[21echoes]

> But I remember the times when we had the amazing Opera browser. In Opera, I could have a hundred open tabs, and it didn’t care, it worked incredibly fast on the hardware of its era, useless today. You may ask: why would a sane person want a hundred open tabs, how would you even manage that? Well, Opera has had a great UI for that, which nobody has ever matched. Working with a hundred tabs in Opera was much easier back then than working with ten in today’s Safari or Chrome. But that’s a whole different story. What would you do today if you opened a link and saw a long article which you don’t have time to read right now, but want to read later? You would save a link and close the tab. But when your browser is fast, you just don’t tend to close tabs which you haven’t dealt with. In Opera, I would let tabs stay open for months without having any impact on my machine’s performance.

This is exactly how I'm using Firefox, right now -- 273 tabs open. It's sitting at ~5% of CPU and 450MB of RAM. And switching tabs is instantaneous. And it doesn't reload every page when I quit and restart my browser -- it only loads a tab when I click into that tab. And it has tab groups so that my current group has only about 8 tabs in it, and the other groups are sorted by topic. And on and on.

I find it frustrating when people post these articles as if everyone has this problem, and don't provide enough details as to their setup so that people can help them fix it. I promise you -- if everyone around the world right now had the problem the author was having, it would have been solved. No one would stand for it. Rather than assume everyone is suffering just like you, assume that other people either a) don't behave the way you do, or b) have found a way to fix the problem.

[owaislone]

> This is exactly how I'm using Firefox, right now -- 273 tabs open. It's sitting at ~5% of CPU and 450MB of RAM. And switching tabs is instantaneous.

Which platform are you on? Which Firefox version? Stock or tweaked? Any special add-ons? I use Firefox on OS X and it crawls after 10-15 tabs. Consumes many gigs of memory. Chrome isn't any better. It just splits the memory consumption among multiple processes.

I don't remember browsers being this slow on Linux. Time to go back to the magic land.

[jholman]

400 tabs. Including several active fancy SPAs, like gMail and two copies of Slack, a gDocs or two, sometimes the godawful work LMS.

Stock Firefox 50 (32bit), untweaked with no relevant add-ons (well, except AdBlock Plus), Windows 10, just over 400 tabs open, under 10% CPU, under 2GB of RAM (on a 16GB machine). If I freak it out by doing a bunch of flipping through dormant tabs, I can spike CPU pretty good as it does layout on fifty tabs at once, but who cares, I don't do that. I do find that I need to restart my browser every few hundred tab open/close cycles, which takes under 30 seconds (just did the restart, that dropped RAM use to 1.3GB, but it'll get back up to 1.9 pretty soon). Restarts used to be a lot less frequent, and a lot faster, before work required me to keep two slack clients open. Running multiple YouTube windows at once seems to be bad for uptime.

Regarding OP's complaints, opening a new tab take imperceptible time, a new window is about half a second (only marginally slower than notepad), and switching tabs can be done several times per second.

I have put ZERO effort into make Firefox run faster, unless you count running AdBlock. I haven't even bothered to figure out which is the best adblocker.

Why do people use Chrome, again?

(edit to add a few details)

[rangibaby]

People use Chrome because Google (Alphabet?) advertises it heavily including a nag screen on google.com. Also Firefox goes through noticeable cycles of being awesome and being a buggy slow mess.

Chrome came out when Firefox was in a noticeable slump. Remember that in ?2008 being better than IE was the yardstick browsers were measured by and Firefox had passed that many years earlier, so I think they had lost their way a little bit. I remember Firefox 4 was noticeably bad on OSX and it took a long time to fix.

PS I use a browser salad daily (Safari and two channels of Firefox so I can have two instances open at once, and Chrome for Facebook / flash / testing).

[roddux]

To save on having to have two versions of Firefox, you can start a new instance with:

  $ firefox --no-remote --new-instance --profile /path/to/alt/profile

[Fnoord]

Try uBlock Origin. It performs even better than ABP, and hasn't sold out.

[_asummers]

uBlock Matrix is good too, if you want to manage all the things. You basically white/blacklist all the image, css, xhr, etc. requests on the page and can set up rules like allow iframe from youtube.com on all sites, to allow the embed youtube frame to show up on pages. Many sites are broken on first load until you get your rules straight but they're trivially fixed. You just click on boxes to allow or deny the particular thing.

HN looks like: http://i.imgur.com/lfjkhkl.png

[rekshaw]

I myself made the switch from both Adblock and Adblock Plus to uBlock Origin, best decision ever!

[PhasmaFelis]

Can we stop the "sellout" business? Having a clearly stated and one-click reversible whitelist is neither dishonest nor bad for the user. I like having the option to support sites I enjoy without massively inconveniencing myself. You prefer maximum adblocking, and that's fine, but there's nothing at all wrong with giving us both the choice.

[Fnoord]

> Can we stop the "sellout" business? Having a clearly stated and one-click reversible whitelist is neither dishonest nor bad for the user.

It is dishonest and bad for the general public. Users expect their adblocker to block adds; not block 'some' adds because of Mafia practices, or corruption (ie. advertising companies paying large, inappropriate sums of money to the company behind ABP in order to be whitelisted by default).

> I like having the option to support sites I enjoy without massively inconveniencing myself.

You can still do this on a case-by-case scenario with uBlock Origin.

> You prefer maximum adblocking, and that's fine, but there's nothing at all wrong with giving us both the choice.

This is false dichotomy. You have the same very choice with uBlock Origin. And uMatrix for that matter. I'm also not taking away your choice; nothing prevents you from installing and using ABP. What I will not do is stopping calling what ABP does sellout. Because as I argued above it is corruption.

On top of that, uBlock Origin is performance-wise better than ABP [1].

[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock#performance

[PhasmaFelis]

> It is dishonest and bad for the general public. Users expect their adblocker to block adds

You still seem to be under the impression that ABP is deceptive. It's not. It explains the "acceptable ads" list and gives you the option to disable it first thing after install. It is not doing anything without the user's knowledge. They're providing a perfectly honest service that you aren't interested in, and you think they should feel bad for that.

> You can still do this on a case-by-case scenario with uBlock Origin.

I specifically said without inconveniencing myself. Building up custom adblock settings for various sites is a chore and I have better things to do with my time. I choose to use a product that takes care of that chore for me, for the most part. You choose to take the time to personalize things, and that's fine; I've done the same in other circumstances. But that's a personal choice, not a moral one.

[imagist]

> I like having the option to support sites I enjoy without massively inconveniencing myself.

So do I, which is why I use Patreon and subscriptions.

The side effects of viewing ads are that in addition to supporting the sites you enjoy, you're supporting malware distributors, and helping companies compete on ads rather than the quality of their products. Maybe you don't care about your own attention or data security, but your actions don't just affect you.

