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

Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

hacks.mozilla.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 283 posts

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#151

Post by danShumway »

hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #133
danShumway wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not going to expand on your point too much, but I've commented similarly in the past, and I heavily agree with you. There's so much room for innovation in browser UX, Bookmarks and tab archival never really evolved and it feels like we're just stuck in the past. Part of the problem is that it's tricky for people to innovate on bookmarks in an accessible way, because I'm not going to do heavy browsing in a 3rd-party C…

I respectfully disagree with both of you. A tab is a bookmark, the fact that tabs are allowed to run background processes and consume a crazy amount of system resources is the problem. Why the hell is JavaScript allowed to run amok? I understand things like Spotify, but Facebook has no need to stream news feed updates if you aren’t even looking at the page. It really needs to be up to browsers to stop this behaviour…

I'm not sure I follow. Either that or I'm not sure you understand what I'm trying to say.

Turning off Javascript won't suddenly make 900+ tabs easy to manage. The UX isn't designed for that volume of separate pages, the tabs are cumbersome to navigate and still just don't really lend themselves well to large sessions that span multiple topics.

I'd believe the same thing even if Javascript had never been invented, tabs as they exist today aren't suitable for long-term content storage/references. Firefox doesn't even support tab grouping unless you set up another extension to try and hobble in tab tree support.

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#152

Post by wintermutestwin »

hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #133
danShumway wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not going to expand on your point too much, but I've commented similarly in the past, and I heavily agree with you. There's so much room for innovation in browser UX, Bookmarks and tab archival never really evolved and it feels like we're just stuck in the past. Part of the problem is that it's tricky for people to innovate on bookmarks in an accessible way, because I'm not going to do heavy browsing in a 3rd-party C…

I respectfully disagree with both of you. A tab is a bookmark, the fact that tabs are allowed to run background processes and consume a crazy amount of system resources is the problem. Why the hell is JavaScript allowed to run amok? I understand things like Spotify, but Facebook has no need to stream news feed updates if you aren’t even looking at the page. It really needs to be up to browsers to stop this behaviour…

I use Total Suspender to shut down unused tabs and it works fairly well. Unfortunately, YouTube tabs take an overlong time to reload.

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#153

Post by wintermutestwin »

earthscienceman wrote: post #21
animex wrote: 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…

The best solution I've got right now relies on these FF extensions:

Window Titler to have a topic name for each window

Multi-Account Containers to have an account for each window

Temporary Containers when I don't want to use a specific account for a tab

Total Suspender for shutting down all the obnoxious JS that runs in background tabs

In addition, I pin a large # of base sites.

This is all working fairly well, but would be much improved if FF had a Move Tab option that lets me select a specific existing window. DUH - such an obviously useful feature!

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#155

Post by peter_l_downs »

throwaway123x2 wrote: post #38
animex wrote: 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.

Fwiw i left Keep a few years ago because they totally fucked the web client. Wouldn’t work for me on either ff or chrome. Had a few thousand notes. Not sure if it’s any better now but that may be a Keep specific thing

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#156

Post by remram »

jodrellblank wrote: post #141
remram wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My number one annoyance (with Firefox and Auto-Discard extension) is when I open back my tab and get a redirection to some login page. Login, get sent to homepage. Back button sends me to login page. No way to get back to the actual tab I'd left there... That tab is then lost forever, unless I can find it in the history from whenever I had opened the tab.

Two web apps I use every day at work have this behaviour when I look away and my session times out. Both of them break web expectations by having the same generic URL for every page. I leave half a dozen tabs open, come back later or the next day and if I'm not careful to login again in a new tab before I refresh them, they're lost. It's the kind of thing which makes me convinced the developers never use their own sy…

I think one problem of JavaScript routing is that it needs two groups of people to communicate for it to work: the ops people configuring nginx/CDN need to talk with the JavaScript devs making the SPA. Worse, if they get it wrong it will break in subtle ways (e.g. appear to work unless you reload of share a direct link).

A recipe for disaster.

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#157

Post by [deleted] »

floren wrote: post #112
animex wrote: 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…

[deleted]

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#158

Post by hsbauauvhabzb »

danShumway wrote: post #151
hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I respectfully disagree with both of you. A tab is a bookmark, the fact that tabs are allowed to run background processes and consume a crazy amount of system resources is the problem. Why the hell is JavaScript allowed to run amok? I understand things like Spotify, but Facebook has no need to stream news feed updates if you aren’t even looking at the page. It really needs to be up to browsers to stop this behaviour…

I'm not sure I follow. Either that or I'm not sure you understand what I'm trying to say. Turning off Javascript won't suddenly make 900+ tabs easy to manage. The UX isn't designed for that volume of separate pages, the tabs are cumbersome to navigate and still just don't really lend themselves well to large sessions that span multiple topics. I'd believe the same thing even if Javascript had never been invented, tab…

Tab management is a UX problem, same with grouping (I think there’s some plugins that manage tree views).

Tabs should be short lived bookmarks, long lived bookmarks could do with a UX update too.

I’m not saying I have all the answers, and we’re probably both half right. We’ve taken concepts which have been around since I can remember (IE5/6 days) and just run with them for 20 years without many substantial changes.

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#159

Post by bsdetector »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #65
godshatter wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bookmarking systems are completely outdated, but I'm not sure what they should be replaced with. What would help you in this case so you didn't have to worry about losing the tabs if you closed them?

Maybe a sufficiently good implementation of history search could replace the need for bookmarks entirely. Instead of just matching on page titles, match on content as well. Rank results according to relevance and time spent on the page. Or alternately, maybe bookmarks could become an extension of existing tab management features. Something like Chrome's tab groups or the Tree Style Tabs[1] extension for Firefox, but…

History should do an automatic Save As, Complete for every page. History search should do a full-text search. Viewing a page from history should open the saved version, with reload or a button to load the original URL.

These are all obvious ideas for computers with lots of memory and disk space, but browsers are one-size fits all designed for 4 GiB laptops and old phones.

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#160

Post by still_grokking »

Avery3R wrote: post #131
progval wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Long-click the back button to get a list of previous pages in the tab.

Right click for people with real mice

I have a real mouse. I didn't know that until yet!

The long click has still the advantage that you don't need to click more than once: You can just hold the button, mouse-over the wanted entry, and than release the button triggering navigation to the history entry currently under the cursor.

Post reply on HN