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The problem is using many open tabs with Chrome. If you use no more than 3 or 4 tabs, Chrome is generally fine. If you use more than that, Firefox has some buil

The problem is using many open tabs with Chrome. If you use no more than 3 or 4 tabs, Chrome is generally fine. If you use more than that, Firefox has some built-in features to help with tabs such as delayed tab loading and tab grouping. It also has more and better extensions for helping with multiple tabs. Furthermore, it doesn't launch a new process for each tab. In a browser comparison I wrote last month, I included a section for users who like to keep a lot of tabs open. Even Opera, which uses the same code base as Chrome, does tabs better than Chrome: http://www.filterjoe.com/2015/01/23/best-browsers-2015-which-browser-is-best-for-you/#ManyTabs http://www.filterjoe.com/2015/01/23/best-browsers-2015-which...

emodendroket 12y ago
I imagine this has something to do with the sandboxing in Chrome that prevents one tab from causing the entire browser to crash, no?
- FilterJoe 12y ago
  Yes. Sandboxing makes sense when you think of browser as operating system. Isolate each process to increase security and crash-resistance. Makes sense, but it takes more memory.
  - emodendroket 12y ago
    Frankly I have more memory than I need for most tasks so I don't mind this trade-off.
    - frozenport 12y ago
      On the other hand memory memory takes more time to read, potentially leading to latency.
- vxNsr 12y ago
  I don't know, I've had one tab cause other tabs to crash all the time, which is something that confused me considering the supposed isolation that should be happening. edit: not sure why I've been dv, but I'd like to add that one thing I've noticed is that this will usually happen when I open links in a new tab, somehow all those tabs become linked and if one becomes unresponsive they all do. For those who claim I should stop opening links in new tabs, I say: welcome to 2004, this is the whole purpose of tabbed browsing. If you;d like to try to reproduce this: go to facebook and open the first ten links in your newsfeed in new tabs (either by middle clicking, ctrl+click, or context menu) I don't normally do more than one or two at a time but ten will force the issue. then go to another tab that isn't connect to those other 11 it'll work fine while those 11 will look like they're on pause. Note: I haven't tested this in other browsers.
jackmaney 12y ago
I switched from Firefox to Chrome right around Firefox 3.6. I have an average of around 20 tabs open at any given moment, and I tend to go around a week or two between reboots. Other than the occasional tab crashing and quickly reloading (and by "occasional", I mean maybe once every couple of months or so), I've never had an issue with Chrome. It just works.
- snowwrestler 12y ago
  I also have better luck with tabs in Chrome. Overall CPU usage is lower, and the in-browser task inspector makes it trivial to ID bad tabs and close them. Firefox is a lot better than it used to be, but it can still be brought to its knees across the board by a bad script, at least in my experience, and it's hard to find the one bad tab to kill.
  - psykovsky 12y ago
    Github will bring firefox to it's knees with many tabs open. But I suspect it's because of flash content.
- zobzu 12y ago
  Firefox 3.6 was pretty slow compared to Firefox today. I would switch again to Chrome if we were in Firefox 3.6 times. Turns out, they fixed Firefox up pretty good over the years
grandalf 12y ago
This is probably b/c most people at Google use computers with 32GB of ram.
- yellowapple 12y ago
  This might sound silly to some, but I wouldn't be surprised if Google limited its usability tests to high-end machines with RAM in the double-digits. I reckon most programming teams have this issue, since even if they're dogfooding, they're doing so on high-end hardware, meaning that low-end hardware is untested and often unusable. Google isn't the only culprit; many websites nowadays will start to lean heavier toward excessive features - making them borderline-unusable on slower computers - because they were developed and tested on fast computers exclusively.
  - TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
    I have 16GB and regularly have >100 tabs open in Chrome. It works, kind of, as long as I don't try to run anything else at the same time. The article persuaded me that Firefox may be worth a try again. As for testing - you'd think testing on a range of hardware would be standard. Testing exclusively on top spec machines is just unprofessional.
    - _lce0 12y ago
      I've using firefox on a 4Gb linux machine for about two years so far.. and it's working just fine, each release it keeps better and better
      - Zancarius 12y ago
