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I keep switching between Firefox and Chrome. I want to be using Firefox, except I cannot.

Chrome is designed for web apps. If you keep several apps open in Firefox, like say Gmail, FastMail, Slack, Gitter, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp Web and Google Music or YouTube, pretty soon Firefox ends up being really, really sluggish. And I keep these apps pinned, and the startup experience for Firefox gets horrible.

Firefox also has problems with many services, where loading a single link can make your whole browser unresponsive for a long time or even crash it. To see what I mean, load this Travis log in Firefox and compare with Chrome: https://travis-ci.org/monixio/monix/builds/148774867 ; and this is just one sample, there are others that bother me, like the OpenTSDB UI. Personally I don't keep 200 tabs open, because I'm focusing on just a few at a time. If I want to go back to something valuable, I use bookmarks (or more recently Pinboard.in). This is because tabs are hard to manage and search, unless you have one of those fancy extensions, but I dislike those as well.

On add-ons, I very much appreciate Mozilla having a good review process, but those add-ons have no isolation and everything is allowed to run even in private mode.

The fact is, if I can't comfortably run my web apps in Firefox, I'll keep going back to Chrome. And yes I keep trying using native apps, like Thunderbird and Adium/Pidgin. It isn't working out.

> On add-ons, I very much appreciate Mozilla having a good review process, but those add-ons have no isolation and everything is allowed to run even in private mode.

To me, that's a good thing. I don't like walled gardens because then you, the commoner, have to beg your benevolent ruler to please allow a particular use-case to be supported in their fiefdom.

Notice also that the Raw Log loads instantly and is very responsive, in the same Firefox that struggles so much with the fancy travis log page.

I think it is unfortunate that insanely heavy web applications, which can kinda get away with it in Chrome, are forcing everyone to Chrome.

It's hard... though, if you work in a mixed environment where different devs use different browsers, some things are better.

Just the same, it's hard to convince people not to bring in the jungle for the banana (appropriated analogy). With today's tooling, it's very easy to use smaller frameworks, and piece together what you need.. but in goes angular, jQuery, lodash and a few other large libraries for good measure. About the only one I'm guilty of bringing in these days is moment... and most of that is because the internals for Date are poorly lacking (maybe it's time to standardize some non-mutating, moment-like ES extensions to Date already).

Ugh I just had this debate recently about moment. I opted out of using it as I felt it was just too big for its use case.

It's not just insanely heavy web applications that are a problem.

It's people writing stuff, then it being slow in all browsers, then them optimizing it in Chrome only (basically changing stupid stuff they did that ended up slow in Chrome but maybe fast in other browsers, but not changing stupid stuff that was fast in Chrome but slow in other browsers) and shipping the results.

> To see what I mean, load this Travis log in Firefox and compare with Chrome

Wow, that one brought FireFox Dev Edition (OSX El Capitan) to a dead stop over here.

that did indeed froze my firefox. I had to kill it (on linux)

Alright, I'm confused. This doesn't do anything for me. I even tried it in a fresh profile to ensure that it wasn't fixed by some add-on or setting that I was using, and tried it with e10s on and off, but it loads perfectly fine in any case. Granted, it's a bit slower than the average site for me, too, but it still loads within about 3 seconds.

I'm on Firefox Nightly, Linux, which should be sort of the combination of the two use-cases that you guys have...

the fun begins when you click on the logs below. It starts loading the log and firefox slows down a lot.

On Safari, this loads instantly for me, butter smooth.

FWIW, I tried this link in FF 47.0.1 on OS X and it loaded quickly without blocking anything else. Maybe check your plugins or try a fresh profile.

Did you click on the build job on the bottom? The page linked above is fast for me, but the actual log[1] blocks FF for a bit.

[1] https://travis-ci.org/monixio/monix/jobs/149097798

I am using Firefox night builds with 33 active addons including GreaseMonkey and some user scripts at the moment as a main browser for about few months already because of multiprocess support. It's perfect - fast, responsive and pretty stable now.

What you say about web apps and Chrome you can say about FF with multiprocess on as well. If some page takes too much cpu you can find it in your OS task manager and kill it and you will see which tab crashes (TabData is an usefull addon showing how much memory pages take https://github.com/bobbyrne01/tab-data-firefox (don't sample too often, it slows FF down if it's active and you have dozens of tabs open and sample every few seconds)

I don't know the number of process they will use as default, I configured 128. I regularly use 20-60 tabs with pinned Twitter, Gmail, Reddit, WhatApp and some more ( TabMixPlus with multirow tabs makes it no problem) and it's really nice browsing experience.

I had to restart FF every morning, sometimes multiple times a day and when something crashed the whole browser went down. Now you just reload the crashed tab or plugin - was common few months back and is rare nowadays. It has a warning if some addon is slowing FF down - I hope addon authors will update them but right now I just ignore the warnings because I don't see any subjective slowdown.

For what it's worth, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1291707 is tracking the travis-ci issue.

