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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

#151

Post by lousken »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #22
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…

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 have never opened 1000tabs in chrome but I can manage 100-200. I've noticed that a lot of this responsivness comes down to extensions. If you have only one bad extension it kill the performance of chrome. Another thing are ads ofc or sites with lots of (poorly written) javascript, but with ublock origin Chrome works fine for me.

Also by 200 the GUI of chrome starts to annoy me so much that it forces me to close some stuff. I've tried a few extensions to deal with this but I've chosen to keep it clean and below this threshold instead.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#153

Post by webmaven »

tambourine_man wrote: post #76
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…

Maybe the Web is as much to blame as Chrome. Average webpage size has ballooned in the past 10 or so years.

Damn, I should have waited to comment. I even phrased it the same way.

/me smh

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#154

Post by fletchowns »

awalton wrote: post #64
fletchowns wrote: post #50

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…

Ok let's say you remember seeing something on a tab but couldn't remember which one it was on. How do you even begin to find that tab? With 1000 files on my file system I have any number of ways of searching not only the filenames, but also the contents of the files, visualizations based on size of the files, etc etc. I don't think it's a good comparison.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#155

Post by fletchowns »

heydonovan wrote: post #129
fletchowns wrote: post #50

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 curious, do you not have tons of tabs open? Do you just use a few at a time? A typical day at work will require at least 50+ tabs for each customer that comes in, plus Google/StackOverflow/Slack for whatever I'm researching, not to mention a few SoundCloud/YouTube tabs for music, while browsing Reddit or HackerNews, and then whatever I have racked up to read later. I'm open to another solution though, but can't t…

I typically have 5 - 30 tabs open at work depending on what I'm doing

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#156

Post by fiveseven_ »

kibwen wrote: post #143
FreeFull wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I believe it is enabled by default now, and the value in about:config is `media.block-autoplay-until-in-foreground`

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#157

Post by sleepychu »

surement wrote: post #116
PeterisP wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A bigger problem with Chrome is that it doesn't support multiple rows of tabs. The usual reasoning is "close some tabs!" For someone who uses a monitor in portrait mode, this is painfully ridiculous.

Conform to widescreen!

I'm sympathetic, I use my two secondary 1080ps in portrait. I think I used to use a vim plugin on Chrome that had a sublime-ctrl+p-like feature to just search through my open tabs for the one I wanted.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#158

Post by montibbalt »

ilaksh wrote: 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…

Edge's reading list shows newer entries at the top. The problem is you don't have to do anything extra to use tabs. You just... leave them open, and then there's no reason to use bookmarks or reading list or history

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#159

Post by yoasif_ »

bobcostas55 wrote: post #48
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.

This is completely right. None of those tabs are doing anything, they're literally just holding a URL and waiting to load it when the user switches over to that tab. It's not a tab, it's a bookmark. I've got a gazillion tabs open on Chrome right now and guess what, they're all actually open.

> None of those tabs are doing anything, they're literally just holding a URL and waiting to load it when the user switches over to that tab. It's not a tab, it's a bookmark.

The tabs store state too, so they aren't just bookmarks - I just closed the browser with just your quoted text in the reply form, and upon restart, the text was restored.

Chrome does seem to work this way as well, but loads all tabs by default instead of lazy loading when a user navigates to the tab.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/session_restore#Restoring_s...

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#160

Post by kanzure »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #22
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…

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 also use many 100s of browser tabs almost all the time. The Opera browser in 2009-2011 used to handle 500 tabs easily for me. These days I am often sitting at >200 tabs in both Chrome and Firefox on same machine.

I'd like to see a command line interface to manage my open tabs, so that I can see which tabs are going to be "expired" soon (unloaded into a stale tab, or converted into bookmarks as long-term cold storage) so that I can manage which groups of tabs I would prefer to continue to be running, and do bulk maintenance on what's "very cached" and "mostly cached" and such. I would imagine something like buku/jotmuch that has HTTPS API access to some extension in my browser. (I mean, the right way to do this is DCOM/RPC but see lkcl's eternally ignored pleas...)

One alternative I tried for a while was xmonad + a plugin to label individual windows. Instead of using browser tabs, each page would be loaded in a new window, and each window would be given a list of tags by me when leaving the window first time. With a keyboard shortcut, I was pulling up a list of possible browser windows that matched a search query about tags. I don't really care about tabs/window distinction as long as the interface gets out of my way.

Have you considered doing a quick extension to monitor your tab usage stats? At minimum you could track details like: Open/close rate, tab revisit/reload rate (longer than a second), tab lifetime, groups of tabs (such as tab creation relationships) and their lifetimes. Once you have this information, you could probably tweak your browser's build configuration to more closely match your habits.

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