        Edit: I want to apologize to eridal. I misread his/her statement and though the browser in question was Chrome, not Firefox. So, public apolgy: I'm very sorry, eridal. I thought you wrote something you did not. My comment was wrong as a result. I have corrected my mistake, and wish to apologize to you personally for misreading what you wrote. Original message with the offending part removed, mistakenly assuming eridal was using Chrome (I'm not sure why I read it that way): --- I stopped using Chromium in part because once I passed the 100-150 tab threshold, memory usage skyrockets to 4-6GiB. It's OK with 16GiB RAM, but usability diminishes pretty badly (the stock UI is NOT conducive to more than 80-100 tabs), and if you're stupid enough to visit a site with Flash, the probability of it leaking and eating up another 2+GiB begin to approach 1. I like Chrome for its speed--if you have 20 tabs or fewer open. But I can certainly correlate my own experiences with that of the GP comment.
jcoffland 12y ago
I regularly have several hundred tabs open in Firefox with no problems. Some people may think this is crazy or messy but I find it very useful for organizing the various projects I'm working on for different clients and my own personal projects. Tab groups and delayed loading make it all very smooth. Such usage is just not possible with Chrome. I tried to switch to Chrome but couldn't find the features I needed and did not wish to change my workflow. Back when Chrome came out Firefox was buggy. Since then it has become much more stable. Chrome is the one that's buggy now. One process per tab means that a bug in one tab does not take down the whole browser but it is much better to just fix the bugs and not crash at all.
- yellowapple 12y ago
  I do the same thing; it's incredibly easy to do with the Tree View Tabs extension. For example, while browsing HN, I'll frequently just middle-click a bunch of article links and (occasionally) their comments, then read them once I have a sizable queue. Same goes for trying to look up documentation to fix some bug in my code; I'll start with a DuckDuckGo search and, suddenly, I have at least a dozen (sometimes multiple dozens) tabs open with Stack Overflow questions and blog posts and official online docs and such with clues pointing me in the right direction.
  - tonetheman 12y ago
    What is the name of that extension? I searched and get over a thousand results. Thanks!
    - andrewflnr 12y ago
      "Tree Style Tab". http://piro.sakura.ne.jp/xul/_treestyletab.html.en http://piro.sakura.ne.jp/xul/_treestyletab.html.en At least that's the one I use.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - yellowapple 12y ago
baby 12y ago
> It also has more and better extensions for helping with multiple tabs. Exactly. Tree Style Tab being the biggest reason I've never switched to Chrome.
- TomDavey 12y ago
  +1 for Tree Style Tab. I like to keep dozens of tabs open, and to drag and drop 'em into hierarchical groups. I also like to additionally organize the tab trees into multiple windows; the windows can be distinctively named with the FireTitle extension to identify them quickly. I admit that I never learned Panorama or Tab Groups. Tree Style Tab does just about everything I need.
  - yellowapple 12y ago
    I'm not sure what Panorama or Tab Groups are, though I suppose I could infer the purpose/function of Tab Groups based on the name. > I like to keep dozens of tabs open Only dozens? Son, I just closed a Firefox session (in order to switch over to Nightly) with 233 tabs (plus another window with 10 or so). Didn't even push the 6GB mark. When it comes to browsing, Chrome is like a modern soldier with all his gadgets and gizmos to keep him nice and sandboxed and safe from his adversaries ("adversaries" being poorly-designed "responsive" "web-scale" "mobile-first" "semantic" "Wangular.js" "jQWOP" "SASSy" "single-page" "web applications"); a good marksman, but easily overwhelmed should he find himself at close range and significantly outnumbered. Firefox, in the meantime, is better likened to what would result if SkyNet had based its Terminators on Viking berserkers: almost naked, wielding nothing more than battle-axes (axen?) in each hand, charging at hundreds of foes in a magic-mushroom-fueled frenzy and winning. Yet, even if he should fail, 'twould matter not, for he only dreams of dying in such a great battle (as he does every week or so when I inevitably need to restart the Firefox process) and ascending to Robot Valhalla; and someday, Servo Firefoxson will grow from boy to man, and upon doing so, himself join the epic battles to avenge his father.
  - dzhiurgis 12y ago
    Tree Style Tabs looks like it has a potential to allow querying HTML via SQL. I have been thinking about this for a while. I do not have a concrete idea for an application, but it would be cool to retrieve titles of all open sites in certain group/tree. Almost like some sort of scraper.
bitslayer 12y ago
The whole point of having separate processes for each tab is that it isolates them. If one crashes, the others remain up. It supports multiple processors, too.
- silverbax88 12y ago
