Firefox’s speed with large numbers of tabs leaves Chrome in the dust
techradar.com
techradar.com
why not take the 30 seconds to mull it over to at least develop a sense of understanding/empathy before throwing out a micro agression around something so frivolous? i mean, if it's not hurting you, then let other people be, right?
and besides, shouldn't the computer conform to how the human wants to work and not the other way around?
I leave about a dozen or so tabs open; they track projects I'm in the middle of but can't complete right now for whatever reason. Leaving them put is organizationally helpful to my brain. (I do the same with physical items as well.)
But the few sites I'm addicted to… those stay closed until I need a fix.
i disagree of course, because that's a pretty judgemental slippery slope argument (i.e., that a single behavior implies a whole host of other negative behaviors & attributes).
Or, alternatively, from keeping an eye on your memory usage. If memory is an issue, not opening too many tabs sure helps.
On my 2GB-of-RAM netbook, I hardly open Firefox at all, on my 8 GB laptop, I just don't care. On my 12 GB work laptop, where I have stuff like mmc, multiple RDP sessions, Internet Explorer with multiple tabs (thank you, SharePoint!) and lots of other stuff opened, I still keep an eye on the number of tabs. Well, sometimes, at least. At 16 GB or above, I just don't give a flying ____.
When you do this, you're one crash + failed recovery away from losing those pages forever. Yes, you can go through your history and try to recreate the list, but let's be honest here -- Most of those tabs were from six months ago. Finding and opening those pages manually is going to suck.
Alternatively, browsers could start treating window + tab lists as less ephemeral, and make it easy to restore window + tab combinations at any time, regardless of whether the browser thinks it crashed recently.
Extensions like OneTab make this sort of dump a one button affair, which makes the process easier when you also have ten windows open. It also keeps them separate from your longer term bookmarks, which is nice.
I also fail to see how preemptively closing my tabs so that they don't accidentally get lost helps me any.
Sometimes it fails, or Chrome crashes a second time after relaunching, but before you were able to restore the tabs, causing the next restore to open a blank window instead of your tabs from two crashes ago. This happens more often than I'm comfortable with.
It would be really nice if browsers kept a history of your last N window + tab sets and allowed you to restore them whenever you wanted, rather than only the last one, and only after it thinks it crashed. Because when it gets this wrong, you usually have no recourse.
The menu is nested into history and works on successive crashes.
But if I crash chrome, relaunch, don't recover or open a different set of tabs before recovering, then force a crash again, the menu is blank.
I'm not going to rely on something this finicky. Compare this to history -- it's there, in chronological order, until you clear it. That's how this should work.
This is possible using Tab Mixer Plus extension for Firefox
We can reverse the logic in your statement and it makes just as much sense. "People who have too many bookmarks are almost always using their bookmarks as tabs, or as an "I want to read this later" mechanism".
As a self proclaimed "tabs as a read it later" user, I do so because I've never found a better "read it later" mechanism. Maybe bookmarks work for you, but I find them mostly useless. For me, tabs are mostly self organizing with similar topics in the same window, and similar windows are close together on the taskbar. And I can reorganize them without opening some other UI to do it. And, the main benefit is, closing a tab removes it from my "read it later" queue. With a bookmark you have to go find it in your bookmarks list by name, possibly among other similarly named, mostly unorganized bookmarks and do a couple more mouse clicks and movements to delete it.
Before tabs, I'm sure all of us tabbers used bookmarks as a "read it later" mechanism. And although I probably do have some 6+ month old tabs, my del.icio.us queue of "toread" items spanned years. And that's a conservative estimate because I haven't used it in years and there's still articles on the list I haven't touched.
I absolutely welcome alternatives, but bookmarks isn't the answer for me.
Completely agree. I am actually currently developing a tree-style-tab browser that has Chrome embedded for this reason [0]. I feel most people that tell people not to have a ton of tabs open haven't experienced the increased productivity with tree style tabs. I can ctrl+click 15 source files on a github page, opened as background tabs, then (with multiple tab handler) I can click+drag across the 10 close buttons and close 10 tabs with one gesture. I almost want to take a video of me "power-using" the web with tree style tabs and multiple-tab gestures to help others understand.
