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Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

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Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#251

Post by BikeHelmet »

danShumway wrote: post #243
brokenmachine wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Turning off Javascript won't suddenly make 900+ tabs easy to manage. I'm fine with searching. I want to have searchable fulltext in those 900+ tabs. Just for a back of the napkin calculation, I took the plain text from this comments page and saved it, and it came to 52kb. My PC has 64Gb RAM. So even without any form of compression or indexing, I should be able to hold searchable fulltext of over a million tabs in RA…

Again, I'm not sure what you're arguing about. I just said "the UX here is due for a lot of innovation." And you replied "I want to have searchable fulltext in those 900+ tabs." Where is the conflict? Yes, you could build a really interesting tab/bookmarking system in a browser that blurred the lines between tabs and bookmarks and archival. You could do really interesting things with browser history, you could do rea…

Just FYI, but Opera does search the full page contents of every tab when using the tab search located next to the minimize button. The browser seems to be one of the only ones innovating right now, at least for power users.

Edit: Now if only they'd fix their bookmark system!

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#252

Post by BikeHelmet »

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.

Just throwing it out there - most software and OS's adapt to fit hardware constraints. I was running 32GB of RAM, and regularly hit 20-24GB of use in my web browser. When I switched to 128GB of RAM and reloaded my session, my web browser expanded its use to 40-44GB and performed a lot better. While Firefox may be working with 6GB, it may work a lot better with 16GB, for example.

The crashes could be some addon or other profile feature interfering with Firefox's stability. I had a profile that I migrated from FF 1.x, and I finally had to put that one to rest...

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#253

Post by BikeHelmet »

hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #137
floren wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Recently switched to chrome as a many tab used, it’s less stable than Firefox for me.

You may want to try Opera. I found it more stable than Chrome, at least after spending an hour in the Settings and about:flags disabling all the extra features that I didn't need.

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#254

Post by dredmorbius »

BikeHelmet wrote: post #249
dredmorbius wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's actually surprisingly stable and usable. Which may contribute to the problem ;-) Tabs only load once directly viewed, so a session restore opens pretty quickly and doesn't actually use all that much memory. After a time, as more tabs are visited (and yes, I really do try to shut some down with time), the session eventually gets less usable, though that can take many days (I've not tracked this). Moving and searc…

I found that Chrome destabilized and black-screened a lot when I had 1500+ tabs open, but Opera oddly enough did not. Opera seems to have slightly better memory management and background tab handling. (Puts them to sleep better.) That said, it does still take a very long time to reopen that many tabs. That's where stability comes in... you don't want to have to close and reopen your web browser throughout the day, if…

For Chrome, I think I usually manage to keep it under ~100 tabs, desktop.

Actually, far less than that as I've stopped using it entirely.

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#255

Post by MrDresden »

exikyut wrote: post #236
MrDresden wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be fascinated to hear how it works in practice to have that many tabs active? Are you able to digest them in any reasonable fashion or even find content later on when you need it? I can't relate to that amount of tabs, but do have an upper limit of around 100 at which time I start actively trimming them down (either dismiss as having lost importance, digest or bookmark for later digestion). My bookmarks steadily…

You had me at "My bookmarks are ... tabbed". Please tell me I'm missing something and that there's a way to do this in Chrome so I can access the tags on my phone???? I have about 30,000 unsorted bookmarks. Yes. Because I need tagging.

I'm not sure about Chrome, as I use Firefox.

Sadly Firefox does (for some peculiar reason) not give acceess to the tags on the mobile browser.

So I navigate by folder hiearchy on mobile; read > professional > development > android > db for instance.

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#256

Post by Izkata »

skinkestek wrote: post #239
agent327 wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Nice idea. Again something that used to work in Firefox. FWIW: I use Tree Style Tabs (or Sideberry) to see why I arrived at a page. Not exactly the thing specified here but it works today.

> Again something that used to work in Firefox.

Yeeep, I used it for a while: https://archive.is/ovRDX (addon no longer exists, it broke with Firefox Quantum)

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#257

Post by hansel_der »

wintermutestwin wrote: post #153
earthscienceman wrote: post #21

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…

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 w…

have a look at sideberry

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#258

Post by hsbauauvhabzb »

Kliment wrote: post #215
hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slack is still trash. I segregate browsers by using different Linux users for different tasks (slack, Facebook, general, etc) which works well with my similarly bespoke workflow. The problem with this arrangement is that When Firefox has pending system upgrades it requires all browsers be closed and reopened. I’m curious about your productivity hack though, I use a grid keyboard layout with ~20 workspaces grouped to…

I do electronics. I keep my BOM entries as tabs, with a tab for each major component, its distributor page, and often its manufacturer page where the documentation lives. Different projects have their parts chunked together as bunches of tabs, so I can search my tabs for a part number and get that and everything else in the same project is nearby in the tab list. I currently have >3000 tabs open.

Interesting, in your use case, would having like ‘multi page bookmarks’ work?

How many vendors are there? If there’s a small pool maybe scraping their datasets would work well also

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#259

Post by exikyut »

MrDresden wrote: post #255
exikyut wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You had me at "My bookmarks are ... tabbed". Please tell me I'm missing something and that there's a way to do this in Chrome so I can access the tags on my phone???? I have about 30,000 unsorted bookmarks. Yes. Because I need tagging.

I'm not sure about Chrome, as I use Firefox. Sadly Firefox does (for some peculiar reason) not give acceess to the tags on the mobile browser. So I navigate by folder hiearchy on mobile; read > professional > development > android > db for instance.

> Sadly Firefox does (for some peculiar reason) not give acceess to the tags on the mobile browser.

Oh. TIL. That's... a bit of an unexpected shortcoming I wasn't aware of. Hmm...

(My Chrome session is big enough that I don't quite have the RAM to play with Firefox, which I was coincidentally last playing with just as the WebExtensions update kicked in and broke my UI setup. Welp.)

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#260

Post by mcovey »

bogidon wrote: post #77
swang wrote: 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,…

I was surprised recently to learn about the back/forward cache (bfcache) [1], a common browser optimization that sort of does what you're describing but stores a more complete snapshot of the page, including the JS heap. I'm not sure if it's used in this new FF feature (the article doesn't give details about the mechanism of unloading). However the bfcache unsurprisingly causes edge cases in JS-heavy pages/SPAs, and…

Opera (with the Presto engine) used to do this really well.
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