  I would ask you to open up your task manager and try picking the largest-in-memory Chrome task and kill it, then see if you still think they are completely isolated. I agree with your point, but give it a shot.
  - muze 12y ago
    I don't think that's really fair, the largest Chrome task in memory isn't a tab or extension. Yes I suppose it isn't perfectly isolated and if something happens to the main program task it will obviously cause problems but if a single page or extension crashes everything else lives on.
    - yellowapple 12y ago
      It's a perfectly fair point. The fact that the largest Chrome task by far is not a tab or extension at all, but is the core of Chrome itself, indicates that maybe - just maybe - Chrome isn't doing as good a job of keeping things isolated as it should. That process shouldn't be doing a whole lot beyond driving the UI and managing the lifecycles of its children.
      - frankzinger 12y ago
        The point is to isolate any code which renders HTML, plugins, etc., i.e., anything which processes untrusted external input, something which the main process does not do.
  - rjbwork 12y ago
    That is chrome itself...of course closing the parent process of a bunch of processes that are tied to it and that it monitors is going to close them all.
Slippery_John 12y ago
Tabs were one of the major reasons I switched over to Chrome. At the time, firefox resized the tabs as soon as space became available, making closing a bunch of tabs a pain. They don't do that anymore, but now they have the tab scrolling feature which adds a gui element if there are too many tabs. Thing is, once you close enough tabs, those elements go away immediately, making closing a bunch of tabs a pain. Biggest reason I switched, which is still the true (though less so), is that Chrome takes up less screen real estate.
- soperj 12y ago
  Ctrl-w kills a tab. Makes that kind of thing completely painless.
  - kevinbowman 12y ago
    As does middle-click, which is super-handy.
  - ntsh 12y ago
    Sometimes Ctrl+w can lead to horrible pain if you accidentally hit Q which is just next to w.
    - dergachev 12y ago
      Chrome has a menu item toggle called "Warn before quitting" that I just enabled, and it has already saved me a bunch of times!!!! In OSX it's under the Chrome menu item (before File), don't know where they stuck it in Windows.
      - Cthulhu_ 12y ago
        I don't think Windows has it, also because the keyboard command to exit an application is alt+f4, which isn't easy to hit on accident.
      - wutbrodo 12y ago
        I can't seem to find this in my settings : (. This bit me every once in a while, and as I keep hundreds of tabs open, it's a huge pain in the ass to restore Chrome. I ended up remapping the ctrl+q shortcut to do nothing.
jackmaney 12y ago
I use Chrome as my only browser. On my desktop, I run an average of 20 tabs open at any given time, across two windows. I also run Chrome on my Android phone (Samsung Galaxy Note 3) and keep 4--8 tabs open at any given time. I reboot my desktop once every 1--2 weeks, and my phone maybe once per month. Other than the rare tab freezing up and needing to be restarted, I've had absolutely no issues. Chrome just works.
- ergothus 12y ago
  Our workflow sounds similar, except that when my system reboots, Chrome is frozen for a minute as every tab tries to reload simultaneously, following by confusion as any youtube tabs all start playing. On Firefox I had no such issue as each tab would only reload on focus.
  - jackmaney 12y ago
    That's...very strange. I don't recall Chrome trying to open up every tab that I've had open before rebooting. [digs into settings] Ah, that's it: on Settings > On Startup, I've selected "Open The New Tab Page" which (I think) is the default. Yeah, trying to open up a couple dozen tabs at once, several of which are videos, could be problematic.
  - makomk 12y ago
    Chrome on my girlfriend's PC did that in the middle of the night once or twice. I guess Windows or Chrome decided to update or something, not sure which, but all the YouTube videos in all the tabs started playing in the earlier hours of the morning.
higherpurpose 12y ago
Actually my main problem with Firefox is that if it "chokes" on one tab, I can't use the whole browser until that fixes itself. In Chrome I generally have 20+ tabs open and I don't have any issues. Firefox needs to get itself a multi-process system. I really don't mind a little extra RAM being used as long as tabs are separated and sandboxed. I'm also looking forward to a complete rewrite in Rust. That should make Firefox much faster than anything else out there. Hopefully sooner rather than later.
- therealmarv 12y ago
  lol. You really think a new programming language will increase speed?! Rust is not faster as C++ for sure.
  - serge2k 12y ago
    Actually re-writing things might make it faster.
    - therealmarv 12y ago
