, if not I'll close the tab. Really the only time I'll have more than 5-6 tabs open is when I'm trying to read through an API documentation and I want to be able to reference multiple points quickly.
  - adamb0mb1 12y ago
    How old are _you_?!
  - letstryagain 12y ago
    You have 200 tabs open? How do you find the tab you want? How often do you look at each of the 200 tabs? What happens when you're on another computer? What happens if you accidentally close Chrome, do you open all 200 tabs again?
    - lumpypua 12y ago
      You have 200 tabs open? 120-200 in each Chrome, FF, Safari. How do you find the tab you want? For me each window has tabs on a particular topic, e.g. database api docs plus stack overflow (10 tabs), a javascript one (7 tabs), hackernews (18 tabs), paleo recipes (12 tabs), etc. Tab creation and deletion basically acts like a stack with the most recent/specific tab on top—and I'll garbage collect (command-w a bunch of tabs) when I finish with the specific task. What happens when you're on another computer? Laptop goes everywhere with me. 99.5% of the time I'm not. But that other computer also has fuckton of tabs open. lol What happens if you accidentally close Chrome, do you open all 200 tabs again? Yup. Various plugins make it less painful but it does hurt. I make sure not to accidentally close the browser.
saidajigumi 12y ago
I'll second the motion that there's something going on specifically with your setup. A reset as another poster suggests might be worth a go. Or even just creating a separate, fresh profile and trying that out for a day or two. [1] [1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-and-remove-firefox-profiles https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-...
jacquesm 12y ago
I have hundreds (not kidding here, it's the nature of my work) of tabs open routinely for days or even weeks on end and this is not an issue for me. This is under Linux (which may be a factor) on a machine with plenty of RAM (which may be another factor), firefox is extremely stable and if it goes down it is because I power off the machine. Do you have any plug-ins or add-ons installed that might be the cause of this problem? If you do I suggest you disable all plug-ins and then slowly re-enable them to figure out if any one of those is the culprit.
keypusher 12y ago
I've heard other people say this too, but it must be a workflow or use case thing. I run Firefox as my browser of choice on Linux, Mac, and Windows every day, and have for 10 years at least. I do remember a time when memory was an issue, but those problems have been resolved for a few years. I routinely have dozens of tabs open, often with Flash video or lots of javascript, sometimes 50 or more (with the excellent TreeStyleTabs plugin for hierarchical side tabs) and I have never had these problems. I restart my browser maybe once a month, usually along with OS updates.
- lmedinas 12y ago
  Interesting that you are talking about RAM, but it's hard to beat Firefox memory usage among major browsers. I'm impressed on my computers how Firefox takes ~750 MB of RAM and Chrome with the same tabs takes ~1.4 GB RAM. Kudos to the developers.

nnethercote 12y ago

Resetting might help: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/reset-firefox-easily-fix-most-problems https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/reset-firefox-easily-fi... It resets your profile while preserving history, cookies, bookmarks, etc. > I'm really looking forward to the new threading model coming up. I have a feeling that once each tab has a thread, things like this will be much more self-repairing. It's not always easy to kill a rogue execution path in an event loop, but killing a thread is pretty straightforward =]. First, it's "process", not "thread" :) The plan is to start with just two main processes -- one for chrome (browser UI, mostly) and one for web content. So no processes will be killed in normal operation. This is because additional processes incur certain extra costs, particularly when it comes to memory consumption. Still, it might help with your problem; it's hard to say for sure.

ibrahima 12y ago

It's not threading, it's processes that's coming up. I would be surprised if each tab didn't already have its own thread, because eg. multiple tabs can load at the same time... And umm, not sure what I'm doing differently but I usually keep Firefox open for weeks at a time and have no issues. Though I cut back a bit on keeping tabs open, I used to keep like 60-80 tabs open all the time but now I usually clean up when I'm done with something (more to reduce cognitive overhead than resource utilization).

aboodman 12y ago
All tabs are on the same thread in Firefox. Tabs appear to load concurrently only because io is async.

Igglyboo 12y ago

Genuinely curious if this is a common use case or not. I personally close chrome maybe half a dozen times an hour.

ooozingly 12y ago
How old are you? I won't get anything done if I kept re-loading my ~200 tabs.
- catmanjan 12y ago
  What does age have to do with the number of tabs you keep open? Don't pretend you are perusing the contents of each of those tabs any time soon. Some people prefer to use bookmarks for that sort of workflow (as they are intended)
  - Igglyboo 12y ago
    Yep, everything I need to know is bookmarked and synced to my google account. If something is interesting enough I'll bookmark it, if not I'll close the tab. Really the only time I'll have more than 5-6 tabs open is when I'm trying to read through an API documentation and I want to be able to reference multiple points quickly.
- adamb0mb1 12y ago
  How old are _you_?!
- letstryagain 12y ago
  You have 200 tabs open? How do you find the tab you want? How often do you look at each of the 200 tabs? What happens when you're on another computer? What happens if you accidentally close Chrome, do you open all 200 tabs again?
  - lumpypua 12y ago
    You have 200 tabs open? 120-200 in each Chrome, FF, Safari. How do you find the tab you want? For me each window has tabs on a particular topic, e.g. database api docs plus stack overflow (10 tabs), a javascript one (7 tabs), hackernews (18 tabs), paleo recipes (12 tabs), etc. Tab creation and deletion basically acts like a stack with the most recent/specific tab on top—and I'll garbage collect (command-w a bunch of tabs) when I finish with the specific task. What happens when you're on another computer? Laptop goes everywhere with me. 99.5% of the time I'm not. But that other computer also has fuckton of tabs open. lol What happens if you accidentally close Chrome, do you open all 200 tabs again? Yup. Various plugins make it less painful but it does hurt. I make sure not to accidentally close the browser.

saidajigumi 12y ago

I'll second the motion that there's something going on specifically with your setup. A reset as another poster suggests might be worth a go. Or even just creating a separate, fresh profile and trying that out for a day or two. [1] [1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-and-remove-firefox-profiles https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-...

jacquesm 12y ago

I have hundreds (not kidding here, it's the nature of my work) of tabs open routinely for days or even weeks on end and this is not an issue for me. This is under Linux (which may be a factor) on a machine with plenty of RAM (which may be another factor), firefox is extremely stable and if it goes down it is because I power off the machine. Do you have any plug-ins or add-ons installed that might be the cause of this problem? If you do I suggest you disable all plug-ins and then slowly re-enable them to figure out if any one of those is the culprit.

keypusher 12y ago

I've heard other people say this too, but it must be a workflow or use case thing. I run Firefox as my browser of choice on Linux, Mac, and Windows every day, and have for 10 years at least. I do remember a time when memory was an issue, but those problems have been resolved for a few years. I routinely have dozens of tabs open, often with Flash video or lots of javascript, sometimes 50 or more (with the excellent TreeStyleTabs plugin for hierarchical side tabs) and I have never had these problems. I restart my browser maybe once a month, usually along with OS updates.

lmedinas 12y ago
Interesting that you are talking about RAM, but it's hard to beat Firefox memory usage among major browsers. I'm impressed on my computers how Firefox takes ~750 MB of RAM and Chrome with the same tabs takes ~1.4 GB RAM. Kudos to the developers.