[PhasmaFelis]

> The side effects of viewing ads are that in addition to supporting the sites you enjoy, you're supporting malware distributors

No, I'm not, because I'm using ABP's vetted ad provider list. This risk of getting malware from one of those is greater than zero, but a whole lot less than the risk I accept by using the internet at all. I might get struck by lightning too, but I don't waste a lot of time worrying about it.

> and helping companies compete on ads rather than the quality of their products.

I'm sorry, you do not get to blame me for the continued existence of capitalism. That's just ridiculous.

> Maybe you don't care about your own attention or data security, but your actions don't just affect you.

Once again, you are trying to turn your personal software preference into a moral issue. My actions re:AdBlock affect you or anyone else exactly as much as my choice of desktop wallpaper.

[kahnpro]

I don't know what Firefox you're using but I always find it very slow and sluggish compared to Chrome.

Especially Google maps and YouTube. I always have to switch over to Chrome to use these sites because they always bring FF to its knees. I wonder if this is deliberate on the part of Google.

[annnnd]

FF on Linux. Don't use maps, but YouTube works as it should (but then again, I only allow youtube.com, ytimg.com and googlevideo.com via NoScript).

It might be deliberate, at least in sense that MS pages never worked properly on Netscape / Firefox / Konqueror /... in the days of IE dominance.

[Certhas]

On a 4 year old MacBook Air running Firefox, google maps takes a second or so to open fully, after browsing around in two google maps windows for a while my memory usage is stable at 1.25GB.

[mirsadm]

Firefox is pretty sluggish for me on my MBP. It sits around 20% CPU usage idling on certain web sites. Playing back videos makes the fans spin up. It's just terribly slow.

[com2kid]

> Stock Firefox 50 (32bit), untweaked with no relevant add-ons (well, except AdBlock Plus),

Same setup, but my Firefox leaks memory like a sieve. It will crash 2x a day easily.

That said, I also have LastPass installed, I am using uBlock instead of ABP (though uBlock uses less memory anyway), and I also have RES installed.

I have seen websites leak incredible amounts of memory. To some extent I don't even know how much it matters what browser is used, if the JS is bad enough.

[philbo]

> That said, I also have LastPass installed...

That's your problem, right there.

I've been told that the main version of LastPass currently available from addons.mozilla.org has known problems that cause the browser to lock up and hang indefinitely.

Instead, if you click through to list all releases and select the latest 4.x version, those problems should all be fixed:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/lastpass-pass...

[joosters]

That's odd - it turned out I had version 3.3.2 installed, I wonder why the auto-upgrade didn't happen? Are the 4.x versions beta releases?

[yoklov]

Yes, IIRC. They're still imperfect and can lag the browser quite a bit IME, but what can you do... Switching to a different password manager is not easy, and the ones I've looked at all have this/other problems.

[timonovici]

My worst problems were with Toptal's website. I even tweeted them about it, but it still leaked memory like crazy. Maybe they fixed it already, but I wouldn't know - they didn't have articles that interest me in a while.

Anyway. I have Firefox with uBlock, on Archlinux. With JS disabled. 400MB, about a hundred tabs. I do recommend using it that way. I also have Chromium, for things that require JS - youtube, facebook and the like.

[kutkloon7]

How can a site leak memory? Javascripts is garbage-collected.

[bzbarsky]

Easy: add it to something that's alive while the site is alive. Here's an example that leaks some memory every 100ms while you have the site open:

  window.leakyArr = [];
  function leakStuff() {
    leakyArr.push("This is leaked" + Math.random());
  }
  setInterval(leakStuff, 100);

Of course if you unload the page this will all be collected. But if you have a page you leave open for a long time and it does stuff like this, it's possible for the page to use hundreds of megabytes of RAM. In fact, twitter does just that if you leave it open for a day or three, for reasons more or less like the above: they're showing or caching all the stuff that came in since you opened the page. That's more and more stuff as time goes on.

[SeanDav]

Nearly 400 tabs open across several browser windows. Firefox with Tabmix plus and noscript addons. Performance and memory use is very comfortable with very few browser crashes.

I use Chrome for websites that use huge amounts of JavaScript links, which are pain to use with noscript. Chrome does not like a lot of tabs open and chews up memory and performance if forced to run large numbers of tabs.

[Robin_f]

This is mostly because Chrome starts a new process for each tab. However, Firefox is also heading in this direction.

[traviswatkins]

Firefox is going for at most N+1 cores worth of processes, as I understand it (one per core for websites and one extra for compositing and the UI) and is doing to use cooperative threading (Quantum DOM) to improve responsiveness within those processes without the overhead of running a process per website.

[Robin_f]

Alright, good to know. I had the idea that they were going in the same direction as Chrome.

[Crespyl]

It's my understanding that Chrome is 1:1, while Firefox is M tabs on N threads, which has been a decent compromise in my experience so far.

[pawadu]

10 minutes and 2-3 tabs on thingiverse.com can easily bring my firefox to its knees.

I think its a combination of badly written code, webgl and maybe even adblocker breaking some otherwise mostly working code.

[barrkel]

I opened up 12 tabs on thingiverse.com on FF, clicking on random links on the page, scrolled to the bottom of several of the expanding lists, and desktop Slack (implemented using Electron) is still consuming more CPU than FF on my laptop.

(Lots of extensions, including Tree Style Tabs, Session Manager, Tab Mix Plus, uBlock Origin, RefControl, Cookie Controller, etc.)

[pawadu]

close everything, restart the browser, go to thinigiverse, open some random design pages and browse a few of the design files (the blue ones).

now watch your memory and CPU usage :)

[dzhiurgis]

> Why do people use Chrome, again?

Oh you are like my mother. I do appreciate Firefox respect for standards, but their UI hasn't innovated since 90s. Two months ago it took me 20 minutes on my moms Windows laptop to find current version of Firefox! It lacks unified search bar, tab expose, even some basic hotkeys are backwards.

I can't believe it uses so little resources though. It's not uncommon to see a single tab use 400 MB of memory on Chrome/Safari.

[pokemongoaway]

I have some similar usage patterns... I really hope this is true because I think you just inspired me to switch from Chrome to Firefox! Chrome can't handle 100 (w/ a bunch of apps like Gmail) on a fully loaded Macbook very well. The only other thing I'd use is a few Chrome apps like Keep and Signal.

[varjag]

This Firefox instance I reply from has a bit under 1.3Gb allocated, with 7 open tabs. Three of the tabs are primitive blog articles, a couple weren't even loaded until I clicked on them now. Adblock Plus, PassFF and NextPlease are the only extensions running; I remember though the extensions didn't make a dent in memory footprint.

[mapcars]

>400 tabs >like gMail and two copies of Slack, a gDocs or two, sometimes the godawful work LMS. >under 10% CPU, under 2GB of RAM

Any proofs? Stock firefox can't go further than 100 tabs, and you can't do literally anything else on your computer at that time.

[bzbarsky]

> Stock firefox can't go further than 100 tabs

about:tabs (see https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-stats/ ) is showing me "151 tabs" and "57 tabs have been loaded" for my current session. The other 90-some I haven't looked at this session, so they're left unloaded. I can post a screenshot, but I could fake that just as easily as I could fake my claims above, so it's not any more "proof".