      yes we have enough proof of that concept... I do not believe you. It's a urban myth that rewriting always make things faster. Especially when looking at a C(++) code basis. Rust will maybe make the code safer but I doubt it will make it faster.
      - FreeFull 12y ago
        Improving the design is part of a rewrite, which would make it faster, even if the rewrite was in C++. Sufficiently large, old projects (and Firefox certainly qualifies) tend to accumulate a lot of gunk and design choices that used to make sense, but don't any more. Rust also allows one to safely use patterns that one couldn't use in C++ without screwing things up, thanks to the borrow checker. And quite a lot of Firefox is written in Javascript, which definitely would be faster when rewritten in a compiled language.
smsm42 12y ago
This extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspender/klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspende... helped me a lot keeping multiple tabs under control. I tend to leave tabs open for days, sometimes weeks, and come to them later. I don't want to waste memory all that time to just keep a tab open. So this extension helps with that.
- vfclists 12y ago
  The one at Chrome store is rather dated. The latest one is available at https://github.com/deanoemcke/thegreatsuspender https://github.com/deanoemcke/thegreatsuspender, and must be installed in developer mode. t
- jannes 12y ago
  I just released an extension that "suspends" tabs to the file system instead: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabattack/ginflokhdahakklidfjlogllkkhokidj https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabattack/ginflokh... It's able to save tabs and windows to the file system as Markdown and restore them from these files, too. I would love to get feedback on it.
finishingmove 12y ago
The main reason I stuck with Opera 12 is how well it handled dozens of tabs (I remember counting 96 in a long-lasting session). Yes, the memory usage was high, but it never felt slow. After switching to the new Opera, I was pretty disappointed, and even switched to Chrome (because the new Opera is a poor man's Chrome in a way), but after a while I came back to Opera. With that said, Vivaldi looks very promising, but it's still too buggy! I'm holding my fingers crossed.
criley2 12y ago
I wish the Firefox address bar wasn't something stuck in 2005. It chokes on all 1 word phrases, spending many seconds attempting to find webpages for that word instead of searching. Chrome instantly searches. Also, having a separate address bar and search was novel in 1999, when search was novel. However, let's get real: a single address bar capable of nearly instantly deciding between search and location isn't a pipedream, it's the competitors reality and has been for many many years. I have a feeling I'll migrate from Chrome sooner or later because I dislike Google's approach to standards and new features (no respect for standards, passionate desire to pump chrome full of backgrounds jobs and proprietary vendor features). But I just cannot wrap myself around the fact that the Firefox address bar hasn't been meaningfully changed in what feels like the entire history of the modern web.
- eitland 12y ago
  Firefox awesomebar has worked nicely for me for years across linux, mac and windows installations. I'd say you either have a seriously old oc, have something weird in your profile or you are doing something seriously wrong. Furthermore, awesomebar lets me automatically do full text searches across titles and urls, something chrome still cannot really do (with firefox you can search a couple of fragments of the url or title and off it goes and finds it, quick.) Furthermore, two separate boxes are the best of both worlds, both awesomebar and quick (ctrl+k)access to your preferred search engine.
- nnethercote 12y ago
  > It chokes on all 1 word phrases, spending many seconds attempting to find webpages for that word instead of searching. Chrome instantly searches. If I've understood what you're saying, I believe this was fixed in Firefox 33: https://msujaws.wordpress.com/2014/08/01/faster-and-snappier-searches-now-in-firefox-aurora/ https://msujaws.wordpress.com/2014/08/01/faster-and-snappier... As for the general complaint about Firefox's address bar: I find it to be vastly superior to Chrome's at finding sites I've visited before. I can type in fragments of URLs and/or page titles (even partial words) and get matches immediately in a way that Chrome (and Safari) can't compete with. For years I wondered why the other browsers were so much worse at this. Then somebody pointed out to me that, for the case of Chrome, Google would much prefer you find a page via Google search than via your browser history...
detaro 12y ago
I regularly use Chrome on windows with ~100 tabs, and it ... just works? It is a bit annoying that it loads everything immediately on start-up, on the other hand once it's done everything is available without further delays. Firefox seemed to get slow/stuck easier, but I haven't tested it extensively for a while.

