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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

#431

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…

Go to Preferences > Search and set keywords for each search engine.

E.g. I use "g" for Google and "w" for Wikipedia. "g hacker news" in the AwesomeBar would then search for "hacker news" on Google and "w hacker news" likewise on Wikipedia.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#432
post #211
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…

Long time user of Tree Style Tabs. Works great for me. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

Too bad it won't work on Firefox 57

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#433

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'd be terrified that one time Firefox just wouldn't shut down clean. This is why Firefox stores a sessionstore file. _And_ a backup of that sessionstore file. And a previous version of that sessionstore file. And a backup of the file as of the last several times you did a browser update. The idea is to never lose the session in an irrecoverable way.

From my experience (max tab count of maybe 30, usual close to 4 or 5), when I tried to restore, I would always get the 'we tried hard, but couldn't do it' type of message, so I don't even bother trying anymore. My guess is that all the people relying on session storage are losing a bunch of data, but they just don't know it because how do you know when you lost one of 1000 tabs.

At one of my jobs, they instituted weekly scheduled reboots of desktops; after several times of getting my sessions killed by that, I started making an effort to close everything at the end of the day; I don't always close all my tabs, but often, and I never leave more than two or three. Whatever was interesting, but I couldn't read, I don't worry about -- if it's important, it'll probably come up again; I just leave a couple things open if there's work I need to do on them when I get back.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#434
post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Have you tried pocket? I used to keep a load of bookmarks but the problem was that after a while many of the source urls would die off. So something like pocket is very handy as it takes a copy of the page you're interested in.

Why pocket when we have opensource wallabag that you can either host yourself[1] or use as a service[2] ?

IIRC pocket has had some serious vulnerabilites exposed.

[1]: https://wallabag.org/en [2]: https://wallabag.it/en

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#435
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

There's a good reason not to use edge: it's not available outside windows.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#436
How does this translate to real use, as in actually loading the pages and having a couple dozens extensions ?

The ability to open 5-10 times more tabs than I use is quite and edge case that mozilla usually doesn't care about, but the real question is what is the point of this when it comes with making firefox totally useless for said use case by dropping support for extension that make it practical or useful.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There's a good reason not to use edge: it's not available outside windows.

How is that relevant to a UI discussion?

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#438

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…

> It used to be the best browser, and then something happened and it gradually became slow, really slow

In many cases, it wasn't that Firefox became slow but that people installed extensions which made it slow. For years, you could solve 90% of those complaints by uninstalling AdBlock Plus.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#439

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…

I speculate that general-purpuse virtual machine management software would fit the bill quite well

How would this help with the scenario described by the OP? Are you suggesting starting a new virtual machine instead of a new browser window?

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#440
post #427
post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you organise tabs then? I've god knows how many bookmarks and I've been blindly Ctrl-D-ing since time immemorial, only tagging very distinct stuff and modifying titles if too stupid. When I need to get at sth. bookmarked, typing stuff into the url field in firefox just works.

Tree Tab Style. Try it, then read the original post and the comments again. :) I think this is the missing piece on all this discussion.

I do know those extensions, but still prefer bookmarks. I just tag stuff unread and go on.
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