I'm certainly doing other things right now (e.g. compiling).

It _really_ depends on what you have in your 100 tabs. If you have 100 copies of gmail, you're more likely to have a bad time than if you have 100 sane pages. ;)

[errnoh]

I have to one up this one.

After being burned by incompatible bookmark formats years ago (I used to keep everything in bookmarks that were tagged within firefox) I ended up with a habit that whenever I have something that I want to read (or refer to) later I leave it open in a tab.

Only browser that could handle this habit was indeed Firefox, running on Windows 7. How it usually went down was that whenever I hit 1000 tabs I reserved some time to read what was worth reading and close tabs that weren't interesting anymore, until I was down to about 200-500. I didn't use addons much, I remember only having vertical tab list, one of the (ad)blockers and an addon that displayed current tab count below the tab list.

That setup had 8GB of RAM, and I didn't have problems playing games without closing the browser. IIRC it usually reserved around 2-4GB. When I installed Windows 10 on the same machine the browser had 1370 tabs open. I know I still have the sessionstore.js backup somewhere, but I did start from 0 again with the new install.

I'm quite sure that some Mozilla people have noticed my crash reports every now and then :) (though mostly the browser was running fine without problems)

I've since started to use things like Google Keep and Stash to keep the tab count down a bit. Browser that I'm currently on has 229 tabs open, mostly temporary, work related things.

[newscracker]

> Stock firefox can't go further than 100 tabs, and you can't do literally anything else on your computer at that time.

Perhaps it's because of what else is running on your system and your system's hardware and OS. I regularly use Firefox with a few hundred tabs open across a couple of windows. On Windows, I find that if I have IE or Edge or Chrome running, each with a few tabs, most of my RAM just goes to them. I also hibernate my system and restart it only once every few weeks.

I use several extensions with Firefox too:

- uBlock Origin (block ads)

- Privacy Badger (tracking blocker)

- Perspectives (distributed certificate checks and better error handling)

- HTTPS Everywhere (default to https on sites and avoid plain http)

- Self-Destructing Cookies (self-destruct cookies for a tab after closing it)

- Tab Mix Plus (better tab management)

- Session Manager (better session management between restarts)

- Tree Style Tab (hierarchical tab list management)

- TooManyTabs (almost self-explanatory)

- Lazarus (save form data to restore or reuse)

- Link Alert (so I know if a link is a file or an internal site link or external site link or a popup and can then decide if I want to click it)

- FoxyProxy (switch proxies easily)

- Foxclocks (handy clocks in different times zones)

- DownThemAll (easier downloads of multiple items, which I need occasionally)

- and many more

Although I experience slow starts and long shutdowns, in general, and in comparison, the browser is not RAM hungry compared to opening just a couple of tabs on Internet Explorer/Edge or about ten tabs or so in Chrome (with fewer extensions than above in Chrome). On OS X/macOS though, Firefox seems more RAM hungry, is a bit more sluggish and consumes more energy than Safari.

Shutting down the browser and opening it again will also help since Firefox by default does not load tabs until they get the focus (this "load tabs on demand" behavior has been around for quite sometime). It will load some stuff from the cache though. One more thing you can try is create a new profile (take care to get bookmarks from the old one) and see if that avoids any problems with extensions or other cruft in the older profile.

[jholman]

> Any proofs?

Ha ha, what proof would satisfy you, where my word does not, O doubting Thomas? If I was going to lie to you on HN, I'd also be able to fake a screenshot. Maybe you'd like administrator access to my machine, so you can satisfy your smug certainty of what is not possible?

I haven't had my FF (stock plus a few plugins) under 300 tabs in months. It doesn't stop me from playing AAA titles, max settings at high resolution, at 30-60 fps. Sometimes while running a VM (because Windows is a gaming OS, not a work OS). I only mention that to disabuse you of the claim that...

> you can't do literally anything else on your computer at that time

I assure you, I can.

[hashhar]

I have stock on 153 tabs with two processes each using 670MB of memory (1.3 GB total) and CPU is at a comfortable 1.5% + 0.9% (2.4%).

EDIT: Oh, I do have 22 extensions installed.

[1]: http://i.imgur.com/Epkfydj.png

[sebtoast]

My Firefox goes higher than 100 tabs, I've actually installed an add-on called Max Tabs to limit it to 100 tabs.

[pfisch]

That is not my experience. Maybe the mac version isn't so great?

[slededit]

To be fair a 32-bit process couldn't use more than 2GB even if it wanted to.

/LARGEADRESSAWARE would give it access to an extra gig but needs to be compiled that way.

[reitanqild]

Firefox Developer on KDE Neon (stock KDE 5 on Ubuntu LTS).

Tab Tree (instead of TreeStyleTabs) and Suspend Tab (instead of UnloadTab.)

Edit: and yes, Linux often feels like magic land. I happen to like Windows 10 better than most earlier Windowses but a good Linux is better for me as a developer on every point except support for MS Office and (niche) tools.

[TeMPOraL]

> and yes, Linux often feels like magic land.

Yes, the browsers (Chrome, Firefox) work noticeably worse than on Windows for me. Also they tend to freeze the computer completely at some point (after taking all the available RAM for themselves).

Browser performance seems to be pretty much as random as printers these days.

[21echoes]

Mac El Capitan, FirefoxDeveloperEdition (which iirc is basically equivalent to Firefox Beta), not many addons (Tab Groups, uBlock Origin, No More 404s).

[abrowne]

> FirefoxDeveloperEdition (which iirc is basically equivalent to Firefox Beta)

The Developer Edition replaced Aurora, which was the alpha release, one version between the beta and Nightly.

[lagadu]

AKA: the alpha :)

Credit to them though, Aurora was surprisingly stable for most of its lifetime, despite not even being a beta.

[nicoburns]

Even more impressive, the Nightly versions of both Chrome and Firefox are (almost always) stable enough for daily use. I use them as my everyday browsers at work, and they probably crash / have bugs about 1 day out of every 2 months.

[abrowne]

Agreed. I started using Nightly — instead of my usually Beta¹ — for the up-to-date GTK+ 3.2x compatibility, but I like some of the pre-release features, and it almost never crashes on me

1: On Ubuntu you can use their Firefox Beta PPA² as long as you don't mind that it replaces release-version Firefox.

2: https://launchpad.net/~mozillateam/+archive/ubuntu/firefox-n...

[hashhar]

I started using Nightly for kicks and giggle around 6 months ago and my about:crashes shows me only 6 crashes (none of which were able to kill anything more than a tab (and in all the cases, the offending website was YouTube)).

Nightly is amazingly good even if it is built from the HEAD of the trunk (branch in git terms).

[debacle]

If you have Flash installed and don't have an adblocker, for most textual content (not Imgur, YouTube), your browser is working 10x harder than it needs to.

