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The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

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Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#51

Post by mkl »

aboodman wrote: post #19

Why do you have a profile w/ 1600 tabs in it. If whatever it is is so important, aren't you afraid to lose it? I'd be terrified that one time Firefox just wouldn't shut down clean.

That's why you save the tabs periodically.

Session Buddy works well for Chrome (and it's really needed there). Firefox is much more reliable IME, and I haven't needed a backup in many years, but I still use SendTabURLs, as it makes finding and bulk closing tabs easier. There may be better options for Firefox, but I haven't needed one so haven't gone looking (used TabMixPlus years ago though).

Tabs are just much more convenient bookmarks.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#52

Post by kenhwang »

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.

It also loads a cached version of the page almost exactly as it were when the browser shut down. Unless you were AFK farming Cookie Clicker, it works just fine.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#53

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

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…

Firefox's “Awesome Bar” will suggest open tabs and let you switch to them like any other site.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#54

Post by zzalpha »

rosser wrote: post #38
zzalpha wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 quan…

I strongly suspect this depends on a) the person and how they process information, and b) the kind of research being performed.

Usually when I'm researching, it's typically because I'm searching for the solution to a problem. In that case, a large quantity of information isn't useful. I just need an answer, not a survey of all possible answers. So once I find it, I can abort the search. Researching breadth-first may cause me to build up a queue of tabs unnecessarily.

If, on the other hand, I was researching to synthesize large quantities of data from multiple sources, absolutely your workflow makes a lot of sense.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#55

Post by fletchowns »

SimonPStevens wrote: post #24
rc_kas wrote: post #3

I <3 you Firefox. I'm so sad that nobody uses you.

I do, almost exclusively. It's nowhere near as bad as some people around here make out. I like it.

It's been my main browser since 2004. So much more flexibility than Chrome.

I wish this ticket would see some movement though! https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=101611

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#56

Post by ngrilly »

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…

Kudos for the great explanation!

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#57

Post by Flammy »

kbrosnan wrote: post #21
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…

"% foo" will search your open tabs for foo. See https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/awesome-bar-search-fire... for other characters that will filter the search results for other data such as bookmarks, history, tags, etc.

Cool trick... But I wish it did a full text search as it appears to only search URLs and tab titles. (maybe there is a different symbol that does full text?)

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#58

Post by adrianmonk »

A quick tangent to plug my method for paring down open tabs when it gets out of control: I create a document!

Personally I use Google Docs, but you could use a wiki or MS Word or many other things. The point isn't the technology, it's that when you have a whole slew of tabs open, and you feel the urge to keep them open, it's a strong sign that your mind is trying to gather info about a topic.

Putting it into a document often feels great. It gives you an opportunity to type out a few quick notes on the topic (like what you thought was significant about various links) or other thoughts you had. And you might find you want to share the document with people you're working with. And I find I feel more organized, not just because I cleaned up something messy but because I took a moment to focus my energies on something my mind was begging me to pay attention to. Sometimes you even realize you need two different documents on different subjects, and it's a little enlightening to realize the two separate themes.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#59

Post by huntie »

aboodman wrote: post #19

Why do you have a profile w/ 1600 tabs in it. If whatever it is is so important, aren't you afraid to lose it? I'd be terrified that one time Firefox just wouldn't shut down clean.

You can backup all of your tabs by copying the .mozilla folder. If you were really concerned you could just setup a cron job to do this once a day.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#60

Post by lobster_johnson »

I've been considering switching to Firefox due to these performance improvements, but the one feature that's always missing is for the location bar to autocomplete terms from other sources such as Wikipedia. Is there some add-on I can install that can fix this?

Safari is brilliant here. If you enter something in Safari's location bar, it will suggest Wikipedia and other search suggestions right away [1]. I use this feature all the time. But FF, out of the box, will only show suggestions from one source. Here [2] is what FF suggests; all the hits are from Google, and it doesn't try to be clever about showing what I might mean to search for. Notice how it offers to search Wikipedia, with this tiny, obscure icon at the bottom of the suggestions, which I find to be a completely useless feature (I have keywords for that). The top hit tends to be what Google puts in a special box in its search results.

Here is another nice thing Safari does [3] which I make use of all the time. I've not visited walmart.com, so that "Top Hit" is just because it's a popular site. I can't make FF do anything like that.

[1] http://i.imgur.com/83FfnPn.png

[2] http://i.imgur.com/T4p1NZv.png

[3] http://i.imgur.com/MkRP2Le.png

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