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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

#141
post #20

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

I also get tab-induced anxiety. I have to close them and organize them when it gets ~10 or I can't keep browsing.

On the other hand, my desktop is an unorganized mess of random files...

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#142

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.

For me its a linear view of how I got somewhere when I'm doing exploratory research. Usually a tree of tabs (I use side tabs) will start with a google search, then go to a site, then another site, then another. When I find something interesting and think "how did I get here again?" and I can just glance at my open tabs.

This context is useful if I get sidetracked/distracted by a coworker, so I can retrace why I was looking at a certain page.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Do you have to enable it? I use Firefox Nightly, and have been observing this behavior for a long, long time. It's one of those things that's so minor and yet so important that I wonder how I went without it for so long.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#144
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 forg…

The first example, it seems like we need a better UI for bookmarks. Something that allows you to organize and quickly search them (url, title and even maybe page content).

For the second, we all do that, but again, the optimal thing there would be to have some extension or tool that keeps track of your "to read" list.

As for tabs stacking when you're looking for a solution, that's generally what my comment referred to. I know somewhere in those 20 tabs, there's one for the documentations to the function I'm trying to use, but it's honestly faster to search for it again than look at those 20 tabs for it.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#145

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…

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…

I hesitate to say that Chrome leaks memory because of what you're seeing. Webpages have exploded in size over the years (both with high dpi images, css, and javascript). I'm not sure I have quite as many tabs as you, but I generally work the same way (window per topic, tens of tabs per window).

Would a plugin like The Great Suspender fix your problem? I really liked that you could collapse a page of tabs into a collection of bookmarks and open a new page of those tabs just as easily.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#146
post #77

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'm not sure that there is. Bookmarks don't work as well because you can't preserve a session as easily. For example, I can just create a new tab group for a project that I want to work on, and then it will stay in the background until I have the resources to work on it. I don't know about other people, but I find it really useful to research a project and then leave it alone for a month or two before working on it.…

You can bookmark tab groups (at least in Firefox) that's what I do to save a session.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#147
I'm torn between thinking it's time to switch back to Firefox, and thinking I need to avoid Firefox at all costs, because the slowdown when Chrome gets over 100+ tabs is the only thing keeping my browser windows remotely navigable.

You know what I really want? A way to attach titles to browser windows. This window is "Games", this one is for "Books", this one is for my current "Work" task, this one is "Research" on the new doohickey I'm thinking of buying...

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#148
post #20

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

I feel the same way - it bothers me to have tabs open that I'm not actively working on (or, I feel like I need to actively remember the context of all my tabs). When I get to 12 or so I close any tab that I don't feel like I'll want to return to in the next hour.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#149
post #20

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

Getting nervous because your computer starts slowing down or swapping because of the number of tabs open, or because you can't read the tab titles or see the favicons anymore? Firefox doesn't have those problems. ;)

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#150

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…

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…

Worth noting that average page size has ballooned ~5× in that same time period.
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