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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

#81
post #74

Can anyone offer an explanation of why should not tabs be managed by the window manager? (My understanding is that this question is independent from how the particular application would choose to control the contents of a tab - whether directly, or through a separate thread, or by spawning a child process.)

Window managers failed us and that's why we created tabbed browsing.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#82
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

> It's similar to saying "Surely there's a better solution than having 1000 files on your file system. That sounds like a nightmare."

No, it's similar to saying "Surely there's a better solution than having 1000 radio/tv channels tuned on at once, waiting for you to decide which one is relevant"

Like why not open what you need when you need it rather than squirreling all those "maybes"?

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#83
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…

For Chrome, the Great Suspender plugin had fixed the resource usage for me, it's kind of like lazy loading + freezing of heavy background tabs, and it enables quick startup even with 100 tabs.

But it should be a core feature of the browser itself IMHO.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#84
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…

[deleted]

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#85
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…

Firefox lazy loads tabs on startup, but not otherwise. So if you open a YouTube in a new tab it will start playing. Chrome, on the other hand, will not start playing the video, which is nice.

I'm a Firefox user though so that's where my chrome knowledge starts and ends.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#86

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

I wonder if the 100+ tab people are also the ones who can handle dozens of cups of coffee a day. I guess I'm boring. Whether tabs or coffee, I do 1-2 at a time/per day.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#87

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…

See this recent (sub) thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14808645

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#88
post #43

There are a lot of people who use tabs as bookmarks. Seems like a good way to keep the RAM industry going strong. Someone once told me (seriously) "I need at least 128 GB of RAM otherwise I can't keep my tabs open." But does everything you were interested in over the last X weeks or months really need to be loaded up? No, and if you use it like that then it can't preload stuff. I think the main lesson is that bookmar…

I had the same feeling. Seems like they are using tabs as a history.

A better history may solve their problem.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#90

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.

I feel like preserving open tabs across a crash is not that hard from a technical point of view. The thing I'd be afraid of is more that something would decide (for me) that I don't want to preserve tabs.

Right. I guess as an engineer, I would be afraid to use something for data storage that is intended more as ephemeral state. But I suppose if you back it up you can always go back.
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