And if you have concrete examples of other pages where there are performance problems, that would be very much appreciated!

I don't think your usage is an anomaly at all. People use open tabs like a read-it-later list, and so far I couldn't get used to a service like that (or bookmarks) because I forget that I even added them in the first place (out of sight, out of mind). Right now, Tree Style Tabs, Tab Mix Plus, Session Manager and loading tabs on demand are what help me manage my tabs well.

I have had several hundred tabs open in Firefox many a times (yes, there are valid reasons), and that affects startup time (even with loading tabs on demand) and exit time (the time taken for process to terminate after the windows disappear). I have read about people who do the same (or a lot more).

In my observation over several years, Firefox has been able to handle many more tabs with lesser CPU and memory usage (aka sluggishness) than Chrome ever could. Chrome is always sluggish after opening several tabs and consumes a lot more memory. What's worse is recovery in Chrome. Restoring sessions and tabs in Firefox has been a breeze for a long time, and even as recent as a few days ago, I had to struggle doing that in Chrome (the session manager extension there is not reliable at all, nor is Chrome's own crash recovery).

On the multi-process model, Firefox is now using one process for the entire browser chrome (UI) and one process for the content. I have also dreaded that Firefox multi-process would become sluggish like Chrome, but we'll have to wait and see how the development progresses. The Firefox developers do know a lot more about Chrome's issues on this front, and I'm sure they will tread cautiously and adopt some kind of trade-offs that provide adquate security (better sandboxing), stability and performance.

To check memory use in Chrome, go to about:memory and you should be able to get details of all Chrome processes and the totals. Pressing Shift+Esc when in Chrome would also show all the Chrome tab stats (similar to a task manager window).

Thanks so much for about:memory and shift+esc ... I always forget about them.

Periodically I keep coming back to HN to pretty much say the same thing. Which is that tabs are used as a replacement for bookmarks. And that's pretty much because of the failing of a good browser bookmark UI. I've tried many tab extensions and haven't been happy with any of them.

You can easily leapfrog Chrome with a better web interface and web page helpers. I see no radically visible innovation with Firefox or Chrome for that matter.

I had an Apple Powerbook, that with age couldn't cope with 'modern' web sites. So I took great pains to make browsing easier. Now I notice the same creep on 'modern' machines. JS may be processed faster, and pages rendered quicker, but many web resources are becoming more bloated and this ruins the browsing experience.

I have gone back to having one browser with no javascript running, just so I can read some pages, as I'm fed up with the inherent slow down. Yeah some 'appy' sites/pages are impressive.

But the bog standard web pages that eat my computer's resources to display a few adverts alongside a passage of text or a picture is pretty dreadful. Being able to easily identify and manage these laggy sites would be a help. There are tools but they aren't that accessible or easy to read or use.

And after running Windows 10 for the first time at the weekend, I can see how the Desktop UI and admin interface is still comparatively stuck in the stone age.

So in short I think there is plenty of room for improvement, across the board.

Session files of tabs are also better than bookmarks since they save per-tab history so you can see how you arrived somewhere.

The per-tab process switch is bad for users like us (I have 300+ tabs right now) but what is even worse in FF48 is the implementation of a walled garden for extensions.

That's a good point about tab/session history. That's another area that could see improvement. I frequently open a link in a new tab, so also having that web of history between tabs could be useful.

I've been terribly unproductive today. Darting back and forth to sites. I have a tendency to close tabs if I can. But sometimes when distracted, open something back up, like a forum to see if there is change. And I may in truth have only opened it about 10 minutes earlier. Last visited/popular site list helper could be of use there. Or of course not procrastinating in the first place.

>Last visited/popular site list

Don't both Firefox and Chrome have it, right in the URL bar?

Where?

Assume you mean:

Chrome -> burger menu -> History and recent tabs.

Firefox -> History -> Recently closed tabs/windows.

Not the best or easiest method to get to that info. Nested menus are only useful for occasional functions. They are a bit of a faff.

In Firefox, go to URL bar and click drop-down list button (or press Alt+Down).

Not sure about Chrome now, I thought it was the same but turns out it doesn't work.

I get a list of of sites, have no idea why they are there. They differ to most visited, and are not last visited.

The algorithm is the same as for displaying tiles in a new tab[1]. For me, it works perfectly.

1. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/about-tiles-new-tab

Oh it's called frecency is it? That's different to what I wanted. But least I have an idea of what it is now. Ta.

I know many Mozilla developers are "tab hoarders" with hundreds of tabs, so I am confident that your use case will get plenty of attention. :)

How do they manage all these tabs without Tab Groups then (which they removed)?

Tab Groups was moved to an extension, and has had a lot of nice improvements: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-groups-pa...

A lot of folks use https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

Personally I use separate windows for separate tasks, so I can close a whole window when I am done with something (research, work, tabs from HN, etc.)

