[jcoffland]

I regularly have several hundred tabs open in Firefox with no problems. Some people may think this is crazy or messy but I find it very useful for organizing the various projects I'm working on for different clients and my own personal projects. Tab groups and delayed loading make it all very smooth. Such usage is just not possible with Chrome. I tried to switch to Chrome but couldn't find the features I needed and did not wish to change my workflow.

Back when Chrome came out Firefox was buggy. Since then it has become much more stable. Chrome is the one that's buggy now. One process per tab means that a bug in one tab does not take down the whole browser but it is much better to just fix the bugs and not crash at all.

[zetafunction]

As a Chrome developer, I agree that process-per-tab absolutely should not be a replacement for fixing bugs. However, I think it's important to point out that process-per-tab is not just for stability: it's also critical for security.

[dmix]

Chrome is way ahead of Firefox in terms of security. It's worth the performance trade-offs.

Each website is rendered in a separate process with a sandbox, each with an empty chroot + process namespace + network namespace + tiny seccomp-bpf + syscall whitelist.

Chrome also has a stronger sandbox, pioneers better SSL, supports PIE on binaries, uses pepper - doesnt use native Flash plugins, the JIT compiler does randomization / encryption tricks to make it hard to heap spray exploit code. They have their own hardened memory allocator called PartitionAlloc.

Etc Etc.

Firefox also had more critical CVEs in 2014 than Chrome: http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=2CRyJkmV

And reports of sandbox escapes are less common in Chrome for a reason.

[jacobolus]

Worth the performance trade-off for who?

For my own use cases, Chrome drags my whole system performance into a gutter and shoots it full of bullets.

In other words, it’s not just a “trade-off”, but rather Chrome is completely and utterly unusable, while both Safari and Firefox handle the load with no problem.

[spoiler]

I actually have more problems with Firefox's performance than with Chrome's (in terms of processor power), Chrome definitely uses more memory, but it's super fast; firefox is just abysmally slow and can;t handle more than a few tabs. Tried both browsers on Windows 8.1 and Linux, with different machines (home and work computers), too.

However, my high memory consumption in Chrome was due to using AdBlock, which is much lower now that I switched to uBlock. Even back with AdBlock, memory was never an issue with many tabs open.

My only problem (which is probably not Chrome's, but my laptop's fault) is that sometimes, when having ~20 tabs open, and certain tabs are idle for a long time, they take a bit of time to re-render once I visit them again, but that also used to happen in Firefox.

[cmon_yar]

You should also keep in mind that everyone dosen't owns a high end machine or even a macbook. I have 4 machines at home , maximum specs are 2.5ghz with i3-4gb , and I guess this should be sufficient for running chrome alone , well atleast theoritically. In reality , chrome starts being unresponive , crashing tabs and stuff occurs beyond opening tabs beyond 7-8 and flash player crashes more often. Anddd , firefox is sure late to start ( a longer startup time ) , but idk how it manages to sustain itself throughout. In one of my machine , I have arch installed with bspwm as WM ,and firefox takes about 150-200 mb only ( when I'm aggresively testing it ) , with 7-8 tabs. Chrome , well ...

[Joeri]

I use chrome on an atom netbook with 2 GB ram, and it generally performs well even with 8 tabs open (some sites can bring it to its knees though)

That's the thing with anecdotal evidence, it's a sample of one.

[wooger]

uBlock is now available on Firefox too, and makes an even more dramatic difference in performance.

I really don't know what you're talking about - Chrome is a dog after ~10 tabs are opened, uses crazy memory and becomes unusable fast once it starts paging. Firefox remains stable, backgrounds tabs you're not using in a graceful way, and doesn't try to open and render every single tab at once on a session restore.

It's unbelievable that Chrome still does this, after the problem has been reported for years.

[michaelmior]

I regularly have dozens of tabs open in Chrome on both Windows and Linux and I haven't experienced the unusably fast (slow?) behaviour you're talking about. That said, Chrome seems much more unstable than Firefox for me lately.

[jtblin]

Are you on Windows? I'm not seeing this on Mac, I often have 30+ tabs opened and apart from high memory, I don't suffer of any performance issues.

[mirimir]

It depends on the user's risk/benefit model.

There are WebKit-based browsers far lighter and faster than Firefox. Chrome, Firefox in Linux, and the Tor browser provide better security. Isolating browsers in separate VMs or Qubes AppVMs provides even better security.