[nothrabannosir]

not Imgur, YouTube

It's depressing that an image viewing site and a video playing site are in the same list of resource uses. YouTube plays 1080p videos. Imgur shows photos. It's a testament to the brazen disrespect of client resources that went into building the latter.

If you're viewing imgur without ad blocker your computer isn't working 10x harder than it should, but 100x.

[CaptSpify]

I remember when imgur was started because there were no good image sharing sites. They were all bulky, slow and terrible. imgur came along and made sharing images easy. Now they are one of the ones they set out to fix.

[Analemma_]

It sucks, but I don't know if they had much choice. Imgur is the classic example of the "treadmill" inherent to business models like image hosting:

1. All the existing image hosting sites suck

2. Someone gets sick enough of it that they launch a new one, with all the features people want: free, direct linking, no/unobtrusive ads, etc.

3. Because this new site is so much better, everyone flicks to it. Bandwidth costs skyrocket.

4. The operators need to cover their costs, so they start adding more ads and blocking direct links. The site starts to suck. Go to step 1.

Sometimes investor dollars get involved, but it doesn't change the basic formula. This is why we've seen Photobucket -> minus -> giphy-> imgur -> gfycat, and it will continue in his vein forever. I don't think there's any way to run a site like this profitably without pissing people off sufficiently that they go elsewhere.

[sametmax]

There is an additional components for imgur : it became more than an image sharing site, it's now a weird looking social network with a very niche community with its own rules and culture.

[TeMPOraL]

Maybe we need a more distributed model for image hosting for it to be sustainable?

I'm thinking about something like a P2P solution, IPFS-style. You could pay for upload space in two ways - either directly, the bog standard way, or with your own drive space. So for instance, you get 1GB free space for image uploads if you agree to set aside 1GB on your drive as a cache. Couple that with your own "seeding" CDNs storing all the images, and maybe this would be enough to distribute bandwidth costs across all the people who want their images hosted?

Not sure if the browsers are capable enough to pull something like this off without relying on some sort of plugin or an application.

[debaserab2]

Kind of - but no, not exactly.

Before imgur, there was photobucket, imageshack, whatever - they were beyond dumpy jankey messes that you truly didn't know what you were going to get when you clicked on them. There was a good chance a new window was going to open behind your current target, or that the images would be intentionally low res until you clicked into them (for more CPM's for the host).

Imgur came along and stole their bread and butter, but then they took on a bunch of VC money and had to figure out how they were going to profit. I'm not sure if they've figured it out, but their site has definitely suffered - although not nearly to the degree as the predecessors that they replaced.

[zeveb]

> It's a testament to the brazen disrespect of client resources that went into building the latter.

I particularly like how imgurl flat-out refuses to work if you disable JavaScript. It's an image-viewing site. Browsers have been able to download images since the beginning, and have been able to render them inline since almost the beginning. There's no need for JavaScript at all, and yet imgurl deliberately choose not to work. 'Brazen disrespect' doesn't begin to describe it.

I don't mind that they try to use JavaScript to minimise the data they serve. They could always show one or a few images without JavaScript, and provide a link to more (and hide it when JavaScript is enabled).

Note that this has nothing to do with ad blocking — they could display all the ads they want to a non-script-executer.

'Brazen disrespect' really doesn't begin to describe it. 'Rank unprofessionalism' starts to.

[debacle]

> they could display all the ads they want to a non-script-executer

But then it would be harder to track you.

[arcbyte]

Amen

[wtallis]

YouTube's videos decompress to much larger quantities of data than Imgur images, but that's not what really affects browser responsiveness, especially when the video decoding is handled by dedicated hardware.

Whether you're displaying a static image or an animated GIF or a H.246 stream, drawing the next frame doesn't require interpreting or JIT compiling any JavaScript, it doesn't require thrashing the garbage collector, and it doesn't require re-computing the page layout.

[FussyZeus]

To be entirely fair: there's a lot of video content on there now too, with the gifv and related shenanigans. Personally I find it incredibly convenient that uploading gifs or mp4's there automatically converts them to gifv, gif and mp4. That's really handy, especially for a free service with no strings attached (that I know of) to offer.

[raverbashing]

Yeah, that's it

There's a lot of gifs that are converted to video (because it is 10x smaller when converted to video)

[user5994461]

I didn't even know there were ads on imgur.

(Well done uBlock!)

[madeofpalk]

> don't have an adblocker [...] your browser is working 10x harder than it needs to.

Except for when Adblocker (used to) makes your browser work harder https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2014/05/14/adblock-plus...

[chanux]

I wonder whether these good days would soon come to an end with process per tab model.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis

[detaro]

The developer edition was mentioned, and that runs Electrolysis already. Even the normal release does if you don't have incompatible plugins.

(FWIW, before electrolysis Firefox was unusuable with many tabs for me, now it is perfectly fine, so either I made a random setup change at the same time, some other optimization landed or it actually helps)

[pc2g4d]

Yeah, to me it seems like a mistake given that such a high performance penalty will likely be incurred, and given the existence of Rust which could address a number of the security problems for which the multi-process model was devised in the first place.

[discreditable]

Note that e10s currently only splits the browser into a content process and a browser process. I don't think they will ever move to 1:1 tabs per process.

[EpicEng]

I don't imagine many of those tabs are actually loaded.

[21echoes]

Ctrl+tab'd thru all 56 tabs in this group, waited for them to finish loading, opened activity monitor: CPU at 20%, RAM at 811MB. So yea, a fair amount weren't loaded, but loading them didn't make too big of a difference.

[nothrabannosir]

CPU at 20%, "loading didn't make too much of a difference"??? 20% is obscene for a process without interaction. Imagine a paused video player taking 20%, or a minimised word editor. Even at 58 videos or documents.

[syrrim]

You forget that webpages are allowed to do what ever the hell they want, and so each is probably running a script or two in the background. We put up with a lot in webapps that would never stand in a desktop app.

[nothrabannosir]

I don't forget, I just don't forgive. It's unacceptable either way. Someone has to take responsibility---might as well start with the browser. Then we can push it down from there; maybe if browsers were held accountable for pages' resource usage they'd implement resource controls. Like they currently do with limiting setTimeout on inactive pages, but more comprehensively. And maybe they'd implement better inspection tools for resource usage (chrome was ahead of the game; I'm looking at you, Firefox )

[MustardTiger]

This is a huge problem. Javascript has become a blight on the web, and browsers really need to make it easier to manage stopping scripts on background tabs and such.

[Senji]

Maybe tabs not currently being viewed should have their JS throttled? Is this an option in FF yet?

[jbergens]

I never used to start 100+ normal apps. It would have dragged my old computers to a crawl.

[EpicEng]

Well hell, maybe it's time for me to look at FF again. I switched away because it was a memory hog... And now chrome's a memory hog. I read that they made improvements, but 800MB for 240+ tabs is pretty good.

[LoSboccacc]

> on OS X

About that, I've noticed some weird stuff as well while debugging why our web app was crashing the tab on chrome after extended use without a page reload.