I see it as vim:intellij::fewer-tab-argument:more-tab-argument. To each his own.
I never understand any of my friends who keep having tens of tabs open. Just bookmark the thing and free up some CPU/RAM. It's a keystroke away.
My personal workflow usually involves opening huge number of tabs researching something, then closing most of them later. So we can say that there are peaks of tab usage followed by a phase of organizing stuff. The advances in the recent Firefox releases really help me.
But this is my own personal way of working, others may have different views.
Obviously this is unmanageable in Chrome from the UI but with the right extensions (tab mix plus w/ multi row tabs) in Firefox it's pretty usable.
Say you start on HN and open five articles. You've now got HN/Site1, HN/Site2, and so on. Then you find an interesting link on 3 of those 5 sites.
With normal tabbing, you now have 9 tabs open and a majority of the text hidden on one line, where with a proper tree view, you can see the entire site, and how you got there, which is probably more valuable to me than the actual content.
To make things even better, when you're done with that research point you just kill the parent level tab and the children all go away too.
Tens of tabs is pretty typical in my workday and improves my productivity vs. fewer tabs and forgetting how I got to a tangent.
This also has the advantage of loading the pages in the background so you don't have to waste your time on bloated webpages.
That reads like "while <more than I use> is ridiculous, <as many as I use> isn't that unreasonable".
I never have more than about ten tabs open, and a hundred strikes me as ridiculous too. To each his own, though, I guess.
That would indeed be a much better use of space.
Also Chrome might be faster but FF has some unique advantages that makes it really great for serious work.
Also the speed advantage that Chrome currently has might be about to disappear : )
The address bar used to be pretty helpful in calling up bookmarks (10+ years ago), but now there's too much featuritis there for me ever to rely on it again.
I bet Henry David Thoreau would say the same about browser tabs.
to "solve" the tab problem, you need to combine tabs, history, bookmarks, back/forward buttons, pinboard/tags/pagecache into groups that are instantly rearrangable by their proximity to each other: spatially, by topic, or temporally. i should be able to, in one command, show only tabs that are hacker news or originated from hacker news, but maybe something i googled while on one of those pages deserves to be related. now the machine should be making inferences on what goes where, and i give it feedback when it is wrong.
tabs should be more like a wiki document, where as i accumulate more about, say, stagecoaches, or good reads from redef, those metadata relationships to topics and origins are preserved. i should be able to go back and show only bookmarks from only hackernews/redef/longreads combined, and only the ones about stagecoaches.
i know mozilla has shown a demo of something like this, but its a long way from being more useful than tabs, because it neglects the content of the page itself.
Check out the Firefox Tree Style Tab plug-in [1], is this what you had in mind?
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
Chrome might be faster than FF and a Ferrari might be faster than a pickup truck.
But:
FF and the pickup truck is more useful for work IMO
and the Ferrari and Chrome comes with a price I'm not comfortable with.
You might have better luck with trying to implement it as an extension to Firefox although the extension API is (at least for now) going to be a shadow of its former self AFAIK.
My tab tree is the closest thing I've come to an effort-less mind-map that works for me. (Effortless as in ctrl-click to open a new sub-tree so I can always see what is related to what and how I found something really hard-to-find-but useful.)
Even though my current setup works well I'm quite sure I or someone else will be able to create something event better in the future.
http://lifehacker.com/203915/download-of-the-day-pathway-mac
"Chrome is so much better for my usecase. Look how much Firefox usage has declined, Firefox should just die"
"Here's my use case which Firefox is better at"
"Your use case is invalid!"
from HN comments this week.
Leaving a tab open means I'll actually stumble across the page again.
I think it's the sort of thing where this works well enough for the same purpose that other people use a read-later or bookmarking system for, and it's reliable enough that people don't care to switch (or don't know there's an alternative).
It's good that Firefox is trying to adapt to the way people use technology, rather than trying to force people to adapt to how the technology works - I think that's a much faster road to widespread adoption, and it creates more goodwill on the part of their users.
With FF when you start to type it intelligently suggests tabs you already have open.
Perfect for keyboard lovers like me :)
firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabist/
chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabist/hdjegjggiog...