emodendroket 12y ago

I imagine this has something to do with the sandboxing in Chrome that prevents one tab from causing the entire browser to crash, no?

FilterJoe 12y ago
Yes. Sandboxing makes sense when you think of browser as operating system. Isolate each process to increase security and crash-resistance. Makes sense, but it takes more memory.
- emodendroket 12y ago
  Frankly I have more memory than I need for most tasks so I don't mind this trade-off.
  - frozenport 12y ago
    On the other hand memory memory takes more time to read, potentially leading to latency.
vxNsr 12y ago
I don't know, I've had one tab cause other tabs to crash all the time, which is something that confused me considering the supposed isolation that should be happening. edit: not sure why I've been dv, but I'd like to add that one thing I've noticed is that this will usually happen when I open links in a new tab, somehow all those tabs become linked and if one becomes unresponsive they all do. For those who claim I should stop opening links in new tabs, I say: welcome to 2004, this is the whole purpose of tabbed browsing. If you;d like to try to reproduce this: go to facebook and open the first ten links in your newsfeed in new tabs (either by middle clicking, ctrl+click, or context menu) I don't normally do more than one or two at a time but ten will force the issue. then go to another tab that isn't connect to those other 11 it'll work fine while those 11 will look like they're on pause. Note: I haven't tested this in other browsers.

jackmaney 12y ago

I switched from Firefox to Chrome right around Firefox 3.6. I have an average of around 20 tabs open at any given moment, and I tend to go around a week or two between reboots. Other than the occasional tab crashing and quickly reloading (and by "occasional", I mean maybe once every couple of months or so), I've never had an issue with Chrome. It just works.

snowwrestler 12y ago
I also have better luck with tabs in Chrome. Overall CPU usage is lower, and the in-browser task inspector makes it trivial to ID bad tabs and close them. Firefox is a lot better than it used to be, but it can still be brought to its knees across the board by a bad script, at least in my experience, and it's hard to find the one bad tab to kill.
- psykovsky 12y ago
  Github will bring firefox to it's knees with many tabs open. But I suspect it's because of flash content.
zobzu 12y ago
Firefox 3.6 was pretty slow compared to Firefox today. I would switch again to Chrome if we were in Firefox 3.6 times. Turns out, they fixed Firefox up pretty good over the years

grandalf 12y ago

This is probably b/c most people at Google use computers with 32GB of ram.

yellowapple 12y ago
This might sound silly to some, but I wouldn't be surprised if Google limited its usability tests to high-end machines with RAM in the double-digits. I reckon most programming teams have this issue, since even if they're dogfooding, they're doing so on high-end hardware, meaning that low-end hardware is untested and often unusable. Google isn't the only culprit; many websites nowadays will start to lean heavier toward excessive features - making them borderline-unusable on slower computers - because they were developed and tested on fast computers exclusively.
- TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
  I have 16GB and regularly have >100 tabs open in Chrome. It works, kind of, as long as I don't try to run anything else at the same time. The article persuaded me that Firefox may be worth a try again. As for testing - you'd think testing on a range of hardware would be standard. Testing exclusively on top spec machines is just unprofessional.
  - _lce0 12y ago
    I've using firefox on a 4Gb linux machine for about two years so far.. and it's working just fine, each release it keeps better and better
    - Zancarius 12y ago
      Edit: I want to apologize to eridal. I misread his/her statement and though the browser in question was Chrome, not Firefox. So, public apolgy: I'm very sorry, eridal. I thought you wrote something you did not. My comment was wrong as a result. I have corrected my mistake, and wish to apologize to you personally for misreading what you wrote. Original message with the offending part removed, mistakenly assuming eridal was using Chrome (I'm not sure why I read it that way): --- I stopped using Chromium in part because once I passed the 100-150 tab threshold, memory usage skyrockets to 4-6GiB. It's OK with 16GiB RAM, but usability diminishes pretty badly (the stock UI is NOT conducive to more than 80-100 tabs), and if you're stupid enough to visit a site with Flash, the probability of it leaking and eating up another 2+GiB begin to approach 1. I like Chrome for its speed--if you have 20 tabs or fewer open. But I can certainly correlate my own experiences with that of the GP comment.