After a hour normal workload, chrome on mac used almost a GB ram, while on windows was at 120mb. Same page, similar workflow etc.

I still have no idea what's going on but there's definitely something about how memory is handled across platforms.

[TwoBit]

I've had 30 tabs open on Firefox/OSX without detriment.

[rangibaby]

Horrible Firefox performance on OSX was a symptom of a bad stick of RAM on a Mac at our company.

[user5994461]

Windows 7. Cheap laptop. I never have less than 15 tabs opened.

[drdeadringer]

My coworker acts like your OP and has your problem writ large as expected. He knows it but it's his personality.

[StavrosK]

I don't know which Firefox you're using, but I want it. Mine is super laggy all the time, even with one or two tabs open. Opening a new tab takes half a second, visiting a new page takes half a second, going back takes half a second. It's extremely frustrating to use, and I don't even have that many extensions or history pages.

[nachtigall]

You might want to "Refresh" your Firefox: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/refresh-firefox-reset-a... It help for me. Especially if you many add-ons over time that might have done all kind of things to your settings...

Backup/Restore your bookmarks etc. afterwards as it cleans up everything. Resetting everything afterwards took 1h for me but was totally worth it in retrospective.

[semicolon_storm]

6 tabs, 1GB of RAM, ~20% CPU usage for me on Firefox. I have a few basic QoL plugins like LastPass, uBlock, and NoScript. It's absolutely ridiculous. I want to keep using FireFox, but it's forcing me to consider moving to another browser.

[mixmastamyk]

Vacuuming your profile might help:

    #!/bin/bash
    killall firefox
    for file in ~/.mozilla/firefox/*.default/*.sqlite; do
        echo sqlite3 "$file" VACUUM
        sqlite3 "$file" VACUUM
    done

I do it in my once-a-month cleanup script.

[majewsky]

Looking at `find ~/.mozilla/firefox -name \.sqlite`, there are some more such databases for window.localStorage and the like. So this could be generalized to

  find ~/.mozilla/firefox -name \*.sqlite -print -exec sqlite3 {} VACUUM \;

[Twirrim]

For those on OS X, it looks like:

find $HOME/Library/Application Support/Firefox -name \*.sqlite -print -exec sqlite3 {} VACUUM \;

[na85]

I remember the days when leaving Windows meant not having to futz with cleanup scripts.

What happened?

[sp332]

Firefox and SQLite have actually improved a lot since those days. And it's not like Firefox uses a different database system on different platforms, it's all exactly the same.

[mgurlitz]

When was this? I recall having to use Cocktail with OS X (10.2-10.9) because the system maintenance scripts would never run if my laptop was off/asleep at midnight. In general, Unix users have had to use cron scripts almost since its origin.

[SAI_Peregrinus]

254 Tabs, 3.3GB of RAM, ~2% CPU usage for me on Firefox 50.1.0. You've got something wrong (and I have too many tabs open)...

[mkj]

If there are only 6 tabs it should be easy to narrow down which is a problem?

[richardboegli]

Try Pale Moon.

Forked from Firefox 27 and super fast.

http://palemoon.org

[nomight]

Incorrect.

Pale Moon 27 is based on Firefox 38 for back-end and Firefox 24 (ish, with some 26-isms) for the front-end. That said, I'd still recommend it. :-)

[sp332]

Opening a tab is the fastest thing about Firefox. I mean it plays a little animation, but you can ignore that and start typing immediately after ctrl-t.

[mrob]

You can disable the animation by setting browser.tabs.animate to false in about:config.

[StavrosK]

Ooh, snappy, thanks for the tip!

[aidenn0]

That's bizarre; I just held down C-t for a few seconds and tab were opening at the rate of maybe 5-10 per second and it is now using 630M of ram with 98 tabs open. A-1 to switch back to the tab I had open was instantaneous (though the tab bar was animated and took almost 2s for the scroll animation to finish)

I'm not sure how the GP has over 200 tabs open with less RAM used than 98 empty tabs though.

[eveningcoffee]

Based on my personal experience I think you are living in some parallel universe. Perhaps you post some other parameters about your system?

[StavrosK]

It's a 2013 MacBook Air, and my desktop is some custom thing with an i5, 16 GB RAM and a Samsung Evo SSD. They're both equally laggy, to the point that my browser froze for half a second while posting the previous comment (and regularly does so). However, after running the cleanup script in the sibling comment, it at least appears to not freeze.

[chongli]

It's interesting how tabs have supplanted bookmarks for a lot of people. Neither one is a particularly good UI, mind you, but tabs are a little bit better than bookmarks.

I wish something even better would come along but I don't really know what that would look like.

[21echoes]

Firefox with Tab Groups and AwesomeBar fits very nicely with my workflow--

1. I dont have to think. I Cmd+Click links as I find them interesting, switch tabs as my attention changes, etc. and the tabs just stay there, waiting.

2. AwesomeBar searches over open tabs by default, and selecting a suggestion switches to that open tab rather than opening a new one.

3. When I have time, I can sort my tabs into labelled groups ("Work", "Research", "Shopping", "Politics", etc.)

4. Tabs are sync'd to and from my Firefox for Android automatically, so if I'm on the move and I want to pull up that thing on the tip of my tongue, it's right there on my phone as well.

I'm sure it's not perfect for everyone, but it works for me /shrug

[olejorgenb]

For the lazy: Awesomebar is just firefox's the built-in address bar. It can be configured to search simultaneous through history, tab (titles of open tabs), etc.

Or one can specify what to search with this micro language:

    Add ^ to search for matches in your browsing history.
    Add * to search for matches in your bookmarks.
    Add + to search for matches in pages you've tagged.
    Add % to search for matches in your currently open tabs.
    Add ~ to search for matches in pages you've typed.
    Add # to search for matches in page titles.
    Add @ to search for matches in web addresses (URLs).
    Add $ to search for matches in suggestions.

[olejorgenb]

The operator doesn't have to be the first char. This works too: "some tab I have %"

Another nugget I just found out about: alt-enter opens the what you typed in in a new tab.

[newscracker]

> Another nugget I just found out about: alt-enter opens the what you typed in in a new tab.

If you're visiting a site by entering the address (as opposed to using search or a bang command on DuckDuckGo or using a bookmark/history entry), then you'd also appreciate the following shortcuts:

Ctrl+Enter (Cmd+Enter on Mac) for "www." prefix and ".com" suffix on the domain. Eg: type "google" <Ctrl+Enter> (or Cmd+Enter) to go to www.google.com

Shift+Enter for "www." prefix and ".net" suffix on the domain. Eg: type "jsfiddle" <Shift+Enter> to go to www.jsfiddle.net

Ctrl+Shift+Enter (Cmd+Shift+Enter on Mac) for "www." prefix and ".org" suffix on the domain. Eg: type "wikipedia" <Ctrl+Shift+Enter> (or Cmd+Shift+Enter) to go to www.wikipedia.org

In my knowledge, the www.<domain>.com autofill with Ctrl+Enter was pioneered by Internet Explorer, but Firefox is the only browser that took it to the next level as a built-in feature.

