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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

#551

Post by wtetzner »

davidgerard wrote: post #397
Houshalter wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yep, another here. I have tabs that have been there in FF for several months ... I also have to run a FF and a Chromium (two separate Google accounts is basically unmanageable without separate browsers). This is enough to fill 8GB. Good Lord the web is fat these days.

> (two separate Google accounts is basically unmanageable without separate browsers)

You can use Firefox's container tabs for this.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#552

Post by laythea »

toast0 wrote: post #422
laythea wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but I have found that if you "open in new tab" then it loads the page even though it is in the background. It should do as it does as startup but doesn't.

That's probably the right behavior for those people who are never going to open the tab; but for people like me who have few tabs, open in new tab is a great way to load something I'm actually going to read soon; eg open the article in a new tab, scan the HN comments while the article loads (especially if it's from one of those sites that takes 3 minutes to load)

I think this behavior should be linked with the "Make new tabs have the current focus when opened" option. So if that is not set, and the new tab does not appear, then Firefox should not load. In the devs defense, the inconsistent behaviour between startup and "restore all", and "open in new tab without focus" is easy to miss.

EDIT: I would agree with you in your assessment of the default behavior however, if it were the case, that most people only have a few tabs open normally.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#553

Post by laythea »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #72
laythea wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but I have found that if you "open in new tab" then it loads the page even though it is in the background. It should do as it does as startup but doesn't.

This, exactly. I'd love to open half a dozen tabs pointing at videos, without having to wait for each one to load and then quickly pause it. (Related: I'd also really like to middle-click video annotations to open them in a tab. No, I don't want to replace the current video with them.)

Yeah, my workaround in a situation like that is to open all. Then close, restart and click restore session. It only loads the active page, not all.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#554

Post by Lepole »

atombender wrote: post #233
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 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…

Hey, great idea ! I'm just use Firefox in the same way. Here i couldn't say thé fox is finnish. On linux it's thé best.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#555

Post by Arelius »

hbosch wrote: post #128
Arelius wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wonder if this "I want to read this but I'll set it aside for now" model of browsing might be better served with a different UI metaphor... Sure, you're welcome to design it, I'll even give other methods a try occasionally, but for me every other metaphor has proved worse in some way and I'm perfectly happy working this way, there could be something better, but it isn't bad in a way that I feel needs to get fixed…

Have you tried tree-style tabs, for instance?

Sure, I think they take up more real-estate and didn't really improve my workflow.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#556

Post by Arelius »

zzalpha wrote: post #270
Arelius wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wonder if this "I want to read this but I'll set it aside for now" model of browsing might be better served with a different UI metaphor... Sure, you're welcome to design it, I'll even give other methods a try occasionally, but for me every other metaphor has proved worse in some way and I'm perfectly happy working this way, there could be something better, but it isn't bad in a way that I feel needs to get fixed…

We'll, I can think of one obvious problem right off the bat: when you accumulate enough tabs they're no longer discoverable. Many folks here have offered extensions or workarounds for making finding/searching tabs easier, but to me this is an issue introduced by the UI metaphor, and maybe better solved some other way. Maybe. I just observe that tabs seem to be a cumbersome tool for a very legitimate use case, and I g…

Discoverability is a bit of a weird metric, if you have very few tabs you don't really need discoverability since you just put the tabs there. So this isn't really strictly worse when you have many tabs.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#557

Post by twobyfour »

acdha wrote: post #509
twobyfour wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's partially true but remember that you're generalizing from micro-benchmarks – which did not universally tilt Chrome – to the complex behavior of real sites, where networking, memory usage, and general de-optimization tended to cancel out many of those small wins. That's not saying that the browser teams haven't made big strides, only that it's not such a simple story. Chrome running a certain JavaScript functio…

Aren't micro-benchmarks kind of pointless if they don't reflect real-world behavior?

The fact is that javascript execution (not networking behavior but javascript performance) on many web apps differs by orders of magnitude between Firefox and Chrome. There are a handful of sites that I find literally unusable in Firefox on a new Macbook Pro because even after loading, sitting in the background doing nothing, they make the entire computer unresponsive due to high CPU usage. These same sites work just fine in Chrome and Safari.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#559

Post by clairity »

johnp_ wrote: post #461
clairity wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)…

yes, i have developer edition installed for testing, but still use the release version as my main browser. it's just a couple weeks left to wait so i think i can hang on until then. =)

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#560

Post by kasabali »

gnicholas wrote: post #503
raesene2 wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Pocket might get better integration since it was recently acquired by Mozilla. Fingers crossed...

Pocket had a great integration with Firefox when it was an extension. Then they decided to integrate it into the browser and ironically it end up being a piece of shit that was not more functional than a bookmarklet. Not only that but they also removed the original extension from add-ons site so you have had to use the half assed built-in implementation.
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