jcoffland 12y ago

I regularly have several hundred tabs open in Firefox with no problems. Some people may think this is crazy or messy but I find it very useful for organizing the various projects I'm working on for different clients and my own personal projects. Tab groups and delayed loading make it all very smooth. Such usage is just not possible with Chrome. I tried to switch to Chrome but couldn't find the features I needed and did not wish to change my workflow. Back when Chrome came out Firefox was buggy. Since then it has become much more stable. Chrome is the one that's buggy now. One process per tab means that a bug in one tab does not take down the whole browser but it is much better to just fix the bugs and not crash at all.

yellowapple 12y ago
I do the same thing; it's incredibly easy to do with the Tree View Tabs extension. For example, while browsing HN, I'll frequently just middle-click a bunch of article links and (occasionally) their comments, then read them once I have a sizable queue. Same goes for trying to look up documentation to fix some bug in my code; I'll start with a DuckDuckGo search and, suddenly, I have at least a dozen (sometimes multiple dozens) tabs open with Stack Overflow questions and blog posts and official online docs and such with clues pointing me in the right direction.
- tonetheman 12y ago
  What is the name of that extension? I searched and get over a thousand results. Thanks!
  - andrewflnr 12y ago
    "Tree Style Tab". http://piro.sakura.ne.jp/xul/_treestyletab.html.en http://piro.sakura.ne.jp/xul/_treestyletab.html.en At least that's the one I use.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - yellowapple 12y ago

baby 12y ago

> It also has more and better extensions for helping with multiple tabs. Exactly. Tree Style Tab being the biggest reason I've never switched to Chrome.

TomDavey 12y ago
+1 for Tree Style Tab. I like to keep dozens of tabs open, and to drag and drop 'em into hierarchical groups. I also like to additionally organize the tab trees into multiple windows; the windows can be distinctively named with the FireTitle extension to identify them quickly. I admit that I never learned Panorama or Tab Groups. Tree Style Tab does just about everything I need.
- yellowapple 12y ago
  I'm not sure what Panorama or Tab Groups are, though I suppose I could infer the purpose/function of Tab Groups based on the name. > I like to keep dozens of tabs open Only dozens? Son, I just closed a Firefox session (in order to switch over to Nightly) with 233 tabs (plus another window with 10 or so). Didn't even push the 6GB mark. When it comes to browsing, Chrome is like a modern soldier with all his gadgets and gizmos to keep him nice and sandboxed and safe from his adversaries ("adversaries" being poorly-designed "responsive" "web-scale" "mobile-first" "semantic" "Wangular.js" "jQWOP" "SASSy" "single-page" "web applications"); a good marksman, but easily overwhelmed should he find himself at close range and significantly outnumbered. Firefox, in the meantime, is better likened to what would result if SkyNet had based its Terminators on Viking berserkers: almost naked, wielding nothing more than battle-axes (axen?) in each hand, charging at hundreds of foes in a magic-mushroom-fueled frenzy and winning. Yet, even if he should fail, 'twould matter not, for he only dreams of dying in such a great battle (as he does every week or so when I inevitably need to restart the Firefox process) and ascending to Robot Valhalla; and someday, Servo Firefoxson will grow from boy to man, and upon doing so, himself join the epic battles to avenge his father.
- dzhiurgis 12y ago
  Tree Style Tabs looks like it has a potential to allow querying HTML via SQL. I have been thinking about this for a while. I do not have a concrete idea for an application, but it would be cool to retrieve titles of all open sites in certain group/tree. Almost like some sort of scraper.

bitslayer 12y ago

The whole point of having separate processes for each tab is that it isolates them. If one crashes, the others remain up. It supports multiple processors, too.