[nachtigall]

Wow, using Firefox for 15 years and did not know. Here's a link to the docs I found now: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/awesome-bar-search-fire...

[mih]

Been using FF for a long time and still was unaware of this. Thanks for the tip

[weaksauce]

You might (might not) find my extension useful. I made it for people that horde tabs like you and me. It's a page that lists tabs per window visually and if you click on one of the links it focuses the tab for you.

Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabist/

and chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabist/hdjegjggiog...

It's also open source: https://github.com/fiveNinePlusR/tabist

If you end up trying it, let me know if you find it useful/hate it or have something that should be added :)

[jholman]

I just installed it (Tabist reports 415 tabs in 9 windows). Looks tentatively useful, I'll keep it around.

If it's easy to add a by-date-last-opened to the order-by at the top, that MIGHT be useful? If it's easy to add the text of the window title to the table, that MIGHT be useful? Those are just top-of-my-head spitball ideas.

[weaksauce]

415 tabs! Wow, that's even more than I typically have... 200ish over many windows.

One thing that is not 100% clear is that you can press cmd-shift-e to bring up the tabist page. or ctrl-shift-e if you are on windows/linux.

> by-date-last-opened to the order-by at the top

That's planned but not easily attained information from the browser so it'd have to be tracked by the extension from the startup of it.

> If it's easy to add the text of the window title to the table

That's how the extension works but there was a bug[1] that I fixed in firefox that needs to be propagated through the builds in order for it to show up in release. I believe it will land in firefox 51 which comes out early next year... yeah 2017-01-24 is when it will be released[2]. If you want it now you can get on the beta build and it will be fixed.

1. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1289213

2. https://wiki.mozilla.org/RapidRelease/Calendar

cheers,

hope this helps.

[newscracker]

Thanks, I will definitely try this one since I use tons of tabs as an interface for "read it later" stuff and avoid forgetting about them altogether.

It'd be nice to include the favicon (if available) next to each link so that a visual scan is easy to perform. Otherwise a "Find on page" (Ctrl+F) would have to be used to find something in a list of a few hundred tabs. Sort options like the ones mentioned in another comment here about the date added, and additionally grouping links by domain, would also be useful.

[weaksauce]

I hope it is useful for you! The favicon is actually already displayed but I didn't update the example gif yet.

Sorting by the date added/visited is a planed feature but a little tougher to get from firefox so it will take a little bit of work. The extension actually has a group by domain sort(but not strictly group by domain as it's grouped by window first)

[chongli]

I use tab groups as well and I have hundreds of tabs spread among all the groups. I like this feature but manual organization of the tabs still feels slow and cumbersome. It also tends to be really slow to first open up due to the huge numbers of thumbnails involved.

[thewhitetulip]

I think that Firefox has the features by default, if you start typing site or text which matches to any tab which is currently open, then it'll open the current one rather than start a new one.

[syrrim]

I use tabs, but have them organized into a vertical tree. This allows many more to be visible at a time. Since they are in a sidebar, you interface with them like bookmarks, but they don't spawn a new tab when clicked. Because they are organized into a tree structure, its easy to recall the purpose of each.

For example, a search engine tab might lead to a stackoverflow tab which might lead to a few documentation tabs. As long as you remember what the documentarion is for, you can tell what the SO thread is about, and what is was you searched.

[reitanqild]

Same here. Recently changed from TreeStyleTabs to Tab Tree. The latter has fewer options but seems to work better and be more stable on my setup. (Firefox/Firefox Developer Edition, settings synced between all of them.)

[lobster_johnson]

For years my wishlist item is a project manager that can treat a single window as a project. A bit like a stateful, window-oriented Delicious/Pinboard.

For example, say I'm looking for a sofa to buy. I might open the ones I like in a bunch of tabs to mull over. However, if I'm at work, I'd like to just close the window. Since the project manager has associated the window with a project, I can just close the window. Later, I select "Sofa hunting" from the Projects menu and off I go with the same set of tabs.

I'd go one step further: Think of the project as a "pile of bookmarks" where the visible set of tabs is a subset of all boomarked tabs. For example, say I find a nice sofa. I add it to the pile and close the tab. The project now includes that URL, but it won't open a tab for it unless I go into the project browser and find it there and open it. So this disassociates the tab from the bookmark, but retains the "working set" that is my project session. Similar to how an IDE or editor might preserve which files I have open, but still maintain my entire project.

There are some extensions out there that do similar things, but don't get the ergonomics right. There's a couple of "session managers", but they are dumb: You "load" a session, and then "save" it. Changing the window doesn't automatically update the session, and closing the window destroys your session. Safari also lets you bookmark a bunch of tabs as a folder and reopen them again, but there's no link between the folder and the open window.

I once started on an extension like this for Safari, but the current browser extension APIs aren't great. For example, I'd want to sync the projects with something like iCloud, so that they're available on all devices; but I don't think there's a way to do this without involving a server app. I might try again, though.

[smhenderson]

I love "bookmark all tabs" commands. I tend to open a lot of related tabs and run out of time like the OP but I don't leave the all open, I bookmark them all with a few clicks and move on...

But I agree about the UI in general. My habit seems to require some monthly to quarterly clean up to keep it from getting to be too much.

[jasikpark]

https://pinboard.io works relatively well as a way to save links for later.

[freehunter]

You mean https://pinboard.in?

[Jaruzel]

I use a hand-cranked version of this, and have been for over 10 years, I call it WebBookmarks.

It's a small bookmarklet that when clicked takes the current tabs URL and adds it as an escaped param onto the WebBookmarks URL and launches WebBookmarks. Then in the WebBookmarks form the Title and URL are already filled in, I assign a category, and click save. Job done.

I do this and do not use local machine bookmarks at all, as I use so many different machines (linux, windows, tablet, phone etc) during the course of a week, that keeping all those locally stored bookmarks in sync would be a nightmare.

It works for me, although I've not touched the code in forever so it's looking a bit dated - simply because it's rock solid.

It surprises me that more people don't do this.

[solnyshok]

chrome, firefox, and, recently, opera - all do sync your bookmarks across devices/OSes. Do not know about safari, since I do not use Apple products.

[Jaruzel]

And have the browser makers profile my habits? No thank you.

[pas]

it should (would?) look like a tree (or more precisely a forest), that'd show how you explored things, with text saved and indexed, and with the option to save even full pages too (for the last ~week or so).

it should be integrated with history (and the back button should not just show a dumb list on right click)

[scottmf]

No one seems to have mentioned Safari's "Reading List".

[kilroy123]

While I don't have _that_ many tabs open. I do usually keep 20 - 50 open in chrome. Same experience, with low / no memory foot-print; using The Great Suspender.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspende...

I'm on a 2015 MBP with 16 GB of ram and like 20 extensions installed.