[saurik]

Chrome does not load every website into its own process: it does a lot of cross-site process sharing, and often very large numbers of sites can end up in the same process. It also does not keep each website into only one process, so in practice if a lot of tabs exist for one process (whether malicious or vulnerable) you can be assured of an overlap as you can end up in every process.

[davorb]

We should also keep in mind that Google is a content company, and is leverageing their market share to bring us such wonderful features such as HTML5 DRM support in our browsers.

[zobzu]

I'll just throw that in there but Firefox Linux - since you refer to that (99% of what you just mentioned doesnt exit on windows/osx) - so yeah, Firefox for Linux uses the Chromium sandbox. You know, the exact same code, with a different filter and options applied.

Sure, its process model isnt as "secure" as chrome since it has the trade off or sharing more memory among other examples. But as a user, it seems like a freaking good enough trade off right now....

[zobzu]

http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/file/a7c177546ca0/secu... its not actually hard to read/find

[scobar]

I found your statement very interesting, and would like to learn more. If you're allowed, would you please provide more details or links to resources that further explain the security issues that process-per-tab resolves?

[geofft]

There's a bunch of good public docs on the Chromium security architecture. One big thing that having a separate process per origin does is that you can use OS sandboxing techniques on each process separately, and even if there are renderer bugs, an exploit can't immediately get to another origin; it provides defense in depth by also requiring a sandbox escape.

Here's an old paper that talks about the architecture (it hasn't changed much at a high level):

http://seclab.stanford.edu/websec/chromium/chromium-security...

[yellowapple]

I do the same thing; it's incredibly easy to do with the Tree View Tabs extension.

For example, while browsing HN, I'll frequently just middle-click a bunch of article links and (occasionally) their comments, then read them once I have a sizable queue. Same goes for trying to look up documentation to fix some bug in my code; I'll start with a DuckDuckGo search and, suddenly, I have at least a dozen (sometimes multiple dozens) tabs open with Stack Overflow questions and blog posts and official online docs and such with clues pointing me in the right direction.

[tonetheman]

What is the name of that extension? I searched and get over a thousand results. Thanks!

[andrewflnr]

"Tree Style Tab". http://piro.sakura.ne.jp/xul/_treestyletab.html.en

At least that's the one I use.

[yellowapple]

Search DuckDuckGo for "Tree Style Tabs"; it should be the first result.

It should also be the first result if you search Mozilla's add-on marketplace thingamajig for "Tree Style Tabs". Here's the link for convenience: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

[GrinningFool]

I find this essentially when I run high numbers of tabs:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

Though another comment has led me to wonder if FF doesn't have something similar built-in.

[keypusher]

Tree Style Tabs is essential if you keep many tabs open. Not only does it make it possible to read the window titles and use screen real estate more effectively, it facilitates tab hierachies (parent page A opened links to B, C, D, parent page B opened links to E, F, G, etc).

[rndn]

There is a very simple extension called Tab Counter which works very well together with TSTs and it helps to remind me when it's time to clean up the tab bar. It also appears to bring peace of mind that all tabs are still there, it's just the missing status bar. :)

[wldcordeiro]

Between Tree Style Tabs and The Fox Only Better[0] I can't see myself going to Chrome or any other browser. The UI is pretty much hidden until I need it, giving me maximum browsing space.

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/the-fox-only-...

[danneu]

Thanks, just installed The Fox Only Better which restored Vimperator to its former glory. That url bar was painful.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/spa/quq37nq1583x0lf/u_g2cx...

[GrinningFool]

Thanks for that, TFoB is promising so far, though it seems to notch up CPU usage.

[leppr]

If you tend to accumulate tabs and forget to close them then the Unload Tab [1] extension is a must. Your browser becomes laggy after opening 5 pages with flash elements? Just right-click on the current tab > "Unload Other Tabs". You can also set it to automatically unload background tabs after a certain amount of time.

[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/unloadtab/

[benjaminpv]

I find that over time I end up with a bunch of tabs whose content seems interesting that grow over time. My working set is off to one side while the 'to read' tabs stack up over to the left.

I'd found a big boon for this workflow in the very simple extension "Export Tabs[1]." It's really simple: click an icon on the toolbar and it lists open tabs by title and then by URL.

Now when I notice that I've got a real glut of tabs open I dump them into my bookmark software so I can comb through later.

Like I said, really simple extension but tremendously helpful.

[1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/export-tabs/odafag...

[jannes]

I just released a similar Chrome extension called TabAttack[1]. I would love to hear what you think of it.

[1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabattack/ginflokh...

