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Comment by 6a68 | Hacker News Reader

Test Pilot isn't happening at the cost of stability and performance improvements. It's a complementary program that helps us ship better features through data-driven iteration.

I hear your concerns, though. The platform and desktop teams are doing tons of great work on improving stability and performance--you might want to give Firefox another try sometime. If you do, maybe try out some Test Pilot experiments while you're at it, and let us know what you think.

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They "are doing tons of great work on improving stability and performance", but I've heard this before and somehow we got to where we are today.

Do you alternate between improving these things and worsening them? Could you possibly not worsen them, or at least warn us to not upgrade when that happens?

Regressions are really not OK. People are trying to use this browser. Well, mostly they were trying to use it. I stuck it out longer than most. Having 512 MB of RAM and dozens of tabs is my use case.

I have 12GB of RAM and probably ~120 tabs open at any given time. This used to be fine, but it seems Firefox is just getting worse over time, the main problem is the frequent 5 to 30 second pauses while it is doing....something.

> 120 tabs open at any given time

Are you exaggerating ? If not, may I suggest an alternative way to browse the web ?

I use multiple virtual desktops. Each desktop logically caters to one task. Each browser window is logically grouped under one activity.

For example my desktop may look like this :

Virtual Desktop 1 ( Communications ):

* Outlook

* Lync

* Flowdock etc

Virtual Desktop 2 ( Development ):

* ConEmu/ Command prompt

* Intellij

* Browser Window with multiple tabs for referring stuff

Virtual Desktop 3 ( Procrastination ):

Browser Window 1:

* Various pages opened from HN

Browser Window 2:

* Various pages concerning World War 2

* Various pages investigating different investment strategies.

The advantage of this approach is that once you are done you can close browser windows and tabs. Done with researching World War 2 ? Close that window, all associated tabs close automatically. If you accidentally close a tab, you can always bring it back with Ctrl + Shift + T. If you want to refer to a previously opened window, you can always do a simple search in browser history.

Keeps your system responsive and makes it easy to find things.

He is not, it is not rare to have 120 tabs, in fact some extreme even have 400+ Tabs openned. Today is rather lightweight for me and has 70 Tabs. Of coz these wont be all loaded, Once you close and reopen those tabs will be unloaded. They are more like a list of things to read and do.

I currently have 753 tabs open on this computer alone :p But as you say, it's not a problem at all because there are not loaded until I go back to them.

The only issue I have with massive number of tabs, is the start-up time of the browser, which increase dramatically with the number of tabs (it's at least quadratic).

The only solution to this would be effective treatment for ADHD I think

Did you count them? How can you be so exact?

If you try and close the window, firefox will be default warn you and tell you how many tabs you have.

> Of coz these wont be all loaded, Once you close and reopen those tabs will be unloaded.

That's how it's supposed to work, but for me the tabs seem to consume memory even when they're not loaded (after a restart). I completely can't understand how this is a difficult thing to implement properly.

On a different system, I had pretty much that. I've moved to Chromium, which is also slow but at least doesn't hang as often or as badly. I would do this:

8 or 16 gigabytes of RAM (got an upgrade)

8 virtual desktops, about 5 occupied with browser windows

1 to 20 windows per desktop

1 to 20 tabs per window

That is likely 100 to 300 tabs total. No, I really don't want to close them. I want more open, but performance is a problem. I like to keep going back to tabs that have been open for months. It hurts to close tabs because then I lose track of what I am working on; the scroll bar position matters and the page might even be gone from the web. Sometimes I write a comment on a web site like this one, then let it sit for days if I am unsure I want to post it.

Have you ever heard of bookmarks?

With bookmarks, I lose my state. Scroll position matters. The highlighting of search terms (by Ctrl-F in the browser) matters. The content of an unsubmitted form matters. Web site log-in matters.

Even if I didn't lose my state, reloading a bookmark is slow.

With bookmarks, deletion is a pain.

How would I even know when to bookmark something? I might open 10 links from a news site or search engine, each in a different tab. Do you propose that I bookmark them immediately, even though they are probably tabs that I will soon close and never wish to see again? If I see the page and think I want to consider it for a few hours maybe (or longer; how should I know?) do I bookmark it? Perhaps I should wait the few hours or days...? Why should I even have to make this decision?

