8 ms·

From the experience I've had with Chrome, I would say that process per tab is overhead. Sure, there are some benefits from having a few processes that are manag

by pllbnk 11y ago

From the experience I've had with Chrome, I would say that process per tab is overhead. Sure, there are some benefits from having a few processes that are managing different parts of the system, but not hundreds of processes just for browsing. The way I use Firefox is that having 50 or more tabs open is normal for me, sometimes there are even hundreds of them. Currently Firefox works great and although there are some unresponsiveness during some workflows, they are not so annoying. I am really worried about this change because I have used Firefox since its version 1.5 and am very familiar with all its problems and successes through the years.

sebcat 11y ago
> The way I use Firefox is that having 50 or more tabs open is normal for me I've never understood this. Isn't that what bookmarks are for?
- bluemetal 11y ago
  Often you need to preserve some state that is lost when using bookmarks (e.g. scroll position, a confirmation message that will be lost on refresh, a paused game/video etc.)
- rcthompson 11y ago
  Bookmarks, tabs, pinned tabs, etc. all sit at different places on the same continuous spectrum of UIs for saving web pages for later. Once you implement unloading of background tabs (which you can in FF via add-ons), they can start to look a lot like bookmarks.
  - gpvos 11y ago
    You don't need to use an add-on (anymore?) for keeping them unloaded, although you do need one to get a more manageable user interface. When you have more than about 1000 tabs, startup end closedown get rather slow though.
    - PetitPrince 11y ago
      > although you do need one to get a more manageable user interface I know this get mentioned every time there's a discussion on Firefox UI and extension, but Tree Style Tabs [ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/?src=ss https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta... ] is one excellent example of such extension.
      - gpvos 11y ago
        I'm trying the builtin Tab Groups feature now.
    - haddr 11y ago
      For Chrome, there is this great extension called "Tabs Outliner". Gets work done really great! Pity that after so much time there is no FF equivalent...
- pllbnk 11y ago
  With bookmarks you have to put additional time for organization and saving them. When I am researching something, I prefer just opening a bunch of tabs and they may stay open for quite a long time. When I am done, I close all of them. The main sites that I use daily, are usually bookmarked, yes.
- hil 11y ago
  It's called tab hoarding and it's a mental disorder, I have it too.
  - kasabali 11y ago
    I'm also a very heavy tab user but I refuse to call it a mental disorder. It is simply an aspect of a workflow among another dime dozen. Web page hoarding may be a disorder though, but in this case it'll be disorder regardless of you're piling them on tabs, bookmarks or Pocket.
- imron 11y ago
  It's like a super convenient temporary bookmark, without any of the hassle of bookmark management. I currently have 80 tabs open, and process-per-tab is not something I'm looking forward to.
- jldugger 11y ago
  I have 9 workspaces, two screens each, in a 3x3 grid. Most are browser - terminal pairs. 4 tabs per workspace is fairly common. They're grouped with working checkouts by task. I'm not quite at 50, but getting there. For example: 1. Support Ticket workspace -- one for RT, more tabs for related research 2. internal wiki workspace -- one for the wiki, another for the wiki's github repo, another for a local build of the wiki 3. email / meetings -- one window for calendar+tasks, one for email, with and 1-2 extra tabs for documents or links sent my way 4. Site Reliability -- one for nagios alerts, one for site testing, one for munin, and one for github PRs 5. management -- weekly management meeting agenda google doc, a key report or two, and maybe a slides for a presentation I've been asked to give or review Edit: IMO, I'm perfectly happy to give up Memory if it means one tab crashing doesn't kill the entire process. Even at 100MB per tab, 5GB is like under 50 bucks.
  - dageshi 11y ago
    I run something similar with 4 workspaces. I solved the "browser crashes taking down everything" problem by setting up 4 different profiles in firefox. Create a batch script to fire up firefox in the right profile for the right workspace. It's worked well for me, when flash inevitably crashes it doesn't take the other workspaces with it, but it's perhaps not the most elegant of solutions.
- scottjad 11y ago
