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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

#61

Post by clairity »

rc_kas wrote: post #3

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

that's just not true... i've used firefox consistently since v. 0.3 (phoenix) so that's at least one. plus a couple others in this thread make a few. i bet there are a few more out there too, so that makes a bunch. =)

anyways, i have ~350 tabs open on firefox 54, and so i can't wait until 55 lands to see this great improvement.

the chrome lead for mac told me that they too are working on better performance with 100's of tabs open and that should land sometime soon as well (even so, i'm a diehard firefox fan so it will be hard to make me switch).

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#62

Post by intherdfield »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #6
rc_kas wrote: post #3

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

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

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

Here's an in-development vertical tabs extension using their new extensions API.

  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-center-redux/
Apparently the tabs still show up at the top because the API to disable that isn't available yet. But you get vertical tabs and it should get better over time. I've been using this and it isn't 100% perfect, but getting better and better.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#63

Post by zippergz »

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…

Yes, this breadth-first description is a good way to characterize my reason for having lots of tabs (though I don't have nearly as many as some people here say they have).

One additional factor is that I think I was trained to do that by slowly-loading websites. If I open a site in a new background tab, it can go about loading as slowly as it wants, and it'll be ready by the time I get around to reading it (I guess this would be ruined by lazy loading tabs...).

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#64

Post by awalton »

fletchowns wrote: post #50
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's unfortunate because back in ~2010 I used to open over 1,000 tabs in Chrome at a time. It's very useful when doing research: each window represents a topic, and each topic can spawn 30+ tabs. Nowadays Chrome keels over at around 150, like you say. It also leaks memory like a sieve, so if your hard drive is anywhere close to full you'll end up with a lovely OS X popup saying all your running programs have been fro…

There has got to be a better solution to this problem than having 1,000 tabs open in a web browser. That sounds like an absolute nightmare.

I don't understand this perspective. It's similar to saying "Surely there's a better solution than having 1000 files on your file system. That sounds like a nightmare."

It's not like you're actively monitoring every tab at once, you just have the knowledge ready to go and at a finger's whim. You use extensions like Tab Hunter to jump directly to the tab you care about.

Yeah, you could do the same with using a bunch of profiles and bookmarks... but then you need to copy your login cookies and such and it just becomes a mess. I've tried many, many other solutions over the years and simply having a huge number of tabs is the one that continues to Just Work.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#65

Post by krylon »

rc_kas wrote: post #3

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

I've been using Firefox since the time it was still called Firebird, and I will continue to do so as long as it is in active development.

Plus, having read that article, I feel much more comfortable leaving many tabs open (although I don't think I've ever had more than 100 open simultaneously).

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#66

Post by nerdponx »

lobster_johnson wrote: post #60

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 f…

DuckDuckGo does a good job of this. So it's not exactly suggestions in your search bar, but it's damn close. Also you can configure FF to have selectable search tools including Wikipedia and Stackoverflow.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#67

Post by wging »

huntie wrote: post #39

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 t…

YouTube is a bit smarter these days: they defer playback until the tab first gets focus. So you have to pause at most as many videos as there are separate windows, not tabs.

I believe Chrome is not nearly as smart as it could be about deferring loading of tabs, though.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#68

Post by laythea »

huntie wrote: post #39

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 t…

Yes but I have found that if you "open in new tab" then it loads the page even though it is in the background. It should do as it does as startup but doesn't.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#69

Post by Chromozon »

mrkrabo wrote: post #20

I suppose I'm alone in getting all nervous if I have more than 10 tabs open.

I also use a small amount of tabs, usually under ten. When I want to go to something, I want to immediately be able to click it without having to spend time searching for it. Sometimes I watch over coworkers' shoulders as they are navigating their browsers, and they definitely spend a significant amount of time looking through tabs trying to find what they need. There is a terrible, visible lag time between asking them to navigate to a certain page and them actually being able to find and go to the correct tab. Maybe my coworkers are just inefficient at managing large amounts of tabs, but I have yet to see someone who is.

Having fewer tabs might also keep one more focused because there is only so much in front of you at a time. You don't have to process through a bunch of data that is unrelated to the current task at hand.

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