5 ms·

Its been my recent experience too, I keep a lot of tabs open and began to notice Chrome was filling up my memory. Very strange that Google let the situation ge

Its been my recent experience too, I keep a lot of tabs open and began to notice Chrome was filling up my memory. Very strange that Google let the situation get so bad. Mind you I find the Chrome developer tools far more powerful and intuitive than those in Firefox which stops me moving entirely.

rockdoe 12y ago
The Firefox Devtools team regularly probes the webdev community on the features they need - make sure you let them know (and don't be surprised if they're in Aurora already).
- e15ctr0n 12y ago
  The Firefox Devtools team even did an Ask HN[1] and then folowed up 10 days later[2] with the feedback they got. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5325445 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5325445 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5393864 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5393864
- colin_jack 12y ago
  Ta yeah, I probably should but its usually just I don't find the approach the UI takes intuitive in a lot of cases. Even just things like doing a search, viewing results, compared to Chrome I find it all a little painful...not sure that's the sort of thing I can meaningfully report though.
AtmaScout 12y ago
I agree with you about the developer tools. One of the main reasons I use Chrome over Firefox.
mason55 12y ago
> I keep a lot of tabs open and began to notice Chrome was filling up my memory. I had this problem too and found that Chrome was getting so slow that it was unusable. For those who have this problem and don't want to switch from Chrome there is an extension called "The Great Suspender" which dumps background tabs after a configurable time period of inactivity. It helped immensely.
- jo_ 12y ago
  This looks exceptionally helpful. I have around 50 tabs open, nominally, and my CPU fan is almost perpetually on high for it. Just before installing it, however, I found myself wondering, "Why am I using an app which allows me to keep more tabs open? Why am I not using bookmarks?" Why do we keep open 500 tabs instead of using bookmarks these days?
  - abandonliberty 12y ago
    Give onetab a shot. I'm still fighting to keep my number of tabs down. It causes significant mental overhead and task switching costs. I've noticed a bump in my productivity by taking the time to close/bookmark/onetab tabs.
    - stygiansonic 12y ago
      Agreed. OneTab is a great way to organize your "sessions" of browsing. If you're like me, you keep separate windows for separate topics and it's great to OneTab them all when something needs to be put on hold. I do realize it's glorified bookmarking, but the concept and ease-of-use make it nice.
  - AngrySkillzz 12y ago
    Because maintaining a large catalogue of bookmarks is a nightmare; good luck finding anything unless you are incredibly meticulous about organizing them. In addition, I think it's a spatial locality thing. I find that I'm a lot more likely to come back to an article/page/etc. if it's still open than I am to remember that I bookmarked it and wanted to come back later.
    - maxerickson 12y ago
      I just had to look up how to do it, but in Firefox you can search bookmarks from the url bar by starting off with a * and a space. (I'm glad I looked it up, this makes me more inclined to make bookmarks without sorting or tagging them)
martin_ 12y ago
I also agree-- the developer tools in Chrome are pretty critical for me, in my opinion they overtook firebug. Whenever I try to use the tools in Firefox or Safari I end up getting confused and frustrated. I use Safari if I'm on battery/traveling because it is a ton more efficient, and then only fire up Chrome if I need it.
Morphling 12y ago
I hear quite a few people talking how they have 30-50 tabs open, how do people manage something like that? And why would anyone need so many simultaneous tabs open?
- sukilot 12y ago
  If your work involves living in web apps (github, trello, gDocs, etc) he tabs pile up quickly. If you live in Photoshop or MS suite, not so much.
  - Morphling 12y ago
    I do work with web projects, but I hardly live in github, sure it's an important tool and I tend to visit the site quite often especially if I'm working, but I see no need to keep it open all the time, but maybe I'm not solving hard enough problems for that to matter.
- scholia 12y ago
  The problem is that you're doing something that uses lots of tabs, and with luck you remember to close them down. Still, at the end of the day, you may have an extra five tabs open, and that's 100 a month. After a few months you have 500 tabs. So then you devote a couple of hours to going through and closing tabs, and find you still have 300... The solution, if anyone ever gets this far down the page, is to use Session Manager to save the tabs, close Firefox, and then just uncheck the boxes for the tabs you don't ever want to reload.
  - Morphling 12y ago
    See that "you don't remember to close them down" part gets me, or rather doesn't. I mean I have a lot of tabs open when I'm working, but at the end of the day I close my browser and I don't have any fixed set of pages that it opens or last session, it just opens on the new tab page and asks for commands. I just can't stand if my browser has so many tabs open I can't read the what the hell it is from the header and since I always use browser only on half of my screen with editor on the other side (actually since I have 21:9 screen I've split it in 3 so I can have project | editor | docs) that gives me at most like 15+-5 tabs to work with. But maybe I'm just the weirdo out of everyone.