  I currently have 2014 tabs in my session (almost all unloaded, using around 2GB of ram that I wouldn't use otherwise). I had 1600 tabs a few days ago. They are links I clicked on in other apps or browsed to over the past few months. When I get a chance to plow through a few dozen/hundred of these tabs I can read/view them and close them very quickly. Notice all the UI stuff I don't have to do: I never had to perform the the actions of saving a bookmark, opening a list of bookmarks, opening a specific bookmark, or deleting a bookmark. I clicked a link once upon a time, and I will close the tab some time in the future. When I switch to and close ten tabs, all I have to do from a UI perspective is type q ten times.
  - xzlzx 11y ago
    Why don't you use something like Pocket? It seems like you are the ideal use case for their software. I use it religiously.
    - scottjad 11y ago
      I do use pocket. Some of these links will end up in pocket, when I get around to looking at them closer if I decide they are long and I want to read them on my mobile devices.
  - octatoan 11y ago
    Wh-whoa . . . I think you just set some sort of a record over there.
  - rexf 11y ago
    In terms of UI stuff, how do you find a tab among a thousand? When the tab page title shrinks and all I see is favicon, I feel lost.
    - xixixao 11y ago
      You can of course search open tabs from the address bar. But at least my workflow is to browse through the old tabs and read / close one by one. Also in Firefox the tabs never shrink to just favicon, the tab heads become a scrollable list. Much better than Chrome imo.
- frik 11y ago
  It depends on what you do. Doing research requires a lot of resources (tabs) especially if you do it in an non-linear way. Consuming a content requires only on tab. I open and use dozens of tabs (up to 100, then I bookmark all with one click and close all). But all tabs are active in memory in IE11 or Chrome so I can switch between them (sure I trade GBs of RAM for time, but that's okay). Firefox unloads tabs, so it reloads the page - that's better if you re-open Firefox as it only loads one tab instead of loading all tabs like in Chrome/IE but worse if you have it open and actually work in the browser. So for me it's a trade off, and I find it good I have a choice for different tasks I can choose the best way.
- pjc50 11y ago
  Ever since the dialup era, when all we had was "open in new window", I would browse by reading down a page and opening interesting-looking links in new windows and letting them load while carrying on with the original page. Tabs are a good LIFO stack of things which are currently "live", or at least not dealt with yet. It's easier to navigate than history or bookmarks. You could argue that at some point tabs should "spill" into bookmarks, but that requires making a decision.
frik 11y ago
"There are multiple competing factors when it comes to choosing the right number of processes. - For security, more processes is better; one per tab is probably ideal. - For crash protection, ditto. - For responsiveness, one process per CPU core is probably best. - For memory usage, one process is probably best." as a dev wrote in the mailing list: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.platform/NHIjpGvOelE https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.platform... For various technical reasons Firefox e10 will support a few sub-processes in near future, but nothing is set in stone. Rust based Servo supports (afaik) dozens of processes, as we know it from Chrome and IE.
- jc123 11y ago
  With crashes, though rare in Chrome, when one does happen it usually kills all my Chrome windows instead of a single tab as is touted :/
  - frik 11y ago
    It depends which process crashes. Usually and rare a sub-process crash which means a few tabs need a page reload. If your main process crash (which should be very very rare) then I would suspect you have a faulty memory module in your device or you have little free memory or your operating system has not optimal scheduler (e.g. server OS on a desktop).
    - hyperpape 11y ago
      I've seen it irregularly on multiple machines, Windows 7, Windows 8 and now Mac OS X. It's actually really soured me on the whole idea of a multi-process architecture. I understand the theoretical benefits, but I don't see messages that a particular tab crashed that much more often than that the entire browser crashed.
    - wooger 11y ago
      "Little free memory" means that Chrome has eaten all my ram though. Chrome is really lagging behind Firefox in this, as it has no backgrounding / unloading process that I'm aware of to maintain a reasonable memory footprint. It also attempts to render every tab at once when restoring after a crash - another obvious problem.
runarberg 11y ago
All changes will disrupt someones workflow[1]. I suppose browsers are no exception. 1: https://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1172/
moron4hire 11y ago
Is Firefox really better than Chrome here, or is it worse because it is enabling bad user behavior?
- kasabali 11y ago
  Bad according to who?

