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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

#461

Post by johnp_ »

clairity wrote: post #61
rc_kas wrote: post #3

I <3 you Firefox. I'm so sad that nobody uses you.

that's just not true... i've used firefox consistently since v. 0.3 (phoenix) so that's at least one. plus a couple others in this thread make a few. i bet there are a few more out there too, so that makes a bunch. =) anyways, i have ~350 tabs open on firefox 54, and so i can't wait until 55 lands to see this great improvement. the chrome lead for mac told me that they too are working on better performance with 100's…

Why not switch to Firefox Beta to get those improvements immediately? With the removal of the aurora channel, Mozilla is trying to get more people on the beta train, that now is the only stabilization phase between Nightly and Release. As a die-hard Nightly user I usually install the Beta (x64) version for other users and, depending on the add-on compatibility, enable e10s or some other features (e.g. TCP Fast Open) that may already be in A/B testing. Right now it makes an amazing difference in user satisfaction.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#462

Post by emiliobumachar »

michaelmior wrote: post #439
emiliobumachar wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes, that's exactly what I'm suggesting. VMs can be named, saved and loaded straightforwardly.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#463

Post by gkya »

bigbugbag wrote: post #451
gkya wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

then link rot and unread stays unread forever.

Well. I've made a little extension that lists unread links. For linkrot, yes that's an issue I plan to solve, and what I will do is I'll either find or write a program that saves my bookmarks as websaves.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#464

Post by jeltz »

lobster_johnson wrote: post #253
confounded wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Folders of bookmarks?

Requires automatic two-way syncing. Browsers have, for a long time, supported restoring a bookmark folder into a window as tabs. But if you then change the tabs, the bookmarks aren't automatically updated. This is one of the missing pieces.

Additionally opening a bookmark fold as tabs does not support lazy loading so it will bog down your computer when you open all the bookmarks.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#465

Post by bigbugbag »

vocatus_gate wrote: post #163
Macha wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just tabs as bookmarks. I can build up a stack of 100 tabs in a day easily.

How??? I've never understood how people can have that many tabs open and it be useful at all. At that point the information overload is too much. I have at most 10 open, and close them as I'm done with them. Helps reduce cognitive load.

On the contrary, opening tabs reduce the cognitive load for me. Instead of having to use some of my limited mental space to keep in mind that there's some interesting link I'd like to go when I have finished reading the current page, I just open it now and will go back to later. Same as writing something down in a todo list.

I also close tabs as soon as I'm done with them which is why I only have 150-200 tabs open. Each categorized by activity, so when I switch one activity to the other I save time and cognitive load by having them right as I left them instead of having to find what URLs to reopen and actually open them. This way I only have 5-30 tabs open in front of me while the other are offscreen in other groups.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#466

Post by bigbugbag »

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…

there's tab groups and tab groups helper but this will be dropped by firefox in november so ...

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#467

Post by [deleted] »

chuckdries wrote: post #291
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…

This functionality exists with bookmarks. FF allows you to bookmark all the tabs you have open into a bookmarks folder. It also provides a button at the bottom of the folder "open all in tabs" This works well enough for my taste, but I also use pinned tabs for stuff like fb messenger

[deleted]

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#468

Post by twobyfour »

acdha wrote: post #438
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…

> 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.

Except that Adblock Plus wasn't the problem when Firefox was slow with web apps or sites that used JavaScript to load content. Firefox's JavaScript engine lagged significantly behind Chrome (and Safari) for a few years. It still does in a few areas.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#469

Post by a_imho »

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…

Which timeframe are we talking about? Personally I have never had any problem with FF and considered this recurring slowness complaint ~fud. I dug up some old benchmarks just to see what was I missing out on not defaulting to Chrome [1][2]. Surprisingly both have FF in front. However I don't think benchmarks tell much about the browsing experience. Indeed sporting an adblocker makes a much bigger difference than a bit lower memory consumption for example.

Imo both FF and Chrome are very capable browsers and Mozilla lost significant market share simply because Chrome had better promotion.

[1] http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/chrome-27-firefox-21-ope...

[2] http://download.cnet.com/blog/download-blog/benchmark-battle...

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#470

Post by jgtrosh »

Houshalter wrote: post #285
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 am tab hoarder. It's a serious problem. So many links that I want to read. But I don't feel like doing it right now. And I know for certain that if I put it into a bookmark, I will never ever look at it again. So they sit on my tab bar for months until I get around to it. Looking at my current open tabs, most of them are dense "boring" reading material like scientific papers (or reddit/HN discussions of them.) I fe…

Hello, you mention it as a serious problem. I agree and I think it's good to be aware of it.

I don't believe it should be up to the browser to deal with tabs. I don't actually believe tabs are a particularly good representation of browsing.

Using extremely light browsers such as surf (http://surf.suckless.org) in a good window manager such as i3 (https://i3wm.org) makes each page a first class window, without any browser clutter.

You soon learn to browse with as few pages open as possible. Opening new tabs is a promise to spend time in the future. Using simpler linear navigation helps keeping focus. I want to know why I'm browsing, not hoping that I go through every tab that I lazily felt I might need to see in some open-ended future. The web is broken but with some effort you can alienate most of the cruft from your usage.

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