>the main problem is the frequent 5 to 30 second pauses while it is doing....something.

Oh god I thought I was alone on this. I've been talking to various Firefox users and nobody was able to relate with me. I usually keep Firefox open 24/7 with around 20-30 tabs open (~6 or so pinned). Every time I am typing (like in a hangout popup window or in a HN comment) Firefox is micro-stuttering and freezing and it eats away some of the words I am typing and it becomes very frustrating. I ended up typing comments in vim and then copypasting because it was faster. It feels like typing in an SSH connection with high-latency.

Also when scrolling long pages (like reddit threads) the "view" takes a while to update so I end up scrolling down to a totally grey page which then updates with content over and over again. And don't make me talk about twitter taking ages and setting my CPU to 100% (one core) with loud as hell fan every time I click on "show 50 new tweets"...

I have 16GB of RAM and a 2-years old top-of-the-line (back then) i7 CPU on a laptop, I shouldn't be having these issues...

Yes, I have the same problems. Last time I looked into these pauses, those were mostly GC pauses. At first you feel like moving on a bumpy road with micro-freezes and frame drops - that's incremental GC, and then you meet a concrete wall - that's non-incremental GC kicks-in, sometimes in multi-second territory. It got better in the last few releases, to be fair, but still far away from other browsers.

Man I dunno, that seems like something else entirely. Maybe try installing NoScript?

Same here, I was using Firefox on Mac for years, but recently I had to move away from it because it was the most CPU/RAM consuming process on my machine, constantly lagging, hanging, crashing... I'd love to get back, but you guys need to improve the performance at least up to Chrome levels, if not Safari. As other people here, I dont care for builtin Pocket and whatever else, because I can get most of things via plugins - I can't do that for browser performance though ;)

I don't know why it is that way for you. I switched to Firefox on mac exactly for this reason. Safari and Chrome were consuming too many resources. Firefox is nice, fast and stable (for me at least).

Translation: Firefox is not Apple nor Google or Microsoft whom has literally unlimited resources. By having engineers on Test Pilot they are having less resources to do what he think is important

Personal Take: Completely agree. I am opening up Firefox with Panarama Mode missing, Pocket, Hello.

And BTW, e10s hasn't shipped yet, and at the current timeline, even if it ship in Firefox 49/50 it will still not be any good for power / heavy tab users, which incidentaly is the only group left using Firefox, most have moved on to Chrome.

I see light of hope in Servo. But liscenses ( MPL? Why not Apache 2.0 ) are a concern for a few company to join and devote resources into it. ( Apart from Samsung )

> I see light of hope in Servo. But liscenses ( MPL? Why not Apache 2.0 ) are a concern for a few company to join and devote resources into it.

Copyleft licences are often the best way to go in this kind of situations: thanks to the GPL, Linux remained one until Google forked it for Android. And 15 years after its beginning, there is no fragmentation in the kernel space. On the other hand, BSD has been forked many times by companies to build their own proprietary OS [1].

The MPL will ensure that Servo is never forked by Google/Apple/Microsoft into a competing proprietary software, but will remain a free software.

[1]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/77/Unix_his...

I am not against Copyleft at all, but MPL in particular because no one is using it apart from Mozilla. They could have use GPL or LGPL instead.

Could you possibly comment on FF's seeming inability to unload tabs from memory? There are numerous add-ons that claim to unload tabs and free up that memory, but none of them work as advertised.

And, when FF crashes and reloads, restoring all the tabs, it seems like the tabs aren't loaded (the page is blank and does a reload when selected), yet if you look in task manager (Windows 7), all the memory seems to have already been consumed.

Should tabs be able to be unloaded from memory, in theory? If so, is it implemented this way? If not, is there a reason?

Hi, thank you for taking the time to reply. FYI - I have been using firefox every day as my primary browser for the past 4 or so years and have only switched to chromium in the past month, I still have two versions of FF installed and they're just so unreliable I can't bring myself to rely upon them - especially at work where I'm in the browser a lot. It's most definitely got _worse_ for me in the past year rather than better.

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