- make a habit of Ctrl+T before googling something
- open all outgoing links in new background tabs
so you can continue reading the current page
- leave several pages of reference material open
(e.g. docs, issue trackers, random blog posts relevant to whatever you're doing)
- open links that someone sends you to work on them later
It's not as though I have hundreds of tabs in one group, it would be inconvenient to access all but 20-30 of them. I think most users with similar amounts of tabs use plugins like tab groups or tree-based tabs to manage their tabs.
Reasons I have a lot of tabs open:
1. Google searching problem. The first result is rarely a complete solution to a problem if I've resorted to Google. Maybe it's a partial solution, maybe it's no good at all. Usually I'll open anything looking relevant from the first page, skim through them, if they don't have a quick answer I'll check the next. Then I'll eliminate any that are totally not relevant. If any have partial answers, I'll keep them around while searching related search terms. See also searching our jira instance for related issues when I know this is very similar to something that's came up before.
2. Programming docs have this annoying habit of sticking one class per page, meaning I usually have to have multiple pages open to understand some area of a library if I'm unfamiliar with it.
3. Reddit/HN threads often send me on tangents down links while I keep the parent threads open.
4. Sometimes I'll go on an aside and do something else while keeping my previous context open for when I return. Yes, I could bookmark them, but bookmarks are a lot more awkward to load back and also mentally feel like they're for something a lot more permanent than "I might need in 3-4 hours but won't need it tomorrow". Plus when it's not costing me much to not have to put up with the reload time...
5. Sometimes I open new windows to view multiple pieces of content at once. Sometimes I end up following links in these new windows.
6. Sometimes I open new windows to create a seperate context for a new piece of research when the previous one might be still relevant.
I have tried pinboard, pocket when it was readitlater, browser bookmarks, etc. None of them have really solved this use case and I tend to forget about using them after a while.
I tend to idle in the 5-20 range, go up to the 50s when researching. Hitting 100+ happens many days, and my record is closing out a browser with 354 open tabs.
It's generally from researching a topic while working on a project. It's a bit like a cache of bookmarks, you don't really know what you're going to need until you've made some headway and found what was truly helpful that you may need later versus what you can safely close.
We talk about privacy as fundamental right but are ok with chrome. We all know it's a memory hog but still are ok with it.
I currently have ~500 tabs open, unevenly distributed among 20 "tab groups". It's very much like expecting your editor/IDE to open a bunch of files and git status when you switch to a "project".
- I'm pursuing a multi-pronged agenda which requires context switches to get different things done (multiple projects/activities, each with their own group eg: communication, project1 at work, project2 at work, paying my bills, topic FOO that I've been reading about in the evenings, HN content, etc. ). I prefer for my browser to display the state at which I left things, including the possible resources I was consulting -- so that I can continue from exactly where I left off. Also, one might actually want to save the state of the javascript objects on the page or something, rather than just the URL!
- A lot of my browser activity has the flavor of research. A lot of searching, consulting references, trying out things in Jupyter notebooks, etc.
- A large part of it is keeping track of interesting things to look into. Whether you call those "bookmarks" or "open tabs" is just jargon, since Firefox only loads tabs on demand. So, for all practical purposes, it has an amazingly convenient way to save context, without having to click once for each page. And closing a tab feels easier than deleting a bookmark.
I sometimes think that this might be the electronic analogue of some (creative?) people who have messy offices and are able to get along just fine. As an example, refer to the recent discussions about Claude Shannon's style:
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14819377 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14774163 3. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14776520
Who are these people with a shockingly low number of tabs, and how do we get them the help they need?
Those I usually see with few tabs are either those who only browse the web for extremely simple things (ie facebook, netflix and google for very simple questions), or those who only just maintain like a single docs page at any given moment.
The hell kind of absurd usage pattern is that? Do you keep one book on your shelf too? Do you just not have any interests? Nothing but one thing at a time? I keep around ~300 tabs and a heavily organized bookmarks storage with some 400 links; tabs are ram and bookmarks are disk.
How else would you naturally organize your web-information? I can only imagine you have very little information to organize...
I would argue that 300 tabs is like having 300 open books piled on your desk.
