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Firefox Test Pilot

testpilot.firefox.com

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Re: Firefox Test Pilot

#101

Post by simula67 »

mistermann wrote: post #99
burfog wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They "are doing tons of great work on improving stability and performance", but I've heard this before and somehow we got to where we are today. Do you alternate between improving these things and worsening them? Could you possibly not worsen them, or at least warn us to not upgrade when that happens? Regressions are really not OK. People are trying to use this browser. Well, mostly they were trying to use it. I stuc…

I have 12GB of RAM and probably ~120 tabs open at any given time. This used to be fine, but it seems Firefox is just getting worse over time, the main problem is the frequent 5 to 30 second pauses while it is doing....something.

> 120 tabs open at any given time

Are you exaggerating ? If not, may I suggest an alternative way to browse the web ?

I use multiple virtual desktops. Each desktop logically caters to one task. Each browser window is logically grouped under one activity.

For example my desktop may look like this :

Virtual Desktop 1 ( Communications ):

* Outlook

* Lync

* Flowdock etc

Virtual Desktop 2 ( Development ):

* ConEmu/ Command prompt

* Intellij

* Browser Window with multiple tabs for referring stuff

Virtual Desktop 3 ( Procrastination ):

Browser Window 1:

* Various pages opened from HN

Browser Window 2:

* Various pages concerning World War 2

* Various pages investigating different investment strategies.

The advantage of this approach is that once you are done you can close browser windows and tabs. Done with researching World War 2 ? Close that window, all associated tabs close automatically. If you accidentally close a tab, you can always bring it back with Ctrl + Shift + T. If you want to refer to a previously opened window, you can always do a simple search in browser history.

Keeps your system responsive and makes it easy to find things.

Re: Firefox Test Pilot

#102

Post by ploxiln »

jgruen wrote: post #21
kibwen wrote: post #4

Is the "Tab Center" feature a prototype for an official version of tree-style tabs, perhaps? I've seen that Servo/browser.html was experimenting with tabs-on-the-side, I'd love to see this graduate to more than just an experiment.

We don't know exactly what's going to happen with Tab Center--or any of these experiments--in the long run. Our goal here is to get feedback from our users to drive successive UX and engineering iterations. Once experiments have incubated in Test Pilot for awhile, we will have a number of options depending on each experiment's overall success. We may push them over to AMO, or integrate them directly into the browser.…

What if nothing ultimately makes a significant proportion of users switch from Chrome to Firefox?

When will Mozilla stop flailing and just go back to making a good browser, like they did when they just had a couple thousand users? When they're fully defeated by the multi-market behemoth again?

I still appreciate that Mozilla saved the web from IE, and I still use firefox because it's not yet multi-process and thus not yet multi-gigabytes-memory.

Re: Firefox Test Pilot

#103

Post by ksec »

6a68 wrote: post #64
mrmondo wrote: post #62

Honestly all I want from Firefox is better stability and performance - I don't care about almost anything else barring security. Firefox has become so unstable and slow (on OSX at least) that many people I know - myself included have switched to chromium. We don't want to use it but we have to because of all the crashes and massive slowdowns during long running sessions or when many tabs are open. This goes for stabl…

Test Pilot isn't happening at the cost of stability and performance improvements. It's a complementary program that helps us ship better features through data-driven iteration. I hear your concerns, though. The platform and desktop teams are doing tons of great work on improving stability and performance--you might want to give Firefox another try sometime. If you do, maybe try out some Test Pilot experiments while y…

Translation: Firefox is not Apple nor Google or Microsoft whom has literally unlimited resources. By having engineers on Test Pilot they are having less resources to do what he think is important

Personal Take: Completely agree. I am opening up Firefox with Panarama Mode missing, Pocket, Hello.

And BTW, e10s hasn't shipped yet, and at the current timeline, even if it ship in Firefox 49/50 it will still not be any good for power / heavy tab users, which incidentaly is the only group left using Firefox, most have moved on to Chrome.

