Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

metafluff.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 563 posts

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#101

Post by ghostbrainalpha »

zzalpha wrote: post #54
rosser wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is broadly my process, too. I'll do a search, and background-open all of the results that seem responsive as I skim them, to read in depth once I think I've found "enough". Most of them of course get closed quickly upon ... uh, tabbing to them, because they weren't as material as I'd thought from the summary. Then, sometimes (read: often), I'll recurse. This way, in my experience, I tend to find more (as in quan…

I strongly suspect this depends on a) the person and how they process information, and b) the kind of research being performed. Usually when I'm researching, it's typically because I'm searching for the solution to a problem. In that case, a large quantity of information isn't useful. I just need an answer, not a survey of all possible answers. So once I find it, I can abort the search. Researching breadth-first may…

I wonder if Google has enough data to look at the search history of (150+) tab users and make a correlation with mental health searches.

I've often felt that the number of tabs I have open was both a symptom of ADD and something that made it worse.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#102

Post by revelation »

glandium wrote: post #80
revelation wrote: post #16

Whut? It didn't get any faster, it's just more aggressively lazy loaded now. This is breaking the very use case of people who have 100+ tabs; they want stuff to be there when they click on it.

Things have been lazy loaded on startup since Firefox 13: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=711193 but the feature itself is much older. The problem was that the xul/xbl code creating the tabbar was still doing a lot of work for the not-yet-loaded tabs.

Yes, it's "it's just more aggressively lazy loaded". Unless you are trying to say it's now not doing less work because it's 1) lazy loading but because 2) they don't know how to implement a tabbar and should have used some native component like Chrome.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#103

Post by lobster_johnson »

glandium wrote: post #87
lobster_johnson wrote: post #60

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…

See this recent (sub) thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14808645

I don't see the relevance? I am on the 55b1 and the behaviour I described is with that release. (I only use the location bar, anyway; I've hidden the search box.)

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#105

Post by sillysaurus3 »

zdkl wrote: post #82
awalton wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand this perspective. It's similar to saying "Surely there's a better solution than having 1000 files on your file system. That sounds like a nightmare." It's not like you're actively monitoring every tab at once, you just have the knowledge ready to go and at a finger's whim. You use extensions like Tab Hunter to jump directly to the tab you care about. Yeah, you could do the same with using a bunch o…

> It's similar to saying "Surely there's a better solution than having 1000 files on your file system. That sounds like a nightmare." No, it's similar to saying "Surely there's a better solution than having 1000 radio/tv channels tuned on at once, waiting for you to decide which one is relevant" Like why not open what you need when you need it rather than squirreling all those "maybes"?

Different people are different. When researching a question without a direct answer, it's more effective for me to open up tabs as I read a page and then search the most likely candidate. Whenever I reach a dead-end I can just switch tabs as opposed to pressing the back button N times. zzalpha's comment sums it up nicely: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14824086

I know I'm a power user, but I miss how effective old Chrome was at this.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#106

Post by Macha »

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…

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

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#107

Post by tokenizerrr »

wging wrote: post #67
huntie wrote: 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…

YouTube is a bit smarter these days: they defer playback until the tab first gets focus. So you have to pause at most as many videos as there are separate windows, not tabs. I believe Chrome is not nearly as smart as it could be about deferring loading of tabs, though.

It's not youtube doing that, but chrome. The html5 video element doesn't start playback until the tab first gets focus.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#108

Post by julian_1 »

fletchowns wrote: post #50
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's unfortunate because back in ~2010 I used to open over 1,000 tabs in Chrome at a time. It's very useful when doing research: each window represents a topic, and each topic can spawn 30+ tabs. Nowadays Chrome keels over at around 150, like you say. It also leaks memory like a sieve, so if your hard drive is anywhere close to full you'll end up with a lovely OS X popup saying all your running programs have been fro…

There has got to be a better solution to this problem than having 1,000 tabs open in a web browser. That sounds like an absolute nightmare.

With a lhs vertical tree-style tab-manager, I'm at around 100-200 tabs. It works the same as an expandable chapter/section navigation metaphor, except I control the content and nesting.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#109

Post by once-in-a-while »

I would vote for at least 365 tabs open (as a normal medium) to every every-day user (yess, you guessed it: one for every day of the year).

So, if The Holy Internets are (unexpectedly) down for a whole year or so, you still have (relative) news to fill every single one of your wake-ups!

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#110

Post by jchw »

glogla wrote: post #97
hammock wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox lazy loads tabs on startup, but not otherwise. So if you open a YouTube in a new tab it will start playing. Chrome, on the other hand, will not start playing the video, which is nice. I'm a Firefox user though so that's where my chrome knowledge starts and ends.

Is that a Chrome feature or Chrome-only Youtube feature?

It's Chrome's lazy-loading of tabs. YouTube could presumably implement this on all browsers by detecting if the user is focused or not, but I don't know that it's always desirable.
Post reply on HN