Instead of exporting tabs as plain text it exports them as Markdown. And it allows you to download the resulting document with one click as a *.md file, instead of having to copy and paste it in an editor.

It also uses the screen real estate in the toolbar a little bit more usefully by showing a tab counter (similar to what Chrome does on mobile).

And of course there are keyboard shortcuts for everything.

Here is my Show HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9047945

[scholia]

In Firefox you can just put them into groups, so they stop being tabs. Later, you can open a whole group when you need it. It's much more organized...

[remarkEon]

More than being more organized, it's really changed the way I browse. Throughout the day I'll build buckets of things to read/deal with and keeping them in groups makes it incredibly simple (and less stressful) to run through.

[sergiosgc]

I'm old school. My to-read queue goes off to del.icio.us. After all the switches and selling and buying, in the end, it's not half bad. Bookmarklets plus droidicious on Android and I have a dependable bookmark store.

[zzleeper]

That's amazing! Much easier than managing the mess that is chrome bookmark manager, when you just want to save something for a while and not forever.

[soperj]

I have a whack of tabs open all the time as well, and if I do it in Chrome it just kills my battery where as in firefox it doesn't. (on fedora 20)

[scholia]

Running down the battery is a well known feature of Chrome on on Windows https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2013/07/08/windows-timer-r...

[wutbrodo]

> Such usage is just not possible with Chrome.

In your opinion, what makes this "impossible"? I also use a few hundred tabs at any one time (also to the consternation of everyone who sees any _one_ of the Chrome windows I have open) and I'm very happy with Chrome.

[scholia]

How do you see which tab is which? (I gave up on Chrome about 20 months ago for Firefox's superior tab handling, better stability, and being less of a resource hog. Oh, and for not spying on me.)

[wutbrodo]

I use an extension called switch to tab. It uses the omnibox interface to auto complete what you type and switch to the right tab. (and when I'm switching back and forth multiple times between two tabs, I just have muscle memory for how many tabs apart they are).

What are you referring to specifically with the "spying on you" claim? I wasn't aware of any behavior like that other than features that you can turn off that end up sending info to Google servers (like tab sync).

[detaro]

Not GP, but: multiple windows and intuition. Generally, for ~20 tabs per window I still can tell pretty okay what is what, only large swabs of similar tabs (e.g. 10 ebay product sites) are a bit annoying. A tab switcher that shows the headlines would admittedly be helpful.

[scholia]

In Firefox, I either scroll quickly though readable tabs with the mouse-wheel, or click the right down-arrow for a text list of tabs, or start typing in the address bar of whichever tab I'm in. For example, if I type twi then the drop-down list offers Twitter, and I select "Switch to tab". That gets me to the half-dozen tabs I want to look at several times a day.

With those options plus tab groups, I find it pretty easy to handle several hundred tabs in Firefox, where Chrome was a nightmare. The drawback is that you just keep adding tabs ;-)

[coldtea]

>I regularly have several hundred tabs open in Firefox with no problems. Some people may think this is crazy or messy but I find it very useful for organizing the various projects I'm working on for different clients and my own personal projects.

It still is crazy and messy. For organizing the various projects there are bookmarks and bookmark folders. Having tons of tabs open != organization.

[detaro]

Why is "a list of bookmarks grouped by folders" organized, but "a list of tabs grouped by windows"(potentially with the support of tree style tabs or something similar) crazy and messy?

[coldtea]

List of folders:

+ user is able to see a tree-view / list of them all at one.

+ searchable.

+ loadable on demand on the same "tabs", even whole folders (projects) at once.

+ persistent (even across computers with bookmark sync).

+ doesn't waste memory (not even mininal).

+ Was even designed for actual organization (Manage Bookmarks...), instead of a viewing content feature that was abused for that purpose.

[crimsonalucard]

For me I keep tabs open in case I need to go back later. This works except I only end up reusing 20% of the tabs that I opened.

What would be awesome is some sort of auto tab closer that assumes you'll never use the tab again after 15 minutes of idle time.

[c3o]

The Great Suspender will remove the tab's contents from memory after a freely configurable time, while still keeping it where it was in case you want to get back to it later. I've found that this works best for me: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspende...

[dbjacobs]

For Chrome look at Tab Wrangler, it does this for you.

[jakub_g]

Note that Opera also has delayed tab loading option in its advanced configuration (my main browser is Firefox though, since 2006 or so).

[sliverstorm]

I use tabs-as-history and tabs-as-queue, but (despite the initial effort hump) I find bookmarks are better for cold storage.

[Touche]

https://pinboard.in