I see light of hope in Servo. But liscenses ( MPL? Why not Apache 2.0 ) are a concern for a few company to join and devote resources into it. ( Apart from Samsung )

Re: Firefox Test Pilot

#104

Post by ksec »

simula67 wrote: post #101
mistermann wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have 12GB of RAM and probably ~120 tabs open at any given time. This used to be fine, but it seems Firefox is just getting worse over time, the main problem is the frequent 5 to 30 second pauses while it is doing....something.

> 120 tabs open at any given time Are you exaggerating ? If not, may I suggest an alternative way to browse the web ? I use multiple virtual desktops. Each desktop logically caters to one task. Each browser window is logically grouped under one activity. For example my desktop may look like this : Virtual Desktop 1 ( Communications ): * Outlook * Lync * Flowdock etc Virtual Desktop 2 ( Development ): * ConEmu/ Comman…

He is not, it is not rare to have 120 tabs, in fact some extreme even have 400+ Tabs openned. Today is rather lightweight for me and has 70 Tabs. Of coz these wont be all loaded, Once you close and reopen those tabs will be unloaded. They are more like a list of things to read and do.

Re: Firefox Test Pilot

#105

Post by Mithaldu »

jeena wrote: post #66
6a68 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the site is templated client-side using Ampersand (though lmorchard keeps threatening to rewrite it in React as a weekend project). Should work fine with tracking disabled, but won't work at all without JS.

Oh wow, this is one of the simple designs which only needs HTML and CSS, no JS at all to work, I wonder why they chose to do it this way.

As do i, so i reported it as a bug: https://github.com/mozilla/testpilot/issues/774

Re: Firefox Test Pilot

#106

Post by burfog »

simula67 wrote: post #101
mistermann wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have 12GB of RAM and probably ~120 tabs open at any given time. This used to be fine, but it seems Firefox is just getting worse over time, the main problem is the frequent 5 to 30 second pauses while it is doing....something.

> 120 tabs open at any given time Are you exaggerating ? If not, may I suggest an alternative way to browse the web ? I use multiple virtual desktops. Each desktop logically caters to one task. Each browser window is logically grouped under one activity. For example my desktop may look like this : Virtual Desktop 1 ( Communications ): * Outlook * Lync * Flowdock etc Virtual Desktop 2 ( Development ): * ConEmu/ Comman…

On a different system, I had pretty much that. I've moved to Chromium, which is also slow but at least doesn't hang as often or as badly. I would do this:

8 or 16 gigabytes of RAM (got an upgrade)

8 virtual desktops, about 5 occupied with browser windows

1 to 20 windows per desktop

1 to 20 tabs per window

That is likely 100 to 300 tabs total. No, I really don't want to close them. I want more open, but performance is a problem. I like to keep going back to tabs that have been open for months. It hurts to close tabs because then I lose track of what I am working on; the scroll bar position matters and the page might even be gone from the web. Sometimes I write a comment on a web site like this one, then let it sit for days if I am unsure I want to post it.

Re: Firefox Test Pilot

#107

Post by Morgawr »

mistermann wrote: post #99
burfog wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They "are doing tons of great work on improving stability and performance", but I've heard this before and somehow we got to where we are today. Do you alternate between improving these things and worsening them? Could you possibly not worsen them, or at least warn us to not upgrade when that happens? Regressions are really not OK. People are trying to use this browser. Well, mostly they were trying to use it. I stuc…

I have 12GB of RAM and probably ~120 tabs open at any given time. This used to be fine, but it seems Firefox is just getting worse over time, the main problem is the frequent 5 to 30 second pauses while it is doing....something.

>the main problem is the frequent 5 to 30 second pauses while it is doing....something.