[olejorgenb]

Similar firefox extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/suspend-tab/

[reitanqild]

I also use it, thanks to a tip from HN :-)

[Keyframe]

I vouch for The Great Suspender. Awesome extension.

[rpwverheij]

tnx for the tip, installed it. 1 million users, so it must be doing somethign right

[mwill]

How is this possible? I'm sitting here with an i5-4690, 32GB RAM, Firefox 50 with about 50 tabs open 1.5GB RAM usage, about half a second to get a usable new tab, and it crashes at least once every few days.

Literally the only reason I'm on Firefox is tab groups, but my performace is basically identical with tab groups disabled.

[wutbrodo]

There are factors other than browser choice that can affect this. For example, which OS are you on?

[mwill]

Win 10 / Arch on the same hardware, slightly better performance booted into Win 10.

Used to run Win8.1 on this machine, Win 10 runs it better.

Used to run Ubuntu on this machine, Arch runs it better.

It would make my day if there was a silver bullet that made FF fast, or at least not crash all the time. The same machine can handle literally 10 times more Chrome tabs without any trace of struggle. But I prefer FF for a few things, so sort of stuck in between.

[govg]

Funny. I use Firefox on my Arch system, and at times I had to stop and remove tabs because they were becoming an unorganized mess (>600 tabs). I've never had much issues with responsiveness unless some particular website I've opened locks up, and with tab groups and tab load only on click, I can easily manage a lot of tabs without much memory use.

You could try checking your RAM, I used to have an issue with FF crashing quite frequently, but found that it was part of a larger issue of having corrupt RAM on board.

[mwill]

I will definately look into this, because the Firefox that others are describing in this thread seems totally foreign to me.

[zie]

Picture proof of memory usage: http://imgur.com/a/7RgZt

FF 1.3GB memory with 10 tabs and 5% of CPU, with FF in the background.

Switching tabs is absolutely not instant, opening new tabs is reasonable, bet definitely not instant.

I'd love your numbers ;)

[SAI_Peregrinus]

I'm in a similar situation to the GP. Addons used to help:

BarTab Heavy - Allows unloading of unused tabs. Lets tabs act like temporary bookmarks. Tree Style Tab - Just great tab management. uBlock Origin + uMatrix - Lots less cruft loaded and running to slow things down. Session Manager - Lets me save windows with groups of tabs like bookmarks, works amazingly for looking things up and being able to restore a lot of references at once.

[kpcyrd]

Well, one of those tabs is graylog and one is gmail. Do you have e10s enabled? (open about:support, check for "Multiprocess Windows")

[AstralStorm]

This only works properly since 50+ version. You will get many issues if you try it in the old one.

[Yizahi]

Unfortunately mine is usually climbing to 2.5 Gb with 20-30 tabs if left open for several days. As a side effect it starts using 12% CPU constantly and any script heavy page load just sends it into (Not Responding) state for 30-60 seconds. uBlock and LastPass only now, too lazy to reinstall all the other addons :) .

But it is still better then Chrome performance vise. Chrome is just generally laggy and unresponsive often (no idea why).

[jsjohnst]

LastPass seems to be a common cause among my friends and others in this thread.

[prewett]

I'm assuming you don't have a GMail tab open. My Firefox memory usage steadily climbs if I have a GMail tab open.

[21echoes]

Mmmm that's true, I don't. I tend to close GMail tabs once I'm done with them because I also noticed they tend to leak and are poorly optimized for non-Chrome browsers.

[candiodari]

Happens to my chrome as well.

[superkuh]

I run a similar number of tabs in Pale Moon (browser) with slightly better performance. But most of this is because I make a choice not to use shitty website that are written in javascript instead of html.

[thecopy]

I have started to use HTML version of GMail. Really refreshing to have a snappy interface again. Manual Ctrl+R to refresh though. That tab is using 1.4MB of RAM.

[owaislone]

or any Google drive document.

[adventured]

That's pretty astounding to me. Firefox instantly eats 500+ mb of ram the moment I open it on Windows (16gb ram, i7 processor, ok video card). If I leave it open with one or two tabs (usually doesn't matter what sites), for about an hour, it goes up to 1.2gb to 1.4gb of ram consumption while doing nothing. If I close all tabs, the ram consumption doesn't drop, I have to close Firefox and restart it to accomplish that. It would be amazing to run more than 30 tabs. Once I leave Firefox open for a few hours, it basically becomes unusable performance wise. I've been using Firefox since it was released initially; Chrome never gives me this performance erosion problem, constantly tempts me to switch, I just happen to enjoy Firefox more. The sole extension I'm using is an ad blocker and my Firefox is always self-updated.

[nothis]

Oh, so I'm not alone in wondering what the hell he was talking about. I often have like 50 tabs open in Firefox when researching something. I notice no delay when opening an empty tab.

If browsers are slow, it's mostly because of some horrible JavaScript running in the background, i.e. poorly optimized websites.

[MustardTiger]

You have a magic firefox then. I try to use it that way too, but its sitting at 1.8GB of RAM and 25-30% CPU usage with 103 tabs and it routinely bombs on me after a week or two when it gets up to 2.5GB or so.

[rasz_pl]

>I'm using Firefox, right now -- 273 tabs open

no, you have 273 labels displayed in your browser UI, not open tabs. Opera 12.x can hold >100 real loaded and rendered tabs open at 1-2GB ram with ZERO influence on browser responsiveness.

Nowadays every single tab in Chrome/Opera 40.something/Vivaldi progressively slows down UI. ~50 tabs means about 1 second UI delay when going fullscreen on YT. Not to mention the most trivial website takes ~100MB of ram, while Opera 12.x was somehow able to do the same thing in ~10MB per website.

[dom0]

> This is exactly how I'm using Firefox, right now -- 273 tabs open. It's sitting at ~5% of CPU and 450MB of RAM. And switching tabs is instantaneous.

Marvellous. By the time I get to maybe 70-90 open tabs Firefox will consume 4-6 GB RAM and constantly hog a CPU core.

Some pages with JS cause the usual instant entire-browser lock-up.

And I admit I miss the days when Opera 10 was still an up to date browser. I don't think I ever had a (subjectively) faster browser.

[roel_v]

I used to do this too, and as of ~ 2 weeks ago, about half of all my stored tabs are replaced with 'New tab' after restarting the browser. No amount of screwing around in the profile and session_store or whatever it's called, or with plugins, will fix it. So now I'm weaning myself off 'tabs as bookmarks', and going back (after, what, 10 years?) to using bookmarks the way they were meant.

[the8472]

the session manager addon would have helped in that situation. it creates regular snapshots of your session which can be used to restore things if something like that happens (which is rare in my experience)

[roel_v]

Well from the comments on the addon page, it seems it has the same problems with multi process as the built-in session manager, and tab mix plus' session manager, have (blank windows after restoring). But I haven't tried this particular addon, it might work.

[Terr_]

Hah, I'm still using an old version of Opera, but the #1 speedup is simply using it's built-in (and easy to tweak) site-preferences so that only certain sites are whitelisted for Javascript.