by pllbnk 11y ago

sebcat 11y ago

> The way I use Firefox is that having 50 or more tabs open is normal for me I've never understood this. Isn't that what bookmarks are for?

bluemetal 11y ago
Often you need to preserve some state that is lost when using bookmarks (e.g. scroll position, a confirmation message that will be lost on refresh, a paused game/video etc.)
rcthompson 11y ago
Bookmarks, tabs, pinned tabs, etc. all sit at different places on the same continuous spectrum of UIs for saving web pages for later. Once you implement unloading of background tabs (which you can in FF via add-ons), they can start to look a lot like bookmarks.
- gpvos 11y ago
  You don't need to use an add-on (anymore?) for keeping them unloaded, although you do need one to get a more manageable user interface. When you have more than about 1000 tabs, startup end closedown get rather slow though.
  - PetitPrince 11y ago
    > although you do need one to get a more manageable user interface I know this get mentioned every time there's a discussion on Firefox UI and extension, but Tree Style Tabs [ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/?src=ss https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta... ] is one excellent example of such extension.
    - gpvos 11y ago
      I'm trying the builtin Tab Groups feature now.
  - haddr 11y ago
    For Chrome, there is this great extension called "Tabs Outliner". Gets work done really great! Pity that after so much time there is no FF equivalent...
pllbnk 11y ago
With bookmarks you have to put additional time for organization and saving them. When I am researching something, I prefer just opening a bunch of tabs and they may stay open for quite a long time. When I am done, I close all of them. The main sites that I use daily, are usually bookmarked, yes.
hil 11y ago
It's called tab hoarding and it's a mental disorder, I have it too.
- kasabali 11y ago
  I'm also a very heavy tab user but I refuse to call it a mental disorder. It is simply an aspect of a workflow among another dime dozen. Web page hoarding may be a disorder though, but in this case it'll be disorder regardless of you're piling them on tabs, bookmarks or Pocket.
imron 11y ago
It's like a super convenient temporary bookmark, without any of the hassle of bookmark management. I currently have 80 tabs open, and process-per-tab is not something I'm looking forward to.
jldugger 11y ago
I have 9 workspaces, two screens each, in a 3x3 grid. Most are browser - terminal pairs. 4 tabs per workspace is fairly common. They're grouped with working checkouts by task. I'm not quite at 50, but getting there. For example: 1. Support Ticket workspace -- one for RT, more tabs for related research 2. internal wiki workspace -- one for the wiki, another for the wiki's github repo, another for a local build of the wiki 3. email / meetings -- one window for calendar+tasks, one for email, with and 1-2 extra tabs for documents or links sent my way 4. Site Reliability -- one for nagios alerts, one for site testing, one for munin, and one for github PRs 5. management -- weekly management meeting agenda google doc, a key report or two, and maybe a slides for a presentation I've been asked to give or review Edit: IMO, I'm perfectly happy to give up Memory if it means one tab crashing doesn't kill the entire process. Even at 100MB per tab, 5GB is like under 50 bucks.
- dageshi 11y ago
  I run something similar with 4 workspaces. I solved the "browser crashes taking down everything" problem by setting up 4 different profiles in firefox. Create a batch script to fire up firefox in the right profile for the right workspace. It's worked well for me, when flash inevitably crashes it doesn't take the other workspaces with it, but it's perhaps not the most elegant of solutions.
scottjad 11y ago
I currently have 2014 tabs in my session (almost all unloaded, using around 2GB of ram that I wouldn't use otherwise). I had 1600 tabs a few days ago. They are links I clicked on in other apps or browsed to over the past few months. When I get a chance to plow through a few dozen/hundred of these tabs I can read/view them and close them very quickly. Notice all the UI stuff I don't have to do: I never had to perform the the actions of saving a bookmark, opening a list of bookmarks, opening a specific bookmark, or deleting a bookmark. I clicked a link once upon a time, and I will close the tab some time in the future. When I switch to and close ten tabs, all I have to do from a UI perspective is type q ten times.
- xzlzx 11y ago
  Why don't you use something like Pocket? It seems like you are the ideal use case for their software. I use it religiously.
  - scottjad 11y ago
    I do use pocket. Some of these links will end up in pocket, when I get around to looking at them closer if I decide they are long and I want to read them on my mobile devices.
- octatoan 11y ago
  Wh-whoa . . . I think you just set some sort of a record over there.
- rexf 11y ago
  In terms of UI stuff, how do you find a tab among a thousand? When the tab page title shrinks and all I see is favicon, I feel lost.
  - xixixao 11y ago
    You can of course search open tabs from the address bar. But at least my workflow is to browse through the old tabs and read / close one by one. Also in Firefox the tabs never shrink to just favicon, the tab heads become a scrollable list. Much better than Chrome imo.
frik 11y ago
It depends on what you do. Doing research requires a lot of resources (tabs) especially if you do it in an non-linear way. Consuming a content requires only on tab. I open and use dozens of tabs (up to 100, then I bookmark all with one click and close all). But all tabs are active in memory in IE11 or Chrome so I can switch between them (sure I trade GBs of RAM for time, but that's okay). Firefox unloads tabs, so it reloads the page - that's better if you re-open Firefox as it only loads one tab instead of loading all tabs like in Chrome/IE but worse if you have it open and actually work in the browser. So for me it's a trade off, and I find it good I have a choice for different tasks I can choose the best way.
pjc50 11y ago
Ever since the dialup era, when all we had was "open in new window", I would browse by reading down a page and opening interesting-looking links in new windows and letting them load while carrying on with the original page. Tabs are a good LIFO stack of things which are currently "live", or at least not dealt with yet. It's easier to navigate than history or bookmarks. You could argue that at some point tabs should "spill" into bookmarks, but that requires making a decision.