Oh god I thought I was alone on this. I've been talking to various Firefox users and nobody was able to relate with me. I usually keep Firefox open 24/7 with around 20-30 tabs open (~6 or so pinned). Every time I am typing (like in a hangout popup window or in a HN comment) Firefox is micro-stuttering and freezing and it eats away some of the words I am typing and it becomes very frustrating. I ended up typing comments in vim and then copypasting because it was faster. It feels like typing in an SSH connection with high-latency.

Also when scrolling long pages (like reddit threads) the "view" takes a while to update so I end up scrolling down to a totally grey page which then updates with content over and over again. And don't make me talk about twitter taking ages and setting my CPU to 100% (one core) with loud as hell fan every time I click on "show 50 new tweets"...

I have 16GB of RAM and a 2-years old top-of-the-line (back then) i7 CPU on a laptop, I shouldn't be having these issues...

Re: Firefox Test Pilot

#108

Post by stymaar »

ksec wrote: post #103
6a68 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Test Pilot isn't happening at the cost of stability and performance improvements. It's a complementary program that helps us ship better features through data-driven iteration. I hear your concerns, though. The platform and desktop teams are doing tons of great work on improving stability and performance--you might want to give Firefox another try sometime. If you do, maybe try out some Test Pilot experiments while y…

Translation: Firefox is not Apple nor Google or Microsoft whom has literally unlimited resources. By having engineers on Test Pilot they are having less resources to do what he think is important Personal Take: Completely agree. I am opening up Firefox with Panarama Mode missing, Pocket, Hello. And BTW, e10s hasn't shipped yet, and at the current timeline, even if it ship in Firefox 49/50 it will still not be any goo…

> I see light of hope in Servo. But liscenses ( MPL? Why not Apache 2.0 ) are a concern for a few company to join and devote resources into it.

Copyleft licences are often the best way to go in this kind of situations: thanks to the GPL, Linux remained one until Google forked it for Android. And 15 years after its beginning, there is no fragmentation in the kernel space. On the other hand, BSD has been forked many times by companies to build their own proprietary OS [1].

The MPL will ensure that Servo is never forked by Google/Apple/Microsoft into a competing proprietary software, but will remain a free software.

[1]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/77/Unix_his...

Re: Firefox Test Pilot

#109

Post by yAnonymous »

mrmondo wrote: post #62

Honestly all I want from Firefox is better stability and performance - I don't care about almost anything else barring security. Firefox has become so unstable and slow (on OSX at least) that many people I know - myself included have switched to chromium. We don't want to use it but we have to because of all the crashes and massive slowdowns during long running sessions or when many tabs are open. This goes for stabl…

I don't even know how it's possible that the performance degrades over time as it does, but it has become bad, at least on Linux.

Opening the dev tools has such a huge performance impact these days (on an i7 with 16GB RAM and an SSD...) that I mostly don't bother to develop with Firefox anymore.

Let alone missing features like user agent spoofing, which still requires an addon, or the bug that messes up file associations with every update.

I hope they do less UI changes, get their shit together and improve the core.

Re: Firefox Test Pilot

#110

Post by stymaar »

ksec wrote: post #104
simula67 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 120 tabs open at any given time Are you exaggerating ? If not, may I suggest an alternative way to browse the web ? I use multiple virtual desktops. Each desktop logically caters to one task. Each browser window is logically grouped under one activity. For example my desktop may look like this : Virtual Desktop 1 ( Communications ): * Outlook * Lync * Flowdock etc Virtual Desktop 2 ( Development ): * ConEmu/ Comman…

He is not, it is not rare to have 120 tabs, in fact some extreme even have 400+ Tabs openned. Today is rather lightweight for me and has 70 Tabs. Of coz these wont be all loaded, Once you close and reopen those tabs will be unloaded. They are more like a list of things to read and do.

I currently have 753 tabs open on this computer alone :p But as you say, it's not a problem at all because there are not loaded until I go back to them.

The only issue I have with massive number of tabs, is the start-up time of the browser, which increase dramatically with the number of tabs (it's at least quadratic).

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