Some sites are just ridiculously faster and more-responsive, especially general news sites where all I really want is some text I can immediately read and scroll through.

[olejorgenb]

The http://piro.sakura.ne.jp/xul/_suspendtab.html.en extension also help keeping cpu and memory down when using lots of tabs. (of course when a tab become suspended the state is at least partially lost)

[jdright]

I really doubt you and you dont provide any details about your setup either. I have exactly the same issues as the poster. I have about 20 tabs and it is costing 1.7GB ram. Note that I almost never reboot, so it may well be leaks, but even so, on eventual crashes, reloading my tabs is painfully slow.

[21echoes]

Mac El Capitan, FirefoxDeveloperEdition (which iirc is basically equivalent to Firefox Beta), not many addons (Tab Groups, uBlock Origin, No More 404s). I can screenshot my Activity Monitor if that'd help?

[jdright]

At this exactly time I have 27 tabs, this is the memory usage:

  Image	PID	Hard Faults/sec	Commit (KB)	Working Set (KB)	Shareable (KB)	Private (KB)
  firefox.exe	10604	0	1,529,308	1,491,692	           62,348	1,429,344

I'm on Windows 7, 39 days and 5 hours up time.

This Firefox instance is running since: 8:05:29 AM 05/12/2016

Firefox 50 (with a pending update).

Also, I see the process as a 32-bits image but I was sure it was 64-bits, will need to check on this.

And I have only: Facebook Ads Block, Ghostery and uBlock Origin.

So being Windows 7 and probably an 32bits Firefox install may cause all this difference?

[hashhar]

Same here, at the start of August I had a total of around 350 tabs, divided into 8 groups according to topics (General, Entertainment, GitHub, Firefox Dev, GNOME Dev, Thesis, Interview Preps etc.) and my CPU idled at around 4% (2.2GHz - 2.7GHz i5 laptop) with RAM at around 1.6GB when started and routinely reached 3GB by the end of the day. It did occansionally crash the tabs while switching between too many YouTube tabs too fast. Took about 4 seconds to start a new instance (meaning that getting a usable instance, the UI came in under 2 secs), shutdown instantly.

[vacri]

Yeah, the article got up my nose as well. I've got a couple of hundred tabs in tab groups in FF, probably about 50 have something in them (the others aren't loaded until I navigate to them). Opening a new tab is instant.

I get a fair bit more resource usage than you're reporting, though...

[agumonkey]

Firefox is a nice workhorse. Lots to like about it. One problem is the GUI latency. Between Chrome instantaneous response and Firefox jitter I always end up back to Chrome.

[miguelrochefort]

I have ~1000 open tabs (across 50 windows) in Chrome on Windows.

I have ~300 open tabs in Chrome on Android.

Although they're probably not all loaded, I don't notice any major performance problem.

[ChuckMcM]

firefox 50.1 on Xubuntu - currently at 6GB of memory, when it gets above 12GB I euthanize it and restart it. About 36 open tabs.

[AstralStorm]

If you're using an integrated Intel GPU, immediately switch to modesetting X driver. Intel DDX leaks surfaces and that is attributed to process which allocated them.

Modesetting is faster too.

[Elvewyn]

I'd love to know how. My Firefox, with 4 tabs open, will use up a gig of memory.

[shipintbrief]

that's Ilia Birman. He have all his blog written with this set of mind. God knows why people read him and why they share articles like this.

[ianai]

I feel like OP needs to reimage his machine.

[PeCaN]

Really? You're the first person I've heard that doesn't have that problem. My Firefox gets quite slow on both my home and work computers¹ at ~40+ tabs. The tab groups extension (which they removed from core, I guess to make room for Pocket and Hello²) does make managing lots of tabs much easier however. I regularly have to clean out my tabs or switching takes several seconds.

I currently have 37 tabs open and Firefox is using ~800MB of RAM. Basically, either you're doing something really magical with your Firefox, or are just spewing bullshit.

Someone's going to say its the fault of extensions (what good is Firefox without extensions, anyway) so let's see:

- Decentraleyes (locally emulates CDNs)

- HTTPS Everywhere (why is this not the default behavior?)

- OverbiteFF (support for the gopher protocol)

- Perapera (Mandarin word splitting and Mandarin↔English dictionary)

- Pinboard (I can't imagine this uses any significant resources whatsoever)

- Random Agent Spoofer (change user agent at random)

- Reddit Enhancement Suite

- Tab Groups (I miss when tab panorama was default, but I can see why it's an extension)

- uBlock Origin

- uMatrix (possibly my single favorite Firefox extension; control JS and more, like NoScript on steroids and easier to use)

- VimFx

That's… actually quite a lot. I wonder if extensions alone are my problem, but then again Firefox without extensions isn't much better than Edge (and Edge seems faster on average).

I don't think I've tweaked any settings in about:config.

Is that enough details about my setup for people to help fix it?

Anecdotally complaints about how slow Firefox is seem fairly common. I think your last paragraph is a bit off the mark.

--

1. Both Windows 10 Pro; 16GB/32GB of RAM respectively; both 4GHz i7-4790k; anyway, point is they're pretty good computers.

2. Kidding, but fuck Mozilla

[minitech]

> - Decentraleyes (locally emulates CDNs)

has to intercept every request

> - HTTPS Everywhere (why is this not the default behavior?)

has to intercept every request

> - OverbiteFF (support for the gopher protocol)

might have to intercept every request, and why do you need this

> - Random Agent Spoofer (change user agent at random)

has to intercept every request

> - uBlock Origin

has to intercept every request

> - uMatrix (possibly my single favorite Firefox extension; control JS and more, like NoScript on steroids and easier to use)

has to intercept every request

Stop installing so many stupid extensions. Random UA switching is especially pointless; “Decentraleyes” is a close runner-up. Firefox has performance problems, but I think you’re definitely seeing extension bloat if you have that kind of device.

[artificial]

It's hardly stupidity. You're discovering different people have different priorities and that privacy is valued by some more than others.

[coldtea]

>It's hardly stupidity. You're discovering different people have different priorities and that privacy is valued by some more than others.

Those BS plugins do very little for actual privacy (and even less if one is actually a target) and very much for CPU/memory.

[minitech]

I’m someone who also values privacy, but a few of the extensions in question almost certainly don’t offer enough value for their cost. Random UA switching makes you more fingerprintable. And this all on Windows 10…

[reustle]

How does someone even begin to function with 273 open tabs, let alone be productive?

[21echoes]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13226078

When I'm in my working tab group, that's like 8 tabs or so. Most of the tabs in the storage groups are months old (more like bookmarks I didn't have to hit Cmd+D to save)

[nzp]

Back when I used to use tabs as bookmarks, I would routinely get to >700 open tabs accumulating over the months. It was a useless agony. Pocket was a godsend for me. The urge to let tabs linger is still there sometimes, but it doesn't get over 20-ish nowadays. Sticking to GTD workflow helps too.