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Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

hacks.mozilla.org

121–130 of 283 posts

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#121
post #112
post #13

I've never had Firefox crash. I guess they are reaching for those edge cases on power users who keep a billion tabs open. Maybe I'm missing some sort of productivity hack that involves leaving 100+ tabs open.

Firefox crashes completely at least once a week for me, and tabs crash at least once a day. I had a brand new tab crash the other day, just seconds after I had opened it and visited a text-only site (no JS, no images). I'm running Firefox 92 on up to date Debian on a machine with 64GB of memory; it's not running out of RAM. I still use it because it's better than Chrome, and I wouldn't touch Brave with a 10 foot pole…

That doesn’t sound normal. Perhaps your profile is in some sort of inconsistent state after years of usage? Maybe give it a try with a new empty profile as well.

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#122
post #13

I've never had Firefox crash. I guess they are reaching for those edge cases on power users who keep a billion tabs open. Maybe I'm missing some sort of productivity hack that involves leaving 100+ tabs open.

How is that possible, I get FF crashes literally every time I load a moderately intensive website (eg. Google Keep). I still use FF because I can't abide Chrome. My PC is admittedly a bit older (only 6 gigs RAM) but still.

Maybe corrupted firefox profile? Try running it with a new empty one.

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#123
post #112
post #13

I've never had Firefox crash. I guess they are reaching for those edge cases on power users who keep a billion tabs open. Maybe I'm missing some sort of productivity hack that involves leaving 100+ tabs open.

Firefox crashes completely at least once a week for me, and tabs crash at least once a day. I had a brand new tab crash the other day, just seconds after I had opened it and visited a text-only site (no JS, no images). I'm running Firefox 92 on up to date Debian on a machine with 64GB of memory; it's not running out of RAM. I still use it because it's better than Chrome, and I wouldn't touch Brave with a 10 foot pole…

I've ran into weird issues like that before. After so many updates, I'm guessing something gets broken somewhere, somehow.

Back up your extension settings and bookmarks, and do a fresh install of it. Bit of a nuisance but usually fixes any weird behaviour in my experience.

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#124
post #95

> Firefox will respond by unloading memory-heavy but not actively used tabs. A dropped tab cannot always be reloaded to the same content. No thanks, I'd rather get more RAM or swap space for paging. The tabbing feature of "close all pages to the right of this one" is almost good enough for me. What I would like is some UI where all the tabs are compactly shown as rows in a table. Here, you could select tabs and move…

The Tree Style Tab add-on might be relevant to your interests? It's a little flaky since the switch to new style extensions, but still better than any other option I've seen: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

I’ve recently replaced it with Sideberry which seems to be more performant.

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#125
post #13

I've never had Firefox crash. I guess they are reaching for those edge cases on power users who keep a billion tabs open. Maybe I'm missing some sort of productivity hack that involves leaving 100+ tabs open.

I'm going to reply with a comment stolen from a different HN discussion: The fact that people (myself included) have 100s of tabs open is a symptom of just how broken bookmarking is on the modern web. Bookmarks are a miserable way to create a placeholder for your thoughts. It's too static, must be maintained, and generally prone to link rot. I'm a scientist. I open and read 10-20-100 links for a given topic depending…

Checkout toby extension, unfortunately only for chrome.

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#126
post #22

What I want implemented.. Chrome/Firefox whatever... is that instead of unloading and reloading when I go back to the tab I want it to export basically an HTML file and when I click back to that tab, I want it to reload the HTML file instead with some notification/marker that it is a "cached" version. There are times where I'll leave a tab in the background that I don't want refreshed but when it gets unloaded, poof,…

Sounds like you want WebMemex, specifically the freeze-dry functionality: https://github.com/WebMemex

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#127
post #13

I've never had Firefox crash. I guess they are reaching for those edge cases on power users who keep a billion tabs open. Maybe I'm missing some sort of productivity hack that involves leaving 100+ tabs open.

How is that possible, I get FF crashes literally every time I load a moderately intensive website (eg. Google Keep). I still use FF because I can't abide Chrome. My PC is admittedly a bit older (only 6 gigs RAM) but still.

I've only got 4 gigs of RAM, and don't think I've seen Firefox crash in years. And I run Jupyter notebooks, browser games, image processing, all sorts of intensive things on it.

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that possible, I get FF crashes literally every time I load a moderately intensive website (eg. Google Keep). I still use FF because I can't abide Chrome. My PC is admittedly a bit older (only 6 gigs RAM) but still.

I routinely have hundreds of tabs open in Firefox at any given time without crashes on macOS and Linux. The tabs include everything from documentation, Jupyter notebooks, papers, Jira, Reddit, HN, Github, Gitlab, GMail, Google Keep, Todoist, etc. I can't even recall the last time Firefox crashed for me.

Agreed.

I've got 99 problems with Firefox, but a crash ain't one.

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#129
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to reply with a comment stolen from a different HN discussion: The fact that people (myself included) have 100s of tabs open is a symptom of just how broken bookmarking is on the modern web. Bookmarks are a miserable way to create a placeholder for your thoughts. It's too static, must be maintained, and generally prone to link rot. I'm a scientist. I open and read 10-20-100 links for a given topic depending…

I hear your qualms about bookmarks but to me having 100 open tabs does not save you from any of those issues at all, it just exposes you to things you never would have encountered otherwise. Macbooks I've owned randomly crash, always has always will. If I had 100s of tabs that would certainly be annoying to deal with opening that session again and watching my computer achieve liftoff with the fans when those 100 tabs…

People have different work flows and that's ok. No need to be so controlling...

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#130
I'd like it if tabs that haven't been looked at for an hour just closed. Any suggestions on how I can do this?

I think this is a very unpopular way of using tabs though. Most people seem to use it as a sort of work queue and leave tabs open for days or longer. I hate doing that, I'd rather just search for the information again or look in the history.

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