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Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

hacks.mozilla.org

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Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#91

Post by marcosdumay »

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.

Hum... Firefox breaking on some Google site is surprising, but not extremely so.

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#92

Post by diamondo25 »

I actually installed Firemin[1] and it really helped getting Firefox's memory usage down (while keeping the browser usable!). Some days I wasn't able to play games because Firefox ate up a large chunk of memory, even though I have 32GB installed!

Its pushing Firefox to purge memory more and more, and it managed to reduce memory usage from gigabytes to under 500MB (used, not allocated).

[1] https://www.rizonesoft.com/downloads/firemin/

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#93

Post by gostsamo »

gsvelto wrote: post #85
gostsamo wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that the issue is known, but hard to track. It shows with NVDA and heavy web apps like Twitter and Messenger if they are running for some time. I'm posting here some of the crash ids, but it is likely that they are not representative. When the browser starts to clock up, it locks the screen reader as well and I'm not waiting for the crash, but kill the process with extreme prejudice. I'd be glad to help in an…

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.

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#94

Post by tomjen3 »

godshatter wrote: post #42
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…

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?

How can they be outdated? I have a bookmark folder at work related to some internal systems that I need to access to do a specific job. Being able to open a bunch of specific URLs at once and then have access to what I need right away is really, really nice and I haven't found any other way to get close.

The same with youtube videos (I like to run hour long videos that create a soundscapes in the background), it is super easy to create a collection that you can open with just a few clicks.

This doesn't mean bookmarks are a substitute for lots of tabs, but I still think bookmarks have a place.

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#95

Post by smw »

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…

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...

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#96

Post by SilasX »

vbezhenar wrote: post #67
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…

AFAIK whether page will be restored or reloaded depends on its cache headers. I remember breaking back button in one of my projects, because users asked for it, as they expected fresh data for some reason. It was not SPA, just old server rendered website, so I disabled caching via response headers and it worked.

Hm I'm going to see if there's a setting to override a site's choice of that header.

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#97

Post by billfor »

Kliment wrote: post #34
ihsw wrote: post #2

It'd be great if this was tunable and usable in non-OOM scenarios.

It is if you add Total Suspender.

Total suspender is great not just for memory but for CPU. I reduced a lot of unnecessary CPU consumption by having the tabs not in focus frozen after a few minutes.

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#98

Post by asdff »

Y_Y wrote: post #81
asdff wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the documentation site is worth its salt it will allow you to download a local html copy or even pdf. I personally haven't seen a documentation site that doesn't let you do this, since its important to store your documentation locally in the event the website goes down (happened to me so its not out of the question).

Often your browser can do this. It's especially easy if you can view the documentation on a single page. Pagination on mostly-text sites is a bizarre habit that's about as necessary as a screensaver.

It's especially baffling with the pagination when the source document the website is generated from is a single markdown document on github most of the time. Just give me that. It's a computer, I don't have to thumb through pages like a bound book, i can ctrl f for my topics.

Re: Tab Unloading in Firefox 93

#100

Post by marcosdumay »

favorited wrote: post #24
MayeulC wrote: post #12

> On Windows, Firefox gets a notification from the operating system (setup using CreateMemoryResourceNotification) indicating that the available physical memory is running low. I've longed for such a mechanism in Linux, but I don't think it exists. This should at least be an OS-level signal IMO, though a D-Bus interface could also work. Integrating with one of the recent userspace OOM daemons could be a good idea.

IIRC on Linux, it overcommits when allocating, so you can keep mallocing memory beyond capacity and it won't actually fail until you go to use that memory.

The GP is describing a signal that your application can react to, not a behavior of allocation failure.

Linux could use some improvement on both. The idea that you always have enough swap and can send everything not used there is wrong. Applications know better how they behave a low-memory than the kernel.

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