rockdoe 12y ago

The Firefox Devtools team regularly probes the webdev community on the features they need - make sure you let them know (and don't be surprised if they're in Aurora already).

e15ctr0n 12y ago
The Firefox Devtools team even did an Ask HN[1] and then folowed up 10 days later[2] with the feedback they got. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5325445 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5325445 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5393864 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5393864
colin_jack 12y ago
Ta yeah, I probably should but its usually just I don't find the approach the UI takes intuitive in a lot of cases. Even just things like doing a search, viewing results, compared to Chrome I find it all a little painful...not sure that's the sort of thing I can meaningfully report though.

AtmaScout 12y ago

I agree with you about the developer tools. One of the main reasons I use Chrome over Firefox.

mason55 12y ago

> I keep a lot of tabs open and began to notice Chrome was filling up my memory. I had this problem too and found that Chrome was getting so slow that it was unusable. For those who have this problem and don't want to switch from Chrome there is an extension called "The Great Suspender" which dumps background tabs after a configurable time period of inactivity. It helped immensely.

jo_ 12y ago
This looks exceptionally helpful. I have around 50 tabs open, nominally, and my CPU fan is almost perpetually on high for it. Just before installing it, however, I found myself wondering, "Why am I using an app which allows me to keep more tabs open? Why am I not using bookmarks?" Why do we keep open 500 tabs instead of using bookmarks these days?
- abandonliberty 12y ago
  Give onetab a shot. I'm still fighting to keep my number of tabs down. It causes significant mental overhead and task switching costs. I've noticed a bump in my productivity by taking the time to close/bookmark/onetab tabs.
  - stygiansonic 12y ago
    Agreed. OneTab is a great way to organize your "sessions" of browsing. If you're like me, you keep separate windows for separate topics and it's great to OneTab them all when something needs to be put on hold. I do realize it's glorified bookmarking, but the concept and ease-of-use make it nice.
- AngrySkillzz 12y ago
  Because maintaining a large catalogue of bookmarks is a nightmare; good luck finding anything unless you are incredibly meticulous about organizing them. In addition, I think it's a spatial locality thing. I find that I'm a lot more likely to come back to an article/page/etc. if it's still open than I am to remember that I bookmarked it and wanted to come back later.
  - maxerickson 12y ago
    I just had to look up how to do it, but in Firefox you can search bookmarks from the url bar by starting off with a * and a space. (I'm glad I looked it up, this makes me more inclined to make bookmarks without sorting or tagging them)

martin_ 12y ago

I also agree-- the developer tools in Chrome are pretty critical for me, in my opinion they overtook firebug. Whenever I try to use the tools in Firefox or Safari I end up getting confused and frustrated. I use Safari if I'm on battery/traveling because it is a ton more efficient, and then only fire up Chrome if I need it.

Morphling 12y ago

I hear quite a few people talking how they have 30-50 tabs open, how do people manage something like that? And why would anyone need so many simultaneous tabs open?

sukilot 12y ago
If your work involves living in web apps (github, trello, gDocs, etc) he tabs pile up quickly. If you live in Photoshop or MS suite, not so much.
- Morphling 12y ago
  I do work with web projects, but I hardly live in github, sure it's an important tool and I tend to visit the site quite often especially if I'm working, but I see no need to keep it open all the time, but maybe I'm not solving hard enough problems for that to matter.
scholia 12y ago
The problem is that you're doing something that uses lots of tabs, and with luck you remember to close them down. Still, at the end of the day, you may have an extra five tabs open, and that's 100 a month. After a few months you have 500 tabs. So then you devote a couple of hours to going through and closing tabs, and find you still have 300... The solution, if anyone ever gets this far down the page, is to use Session Manager to save the tabs, close Firefox, and then just uncheck the boxes for the tabs you don't ever want to reload.
- Morphling 12y ago
  See that "you don't remember to close them down" part gets me, or rather doesn't. I mean I have a lot of tabs open when I'm working, but at the end of the day I close my browser and I don't have any fixed set of pages that it opens or last session, it just opens on the new tab page and asks for commands. I just can't stand if my browser has so many tabs open I can't read the what the hell it is from the header and since I always use browser only on half of my screen with editor on the other side (actually since I have 21:9 screen I've split it in 3 so I can have project | editor | docs) that gives me at most like 15+-5 tabs to work with. But maybe I'm just the weirdo out of everyone.