silverbax88 12y ago
I would ask you to open up your task manager and try picking the largest-in-memory Chrome task and kill it, then see if you still think they are completely isolated. I agree with your point, but give it a shot.
- muze 12y ago
  I don't think that's really fair, the largest Chrome task in memory isn't a tab or extension. Yes I suppose it isn't perfectly isolated and if something happens to the main program task it will obviously cause problems but if a single page or extension crashes everything else lives on.
  - yellowapple 12y ago
    It's a perfectly fair point. The fact that the largest Chrome task by far is not a tab or extension at all, but is the core of Chrome itself, indicates that maybe - just maybe - Chrome isn't doing as good a job of keeping things isolated as it should. That process shouldn't be doing a whole lot beyond driving the UI and managing the lifecycles of its children.
    - frankzinger 12y ago
      The point is to isolate any code which renders HTML, plugins, etc., i.e., anything which processes untrusted external input, something which the main process does not do.
- rjbwork 12y ago
  That is chrome itself...of course closing the parent process of a bunch of processes that are tied to it and that it monitors is going to close them all.

Slippery_John 12y ago

Tabs were one of the major reasons I switched over to Chrome. At the time, firefox resized the tabs as soon as space became available, making closing a bunch of tabs a pain. They don't do that anymore, but now they have the tab scrolling feature which adds a gui element if there are too many tabs. Thing is, once you close enough tabs, those elements go away immediately, making closing a bunch of tabs a pain. Biggest reason I switched, which is still the true (though less so), is that Chrome takes up less screen real estate.

soperj 12y ago
Ctrl-w kills a tab. Makes that kind of thing completely painless.
- kevinbowman 12y ago
  As does middle-click, which is super-handy.
- ntsh 12y ago
  Sometimes Ctrl+w can lead to horrible pain if you accidentally hit Q which is just next to w.
  - dergachev 12y ago
    Chrome has a menu item toggle called "Warn before quitting" that I just enabled, and it has already saved me a bunch of times!!!! In OSX it's under the Chrome menu item (before File), don't know where they stuck it in Windows.
    - Cthulhu_ 12y ago
      I don't think Windows has it, also because the keyboard command to exit an application is alt+f4, which isn't easy to hit on accident.
    - wutbrodo 12y ago
      I can't seem to find this in my settings : (. This bit me every once in a while, and as I keep hundreds of tabs open, it's a huge pain in the ass to restore Chrome. I ended up remapping the ctrl+q shortcut to do nothing.

jackmaney 12y ago

I use Chrome as my only browser. On my desktop, I run an average of 20 tabs open at any given time, across two windows. I also run Chrome on my Android phone (Samsung Galaxy Note 3) and keep 4--8 tabs open at any given time. I reboot my desktop once every 1--2 weeks, and my phone maybe once per month. Other than the rare tab freezing up and needing to be restarted, I've had absolutely no issues. Chrome just works.

ergothus 12y ago
Our workflow sounds similar, except that when my system reboots, Chrome is frozen for a minute as every tab tries to reload simultaneously, following by confusion as any youtube tabs all start playing. On Firefox I had no such issue as each tab would only reload on focus.
- jackmaney 12y ago
  That's...very strange. I don't recall Chrome trying to open up every tab that I've had open before rebooting. [digs into settings] Ah, that's it: on Settings > On Startup, I've selected "Open The New Tab Page" which (I think) is the default. Yeah, trying to open up a couple dozen tabs at once, several of which are videos, could be problematic.
- makomk 12y ago
  Chrome on my girlfriend's PC did that in the middle of the night once or twice. I guess Windows or Chrome decided to update or something, not sure which, but all the YouTube videos in all the tabs started playing in the earlier hours of the morning.

higherpurpose 12y ago

Actually my main problem with Firefox is that if it "chokes" on one tab, I can't use the whole browser until that fixes itself. In Chrome I generally have 20+ tabs open and I don't have any issues. Firefox needs to get itself a multi-process system. I really don't mind a little extra RAM being used as long as tabs are separated and sandboxed. I'm also looking forward to a complete rewrite in Rust. That should make Firefox much faster than anything else out there. Hopefully sooner rather than later.

