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Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

hacks.mozilla.org

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Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#201

Post by gcp »

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.

Paste a few links from about:crashes here. If you click on them, you might find the associated bug (if it exists).

Firefox should literally never crash. If it does, that's a serious bug (but especially on Windows, not necessarily in Firefox itself).

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#202

Post by gcp »

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…

Paste a few links from about:crashes here. If you click on them, you might find the associated bug (if it exists).

Firefox should literally never crash. If it does, that's a serious bug (but especially on Windows, not necessarily in Firefox itself).

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#203

Post by easygenes »

eloisius wrote: post #187
yunohn wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not an angle I’ve heard before - how does an SPA save money?

It’s cheaper to build single page apps using web developers than to build and maintain multiple platform-specific native apps.

So the smaller-scale correlate would be that SPAs can make more sense for proof-of-concept or hobby-developed applications that need some cross-platform access.

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#204

Post by gcp »

gostsamo wrote: post #93
gsvelto wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately those crashes do not appear to be related to low memory scenarios. They seem to be genuine bugs in the screen reader. I think the right bug tracking them is this one: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1691928

As I said, usually I don't wait for a full crash so there is a survival bias in those ids.

The original ticket seems to indicate this is a leak in a Windows accessibility service and so far there was no luck in finding a way to avoid it. That sucks.

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#205

Post by gcp »

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.

People on low memory machines, or people on big boxes that read some article about how swap makes your SSD die and tried to disable Windows swapping (or downloaded some "optimization" tool that does that). The last is explicitly hinted in the article. There's a surprising amount of people in that situation.

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#206

Post by gcp »

kazinator wrote: post #68

> 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…

>No thanks, I'd rather get more RAM or swap space for paging.

As the article explains, if you have enough swap you'll never trigger this. It activates right before you'd have crashed otherwise.

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#207

Post by gcp »

vlovich123 wrote: post #184

> As long as there is still swap AND physical memory available, there is no problem. If we run out of physical memory and there is swap, performance will crater due to paging, but we won’t crash. That's a disheartening stance to hear. The browser should be actively evicting work before I start swapping if it's using more than some small percentage of overall RSS. If my IDE decides it needs more RAM for code completio…

That's definitely something we would want to do, but it requires a (very) reliable measurement method for this kind of memory pressure.

If it's not reliable, the browser unloads tabs when it's not needed, and that's way more annoying.

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#208

Post by [deleted] »

NoGravitas wrote: post #61
SilasX wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This! I feel like Back used to get instant results all the time, and now it's almost always a big delay, which is a huge pain -- plus, it loses your position on infiniscroll and other dark patterns. Part of it is caused by site coding, but part of it is browsers treating "back" as some species of new page load/arrival/selection. And I know it's possible to get us back to the old days! The functionality I want is almo…

Back basically works like it always did on static sites. Blame the fashion for single-page apps and endless scrolling for it being broken.

[deleted]

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#209

Post by agent327 »

masklinn wrote: post #195
Waterluvian wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only recently when I flew backwards through about 50 history steps (entirely different webpages) on my phone did I think more deeply about how impressive it was that it was so seamless.

Sadly lots of modern sites break it completely. I regularly have issues getting back to HN threads from websites, usually I end up at the HN home instead. Quite frustrating.

This should help, if it ever gets implemented: https://mozilla.crowdicity.com/post/728459

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#210

Post by gcp »

kevingadd wrote: post #8
ksec wrote: post #3

I left Firefox for a number of years already. Did Firefox changed its Tab Unloading behaviour? I remember Firefox will unload Tabs that are inactive after a period of time. So having OOM crash on Firefox was a relatively rare occurrence even when I had hundreds if not thousands of tabs.

I've never seen Firefox unload an inactive tab without my permission, but it looks like according to the docs it's had a 'memory is low, unload tabs' mechanism since 2019. It looks like that behavior was further adjusted in this release, though it's not clear to me what the difference is.

>though it's not clear to me what the difference is

This one works well enough that we can default it on :-)

The previous one didn't reliably detect low memory situations and you could crash with OOM before it ever triggered. The article goes into detail about the various signals that have to be monitored on Windows. We had to do some work on gathering the metrics and correlating with crash data to determine when to trigger.

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