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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

#351

Post by _wmd »

vit05 wrote: post #295
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…

That's because the bookmarkers sucks. They do not adapt to what you are doing, you need to do a lot of setup and organize a lot to be able to use it well. It should be more organic, grow with the use you make. I still believe that anyone who makes a better bookmark will dominate more than just the browser war.

Bookmarking always struck me as a 90s solution to just having fulltext search and analytics over your browser history, there have been a few attempts at browsers that addressed this head-on, but they've all died off over time

IMO just one good new tab UI over a user's history/local cache could make a sizeable dent in Google's ad revenue

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#352

Post by iamleppert »

Firefox is a case study in how performance really does matter. A lot.

It used to be the best browser, and then something happened and it gradually became slow, really slow, while Chrome became fast. Who was in charge over at Mozilla during all this?

Any engineering director worth their salt would have noticed what was happening and installed metrics that didn't let engineers commit code that caused performance regressions and given an engineer (or multiple engineers) who loves optimizing things carte blanche.

Really, I want to know what happened over there. Does anyone know?

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#353

Post by reitanqild »

2OEH8eoCRo wrote: post #203
huntie wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just checked and I currently have 450+ tabs open. I closed around 100 the other day. I work on a number of projects at the same time, so I'll often have a bunch of documentation open for one project and then switch to the next one without closing everything. I also research a project and then wait a while before starting it. This helps me get a better perspective on the project. I'll often leave my research open in…

Do you have any add-ons to manage that? I don't mean to tell you how to work but that doesn't seem optimal. There is probably a better way than having over 400 tabs open.

FF searches open tabs when you type in the url bar. (Officially the "Awesomebar" and the name is kind of earned but it is to cool for me.)

Also many of us (I think) use some kind of vertical nested tabs.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#354

Post by reitanqild »

BenjiWiebe wrote: post #274
faizshah wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I usually have around 400 tabs open across 10 windows. They build up because I have many things that I intend to read, use or reference but I don't want to stash them and forget to read them like with Pocket or normal bookmarks. So I keep them open in a window so that I can return to whatever I was researching or working on some time soon. Just an example: I'm working on an ML model, I begin by researching prior work…

I have the same issue of not reading things I bookmark... Until recently, when I installed Random Bookmark add-on which allows me to open random bookmarks. So now when I'm bored I just click it a lot and finally read those bookmarks.

Also exists in pinboard I think.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#355

Post by fouc »

Note for the blog author:

"It's interesting that Firefox startup time got consistently worse over time until Firefox 51."

I believe you meant to write "until Firefox 52." I think the usage of "until" would typically point out the exception to the rule, in this case Firefox 52 is the first version that is no longer slower than the previous.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#356

Post by reitanqild »

pmontra wrote: post #345
elorant wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So even if you only had 100 tabs This is fucking surreal. Why on Earth would anyone want 100 open tabs, besides testing? What's the real life scenario we're looking at here?

I had 37 tabs open in Firefox on my phone yesterday. A stack of pages to read. No slowdowns.

44 now as I read this.

I'm on beta. Had a few hangs last week but this week it is buttery smooth as usual.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#357

Post by icelancer »

iamleppert wrote: post #352

Firefox is a case study in how performance really does matter. A lot. It used to be the best browser, and then something happened and it gradually became slow, really slow, while Chrome became fast. Who was in charge over at Mozilla during all this? Any engineering director worth their salt would have noticed what was happening and installed metrics that didn't let engineers commit code that caused performance regres…

I think multiprocess/multi-tab was a big separator for a long time, as well as plugin memory leakage being way worse on Firefox (initially because Chrome had nearly none to speak of).

I very reluctantly switched to Chrome. I loved Firefox. I even know today that Firefox likely suits my needs better... but at this point I'm too old and too stuck to change. Chrome doesn't yet make me so angry that I have to switch. Horowitz is right (along with every other entrepreneur) when they say for someone to switch, the next product has to be an order of magnitude better than the currently adopted product. Anything less isn't enough.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#358

Post by granitosaurus »

magoon wrote: post #279
atombender wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish tabs/windows worked more like persistent "workspaces". For example, say I'm booking a trip. I always open a bunch of sites (Kayak, Booking.com, lots of hotels, Google Maps, places to visit, etc.) in a single window. In pre-computer times it would be like covering a desk with a ton of papers, books and notes. Gradually I will figure out stuff, book the trip, etc. but the tabs can stay for quite a while. I feel…

Can you just open a new window as a "workspace" and have tabs within that window?

That's the most obvious and sane solution. Browser shouldn't aim to be it's own OS - keep it simple.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#359

Post by frik »

iamleppert wrote: post #352

Firefox is a case study in how performance really does matter. A lot. It used to be the best browser, and then something happened and it gradually became slow, really slow, while Chrome became fast. Who was in charge over at Mozilla during all this? Any engineering director worth their salt would have noticed what was happening and installed metrics that didn't let engineers commit code that caused performance regres…

Mozilla turned to a big corp (even if non profit) and got too many new staff. The original staff that was part since early Mosaic and Netscape days left. When Firefox got this new rounded tabs and left the slower release cycle around Firefox 3 it was the tipping point. It changed from a community project back to a corp project, that again doesn't care.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#360

Post by mrweasel »

sicariusnoctis wrote: post #324
elorant wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So even if you only had 100 tabs This is fucking surreal. Why on Earth would anyone want 100 open tabs, besides testing? What's the real life scenario we're looking at here?

I don't understand why some people think it's weird. Folks with tabs in the 100s just have a different workflow from you. If I google something, I like having a few different sources or points of view, so I open a bunch of tabs to look through. Sometimes, I want to switch to a different task, so I collapse that tab tree for looking at later. Sometimes, inside that tree, there's another topic of interest I want to kno…

You absolutely right that it's just different workflows, for different people. The weirdness comes up when someone like me meet someone with 20+ tabs, because I wouldn't now how to work like that. If I end up with 10 or 15 tabs during a session where I'm researching something, I'll often pause to close down all the those tabs, because they're a mental burden.

So some of us think 100s of tabs are weird, because there's no way we could get any work done, before closing down those tabs.

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