therealmarv 12y ago
lol. You really think a new programming language will increase speed?! Rust is not faster as C++ for sure.
- serge2k 12y ago
  Actually re-writing things might make it faster.
  - therealmarv 12y ago
    yes we have enough proof of that concept... I do not believe you. It's a urban myth that rewriting always make things faster. Especially when looking at a C(++) code basis. Rust will maybe make the code safer but I doubt it will make it faster.
    - FreeFull 12y ago
      Improving the design is part of a rewrite, which would make it faster, even if the rewrite was in C++. Sufficiently large, old projects (and Firefox certainly qualifies) tend to accumulate a lot of gunk and design choices that used to make sense, but don't any more. Rust also allows one to safely use patterns that one couldn't use in C++ without screwing things up, thanks to the borrow checker. And quite a lot of Firefox is written in Javascript, which definitely would be faster when rewritten in a compiled language.

smsm42 12y ago

This extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspender/klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspende... helped me a lot keeping multiple tabs under control. I tend to leave tabs open for days, sometimes weeks, and come to them later. I don't want to waste memory all that time to just keep a tab open. So this extension helps with that.

vfclists 12y ago
The one at Chrome store is rather dated. The latest one is available at https://github.com/deanoemcke/thegreatsuspender https://github.com/deanoemcke/thegreatsuspender, and must be installed in developer mode. t
jannes 12y ago
I just released an extension that "suspends" tabs to the file system instead: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabattack/ginflokhdahakklidfjlogllkkhokidj https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabattack/ginflokh... It's able to save tabs and windows to the file system as Markdown and restore them from these files, too. I would love to get feedback on it.

finishingmove 12y ago

The main reason I stuck with Opera 12 is how well it handled dozens of tabs (I remember counting 96 in a long-lasting session). Yes, the memory usage was high, but it never felt slow. After switching to the new Opera, I was pretty disappointed, and even switched to Chrome (because the new Opera is a poor man's Chrome in a way), but after a while I came back to Opera. With that said, Vivaldi looks very promising, but it's still too buggy! I'm holding my fingers crossed.

criley2 12y ago

I wish the Firefox address bar wasn't something stuck in 2005. It chokes on all 1 word phrases, spending many seconds attempting to find webpages for that word instead of searching. Chrome instantly searches. Also, having a separate address bar and search was novel in 1999, when search was novel. However, let's get real: a single address bar capable of nearly instantly deciding between search and location isn't a pipedream, it's the competitors reality and has been for many many years. I have a feeling I'll migrate from Chrome sooner or later because I dislike Google's approach to standards and new features (no respect for standards, passionate desire to pump chrome full of backgrounds jobs and proprietary vendor features). But I just cannot wrap myself around the fact that the Firefox address bar hasn't been meaningfully changed in what feels like the entire history of the modern web.

eitland 12y ago
Firefox awesomebar has worked nicely for me for years across linux, mac and windows installations. I'd say you either have a seriously old oc, have something weird in your profile or you are doing something seriously wrong. Furthermore, awesomebar lets me automatically do full text searches across titles and urls, something chrome still cannot really do (with firefox you can search a couple of fragments of the url or title and off it goes and finds it, quick.) Furthermore, two separate boxes are the best of both worlds, both awesomebar and quick (ctrl+k)access to your preferred search engine.
nnethercote 12y ago
> It chokes on all 1 word phrases, spending many seconds attempting to find webpages for that word instead of searching. Chrome instantly searches. If I've understood what you're saying, I believe this was fixed in Firefox 33: https://msujaws.wordpress.com/2014/08/01/faster-and-snappier-searches-now-in-firefox-aurora/ https://msujaws.wordpress.com/2014/08/01/faster-and-snappier... As for the general complaint about Firefox's address bar: I find it to be vastly superior to Chrome's at finding sites I've visited before. I can type in fragments of URLs and/or page titles (even partial words) and get matches immediately in a way that Chrome (and Safari) can't compete with. For years I wondered why the other browsers were so much worse at this. Then somebody pointed out to me that, for the case of Chrome, Google would much prefer you find a page via Google search than via your browser history...

detaro 12y ago

I regularly use Chrome on windows with ~100 tabs, and it ... just works? It is a bit annoying that it loads everything immediately on start-up, on the other hand once it's done everything is available without further delays. Firefox seemed to get slow/stuck easier, but I haven't tested it extensively for a while.