frik 11y ago

"There are multiple competing factors when it comes to choosing the right number of processes. - For security, more processes is better; one per tab is probably ideal. - For crash protection, ditto. - For responsiveness, one process per CPU core is probably best. - For memory usage, one process is probably best." as a dev wrote in the mailing list: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.platform/NHIjpGvOelE https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.platform... For various technical reasons Firefox e10 will support a few sub-processes in near future, but nothing is set in stone. Rust based Servo supports (afaik) dozens of processes, as we know it from Chrome and IE.

jc123 11y ago
With crashes, though rare in Chrome, when one does happen it usually kills all my Chrome windows instead of a single tab as is touted :/
- frik 11y ago
  It depends which process crashes. Usually and rare a sub-process crash which means a few tabs need a page reload. If your main process crash (which should be very very rare) then I would suspect you have a faulty memory module in your device or you have little free memory or your operating system has not optimal scheduler (e.g. server OS on a desktop).
  - hyperpape 11y ago
    I've seen it irregularly on multiple machines, Windows 7, Windows 8 and now Mac OS X. It's actually really soured me on the whole idea of a multi-process architecture. I understand the theoretical benefits, but I don't see messages that a particular tab crashed that much more often than that the entire browser crashed.
  - wooger 11y ago
    "Little free memory" means that Chrome has eaten all my ram though. Chrome is really lagging behind Firefox in this, as it has no backgrounding / unloading process that I'm aware of to maintain a reasonable memory footprint. It also attempts to render every tab at once when restoring after a crash - another obvious problem.

runarberg 11y ago

All changes will disrupt someones workflow[1]. I suppose browsers are no exception. 1: https://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1172/

moron4hire 11y ago

Is Firefox really better than Chrome here, or is it worse because it is enabling bad user behavior?

kasabali 11y ago
Bad according to who?