60-100!! That's (personally) so many. How do you know which tab is which and where it is? My colleague has about 20 or 30 tabs open on Chrome and each time he wants me to look over his chrome for any debugging purpose, I get frusrated that I can't find where the right tab is! (I'm assuming there is a better tab management tool out there).

TabMixPlus to the rescue :) I set all tabs to have fixed width (so around 8 tabs per row) and to show 3 rows of tabs. Also unread tabs have title in red italic, current tab in blue bold and read tabs in black regular. Works for me :)

I use TreeStyleTab [1] and usually have more than 150 tabs at the same time on my PC and around 60-100 on my professional computers (at home and at work). I sort them by category, then when I have a spare day I read dozens of news one by one, or when I'm in a mood, I read by categories what I like. In the last 3 years I tried to switch to Opera and Chome a few times, but they... they just suck for my requirements. Firefox lets you search by bookmark, history and open tabs, which is really useful in my cases (I also have hundreds of bookmarks).

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

> and where it is?

Firefox has UI for searching your tabs. You focus the location bar, type "% " followed by a string (but don't hit enter!) and it searches the urls and titles of the things in your tabs for that string and shows you a list of results. Selecting one of those results will select the corresponding tab.

If you leave out the "% " it will still search your open tabs, but also your history; some of the history results can appear above some of the tab results, depending on how often you visit pages vs selecting their tabs and whatnot.

>How do you know which tab is which

Firefox always shows the site icon and first word or two of the page title in the tab; unlike Chrome it has a minimal tab size (precisely so you can see what the tab is!) and a scrolling UI so you can go swipe through the list when there are too many to fit in the window and look for the one you want if you don't want to use the text search option.

There are also various extensions that help people manage tabs, but even the built-in setup is quite usable (speaking as someone who has a lot of tabs open and does not use those extensions).

I agree that Chrome's non-scrolling UI, which just shrinks the tabs until nothing is visible in the tab and then starts not showing the later ones at all so you have to use keyboard shortcuts to even consider trying to get to them, makes using more than about 10 tabs pretty much impossible. But that's just because the UI sucks, not an inherent property of having many tabs open.

I usually leave several hundred tabs open across multiple browsers at the same time. New window for each project, and tabs within them. Between my own projects, and clients, and research on the go, I find it works for me. I would get little done if I wasn't using the vimium plugin to search my tabs much like Alfred let's me search my mac.

Another use case for lots of tabs is using the great Spaces feature in Firefox. You can fire up and maintain multiple groups of tabs and windows per project. It's a great way to switch contexts. The main reason I used Chrome/Chromium was to have a sense of which Tab was a runaway process. Hoping Firefox v48 is a step in teh right direction.

I use a tab suspender that will suspend background tabs after a couple minutes... I'll whitelist internal apps, and lighter pages (like HN). It helps quite a bit.

I have to agree on it being harder to track how much memory chrome is really using... also, hard to tell which process is for what tab or extension.

I haven't been a heavy Firefox user for a while, I find the opposite case when trying to debug in Firefox.

For me the bigger draw to chrome is I happen to like the UI more... I no longer see the need for the separate search input, sometimes the fast paced changes to chome's UI can be cumbersome. That said, I work in OSX, Windows and Linux (Ubuntu Unity) pretty regularly, so it's always different somewhere.

I noticed that Chrome is more performant when heavy Javascript is involved. Firefox works better with heavy tab usage.

I usually run Firefox for general browsing and Chrome for one-off dedicated app.

yes, I too find that Google Drive apps works better under chrome and leads to weird errors in Firefox. So I have Chrome hanging around just for this case.

Not terribly representative, though, that browser A would do worse than browser B on browser B's vendor's web property...

I am another user with similar habits. I think separating the UI process from contents is still required (since you use so many tabs as well, you must have faced UI blocking problems) - though not so sure about having a separate process for each page.

You can use the excellent OneTab extension for Chrome: https://www.one-tab.com/

Just click on the button if you notice a slow down and restore the tabs later either selectively or as group.

Why not use bookmarks instead? That's what they're for.

Trust me I tried it! Only the bookmarks became a forest I could not find my way in or out. Atleast when they are tabs, when firefox starts slowing down, i realize there is too much and trim some down.

That said, I use evernote to clip urls that will be useful in the future. The tabs that are open are transient ones, that are required only in the context of a current research or feature implementation and would not be needed once concluded.

I suppose, I am a pathological reader and researcher who needs to look at all opinions, find all apps that provide a feature and try them all, dig deep into each solution etc etc. Sometimes that leads to analysis paralysis. Not at all a good thing.

You can't see the page from the bookmark and you forget the content just from the bookmark title. Well maybe not you but many people including me do.

Bookmarks don't save the per-tab history. With tab sessions you can go back and see what search terms and sites you used to get somewhere.

I regularly have 200~300 tabs open in a single session in chrome. Yes, it gets a little hard to find what I want, but it still runs excellent.

Don't dread it, it got better :) See my other post here.