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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

#131

Post by bzbarsky »

alexpw wrote: post #89
reiichiroh wrote: post #34

With Chrome, I use "The Great Suspender" extension.

This. Changed the way I use a browser. New window per topic. Only stop making tabs when the titles/icons can't be seen any more...

In Firefox, the "titles/icons can't be seen any more" state is never reached, because Firefox enforces a minimum width on tabs so that information is always visible. Combined with searching tab titles via "% stuff" in the URL bar, it's a much nicer experience than Chrome, imo. [Disclosure: I'm biased, obviously, since I'm using Firefox and hence more used to it.]

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#132

Post by mustacheemperor »

zdkl wrote: post #82
awalton wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

I'd compare it more to bringing a stack of books to your table at the library. Just because you could notate the name and position of each and fetch them as needed doesn't mean it's not helpful to have them all handy. I've never personally used that many tabs for research, but vetting sources often requires taking a look at a lot of different links for any given subtopic.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#133

Post by johansch »

Opera has supported this abnormal behavior for like two decades now. I remember being shocked by how many tabs the Opera core browsing/rendering engine developers used to have open on their desktops when I joined Opera back in 2004. I guess it was an odd pride thing? :)

To clarify: I am talking about a one-row tab scenario. With about 3-4 pixels per tab. And they were perfectly happy with that. Even seemed to feel it was a good user experience.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#134

Post by craigching »

personlurking wrote: post #86
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

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.

It's not like people are suddenly opening up 150 or 1000 tabs due to hyperactivity! :p. I know in my case I just keep my browser open and things tend to just keep going and eventually I have hundreds of tabs open over the course of ... a week? A month? I'm not exactly sure. Occasionally I just shut the browser down and start over.

FWIW, I use safari as my primary browser and it seems to handle many tabs fine, though I'm sure I don't get up to the thousands of tabs that people are reporting. I can't say I've thought about how many tabs it can actually handle, though, as I do eventually clean things up, bookmarking tabs that are actually worth something and discarding the rest.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#135

Post by pfranz »

glogla wrote: post #97
hammock wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is that a Chrome feature or Chrome-only Youtube feature?

I'm pretty sure it's a Chrome-specific lazy autoplaying of html5 video. I really like to alt-click Youtube links (so the page is loaded and queued), put my headphones on and switch over when I'm ready.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#136

Post by noselasd »

mccr8 wrote: post #92
JoshTriplett wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This, exactly. I'd love to open half a dozen tabs pointing at videos, without having to wait for each one to load and then quickly pause it. (Related: I'd also really like to middle-click video annotations to open them in a tab. No, I don't want to replace the current video with them.)

Some sites, such as YouTube, don't start playing a video until you switch to the tab.

By default they do start playing immediately in Firefox. Configurable with the media.block-autoplay-until-in-foreground setting.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#137

Post by dijit »

ehsankia wrote: post #114
canuckistani wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't his main profile ( well I hope not any way ), it's a profile used to test extreme startup performance issues.

You'd be surprised. And if not that many, I know many many people with 100+ tabs. I never really understood the workflow myself. Every time I have more than 20 tabs, I generally can get to the page I'm looking for faster by googling it than having to find it in my tabs. But I guess to each their own.

Sometimes after searching for some time I'll come to something quite arcane that I want to hold on to. (I know this is what bookmarks are for but the UI is so poor here)

Other times I'll find something and think; I'll read that later.

Or. Less often, I'll be recurring into different things looking for solutions to a problem I have. Eventually I'll find something relevant and close the tab that was last opened, I forget the others and they become orphaned in my like of tabs I'll likely never get back to, until my browser crashes hard and I lose everything.

After the mild panic a wave of relief washes over me, and I go about my business hoarding tabs once again.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#138

Post by Osmose »

evolve2k wrote: post #79

My biggest frustration with Firefox is that you can't 'Tab to Search' as you can in chrome. Every time I attempt to switch to FF the lack of this feature just kills my productivity and I end up switching back. So wish this was possible. Ref: https://www.chromium.org/tab-to-search

A similar (but not as magical) feature in Firefox is Smart keywords: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-search-from-address...

There's a bug on file to consider adding this, but it has no momentum behind it right now since it's a bit niche: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1373740

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#139

Post by FreeFull »

tokenizerrr wrote: post #107
wging wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not youtube doing that, but chrome. The html5 video element doesn't start playback until the tab first gets focus.

Firefox has the same thing, but you have to enable it in about:config

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#140

Post by pfranz »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #126
mccr8 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some sites, such as YouTube, don't start playing a video until you switch to the tab.

That hasn't been my experience with YouTube; middle-clicking to open a half-dozen videos in tabs starts all the videos playing at once.

Not sure if you're using Chrome or Firefox. I just tested FF 54 by alt-clicking a link. It loads and autoplays the non-active tab. Chrome v59, loads the page but doesn't autoplay until you switch to it. Chrome is my daily driver and I really prefer this behavior.

But recent performance improvements, especially the handling of many, many tabs has me looking at FF again.

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