Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

metafluff.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 563 posts

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#31

Post by zzalpha »

KZeillmann wrote: post #23
elfchief wrote: post #13

Wow. I've been getting more and more frustrated with how poorly Chrome handles even a moderately large number of tabs (~150), and it sounds like my savior is going to be ... Firefox. Huh. Wouldn't have guessed it, but I'll totally take it. I have a nice extension for Chrome called Quick Tabs that gives me a searchable list of my open tabs and makes it easy to find things I have open... anyone know which of the severa…

Out of curiosity, and because the article doesn't delve into it, why do you have 150 tabs open? In the course of my regular browsing, I usually have 3-4, and never more than 10-15. It's not something I've ever considered to have that many tabs open

As far as I can tell it's all about depth-first vs breadth-first.

I find the same people that like to open lots of tabs also prefer tabs that open in the background.

Why?

Because the browse breadth first. They'll be reading something and in the midst of it, see something they want to dig into, and open a new tab while continuing on the page they're currently on. This repeats a few times, and then once done with that content they go the next level down. Then lather-rinse-repeat. This causes a queue of pages to form (and BTW, for you programming newbies out there, this is a great way to visualize how recursion-less breadth-first tree traversal works).

I tend to be much more depth-first. When I open a tab, it's because I want to start exploring what's in that page. So I always have my browser focus new tabs (and screw you, Chrome, for only making that possible through an extension...). Then I'll pop back out and continue. In that model, you can just throw tabs away as you're done with them.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#32

Post by mkl »

revelation wrote: post #16

Whut? It didn't get any faster, it's just more aggressively lazy loaded now. This is breaking the very use case of people who have 100+ tabs; they want stuff to be there when they click on it.

Not true. On most days I visit Tabs for me are like much more convenient bookmarks.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#33

Post by rndmize »

This is nice to hear. I use Firefox as my default browser with the tree-style tabs add-on, and just yesterday I replaced ABP with uBlock and Ghostery with Disconnect out of frustration with how slow things were going (~30-50 tabs open). The slow startup time hasn't been helping (come on, its not even loading the tabs until I click them, what's taking so long?)

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#37

Post by Chaebixi »

lucb1e wrote: post #29
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard to love when the broken extension ecosystem prevents the use of vertical tabs for these scenarios.

I've got vertical tabs from Test Pilot for months now and I'll never turn back. Not sure what you're talking about.

> Not sure what you're talking about.

They changed their add-on API and are in the process of deprecating the older one which allowed for radical UI changes. That's probably what he was talking about.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#38

Post by rosser »

zzalpha wrote: post #31
KZeillmann wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, and because the article doesn't delve into it, why do you have 150 tabs open? In the course of my regular browsing, I usually have 3-4, and never more than 10-15. It's not something I've ever considered to have that many tabs open

As far as I can tell it's all about depth-first vs breadth-first. I find the same people that like to open lots of tabs also prefer tabs that open in the background. Why? Because the browse breadth first. They'll be reading something and in the midst of it, see something they want to dig into, and open a new tab while continuing on the page they're currently on. This repeats a few times, and then once done with that…

This is broadly my process, too.

I'll do a search, and background-open all of the results that seem responsive as I skim them, to read in depth once I think I've found "enough". Most of them of course get closed quickly upon ... uh, tabbing to them, because they weren't as material as I'd thought from the summary.

Then, sometimes (read: often), I'll recurse.

This way, in my experience, I tend to find more (as in quantity) relevant info, from which I can sieve quality of info, than if I were to serialize my search, going depth-first.

YM, as always, MV.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#39

Post by huntie »

I'm really glad that people at Mozilla use ridiculous numbers of tabs too. Lazy-loading of tabs is the reason I switched to firefox. I'm not sure if it's still this way, but Chrome used to load every tab on startup. So even if you only had 100 tabs, you were looking at 5+ minute startup time. God-forbid that any of them were Youtube, or you'd have to go through and pause them all.

I've just updated to Firefox 55 to test this, and the improvement is ridiculous. I hope that Firefox focuses more on power users in the future.

I'm curious what the author uses to manage all of these tabs. I use Tab Groups, but I think they won't work in a few Firefox versions so I'm looking for alternatives.

Post reply on HN