321–330 of 346 posts
I've got 732 tabs open at the moment and performance is still fine. The upper limit for my machine seems to be about 745 ish - much beyond that and FF runs out of video memory or something (new tabs render sites half black).
You need to get a better handle on your life.
Why is there still a browser capable of having its performance improve by 400-700%? This browser is a decade old. It is clearly the CPU and RAM hog everyone has said its been.
But you are also quite clearly underestimating how terrible modern browsers are. Mozilla is also currently working on a research browser called "Servo", which has been written completely from scratch and employs a more modern architecture, and that isn't too far away from 400-700% performance increase over other browsers in certain aspects.
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If you don't mind me asking, what are you doing that you have 875 tabs open? How are you able to keep track of what you opened, and where etc? I tend to feel anxious and unfocussed when I've got over a dozen or so open - at which point i'll dump some "I'd like to read this" articles into a bookmarks folder which I work through in my down-time, and clean out periodically.
I would like to spend some words saying how good is the tab-unloading thing. I have an extension that basically unloads a tab (I guess it freezes the state and serializes it to disk) and frees its ram. It works very well, so well I'd love to use it on my phone too.
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Funniest thing is that FF memory usage didn't go down that much. For me it is even higher.
I'm currently at a little over 1 GB with 8 tabs open. I really wish I had the option to trade off responsiveness for memory usage by being able to mark tabs as "no background activity allowed" so FF could serialize that content to disk when the tab isn't in focus.
> so FF could serialize that content to disk when the tab isn't in focus
Isn't there an extension (Suspend Tab?) which does this?
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> I've been a long time Firefox user (due to multi-row tab extension -- can't live without it). Which one do you use? There are several.
I can suggest a few for tab management: Tab Mix Plus [1] TooManyTabs [2] Tree Style Tab [3] Use one or more of these with the Session Manager [4] extension and life becomes a lot easier with several hundreds of tabs. I highly recommend looking at the configuration options provided by each of these extensions and adapting them to how you'd like them to behave. Some of these are also developed with compatibility with t…
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>> by being able to mark tabs as "no background activity allowed" > What if you spent a few hours filling out some government form online, then you went and took a break by watching a few YouTube videos? Memory usage might spike up, and the browser decides to unload the tab with the form. You'd be mad if form state got lost when you switched back. GP is talking about actively marking tabs as "no background activity a…
> I have been searching in vain for something like that: stop scripts in background tabs except for specifically whitelisted pages. Have you tried UnloadTab? https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/unloadtab/
If it is unloaded that means I have to connect to the Internet again to get hold of my page again?
(I'd think what I want is just to pause any javascript or other processing from any webpage that us not focused in the browser and not specifically whitelisted.)
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They're getting worse at a linear pace, while hardware improves exponentially. Effectively that's a pretty good improvement each year.
My hardware doesn't improve exponentially. In fact, my current work laptop has less memory (8G) than my previous one (16G) or previous desktop machine (also 16G). And it mostly works with Chrome, but I stopped using Firefox because my habit of opening dozens of tabs led to stratospheric memory usages that killed even 16G machines. That was somewhere in 2013, looks like it's even worse now?
That indicates really poor buying decisions! I'm curious about why would this happen.
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I've found Firefox performance to be absolutely awful at work on OS X. I have no issues at all with it at home on Linux, and didn't have any issues in my previous job on OS X either. I'm not sure if it's OS X specific, a change in recent versions, this laptop being underpowered, or the nature of the work I do (a lot of video stuff), but anything JS heavy severely slows down or locks up the browser. And if anything, i…
I've actually had the opposite experience. I work on Firefox support for a very heavy Angular2 app, and I usually see 2-3x faster reflows on OS X (and Windows) than on Linux, and faster paints too (although I haven't taken exact numbers, since reflows are the bottleneck). It seems that at least the graphics pipeline is much better optimized for OS X/Windows than Linux.
Afaik firefox still doesn't have OpenGL accelerated compositing (at least not enabled in stable builds yet) on linux
On OSX and Windows it has hardware accelerated compositing, video decoding, canvas etc...
Its incredible multi-process took this long. Just goes to show you that your architecture decisions last a long time and are often difficult to change. Chrome had this from day one and never had a big and old codebase to worry about. Yet it took Firefox many years to get multi-process going and my understanding is that its much more limited and simpler than what Chrome or Edge do. I'm also a little surprised there ha…
> I'm also a little surprised there hasn't been an attempt to launch a completely new Firefox from the ground up. It's interesting how the history goes. We had Netscape 4, and it was crap (remember when resizing a window reloaded the whole page?) So they was a ground-up rewrite of the rendering engine, resulting in Gecko, which was put in Mozilla. Gecko was great but Mozilla was a bloaty amalgamation of features, so…
I highly doubt it, as there's very little incentive to create a gecko based browser vs a webkit or chromium based browser.