> Do you just not have any interests?
Yes, and my bookshelves - and bookmarks - are crammed full of them. But I don't need to have every project I'm working on on my desk.
I guess it's pretty arbitrary, but I find it easier to organize things in bookmarks - for certain things, hierarchically in folders; for others, with tags - but if I'm done working on Thing X, and want to start working on Thing Y, I don't want to have to search through my 300 open tabs to figure out where things are.
An advantage of many open tabs, I will freely admit, is that they're typically scrolled to where you last left off, sometimes with information pre-filled if it's something interactive.
That's reasonable. Do any browsers do this out of the box? I'm just boggled at the idea of keeping a vague map of thousands of open tabs, with no easy way to sort, filter, categorize, etc. them.
I need to jump from one to another trying to solve a problem. I will be able to close those tabs only when i am done with the debug. I guess clean slate is for people who have written their own tools and use.
To me, the tab bar is a working area. I don't keep stuff that is not immediately relevant to what I'm doing in the working area.
When you're soldering stuff, you don't want spatulas and eggs getting in your way. On the other hand, when you're cooking, you don't want solder to get mixed up with your food.
> How else would you naturally organize your web-information?
You don't. There's google for that :-)
And what'll you do for a large task thats interrupted by a small task? Wipe out the large and replace it with the small, then work up towards the large again? Obviously not; you stick it up with the large task's tabs, and just note which tab marks the differentiation between tasks (not literally... you mentally know a tab is associated with which task, unless both tasks are extremely similar)
And multiple small tasks interrupting each other? (Often a redult of each one being extremely boring). Obviously, more tab sequences.
The natural thing to do is accumulate tabs until it becomes unsustainable, and then garbage collect
You choose instead to artificially constrain yourself for some arbitrary notion of cleansliness (One window, one tab sequence, I bet !) and then attack those of the One True Way with your spatulas and eggs. Google is your organization? Either you have an amazing memory of arbitrary websites...or you dont have any memory of them (artificial or otherwise)
No, just open a new tab. I simply never have more than 2 tasks in-flight. I can't focus on more than two things at a time, and even then the second one has to be really quick (no more than 1 tab deep). And of course, once I'm done with something, it goes away.
> Either you have an amazing memory of arbitrary websites...or you dont have any memory of them (artificial or otherwise)
The latter. I don't commit things that can be searched to memory. For example, I don't go to Khronos website to search OpenGL APIs, I just google the function names. Same if I want to look for something in wikipedia. I also don't bother remembering website names. For example, if I know there's a particular article about shadow mapping I want to read, I can just google "article about shadowmapping by fabien" and the thing I'm looking for will be the top result.
> The natural thing to do is accumulate tabs until it becomes unsustainable, and then garbage collect
Sure. It's just that > 10 is already pushing it and > 20 tabs is completely unsustainable for me.
I'm one! I'm a happy software/systems/knowledge engineer.
> and how can we get them the help they need?
Thanks for asking! Here is my idea:
Make an even better solution! What I need:
An effortless[0] way to research big topics. This includes
- multi-path discovery (currently solved by ctrl-clicking to open links that looks useful or interesting in a sub-tab-tree while continuing to read the piece I'm already reading.)
- possibility to bookmark stuff I work on effortlessy and with cross-device sync. I currently use pinboard which is great. I'm not even fully utilizing it (.tags for instance is a part I'm sure I'm not utilizing as much as I should.)
My current setup has a few weaknesses, e.g.:
- I want a way to stash away everything down to the position of the windows (no, I actually don't think I need that, but I really would like: the current windows, the current tabs, nested the way they are etc etc). Why? In case I want to switch to another task (e.g. urgent request).
- I want an even better "OneNote" that integrates effortlessly with FF (or whatever you create to replace it).
- A tool to automatically transcribe booooring videos or at least extract the juicy few seconds that I need :-P
Feel free to suggest more great ideas here.
[0]: Yep, if you want a chance to replace my exiting system effortless is your goal.
This would be great for dynamic research tasks. You could collapse trees and get a top level view, useful if you're in the weeds; you could close trees by parent, great for killing avenues of research you no long need. It would also be good for when you need to quickly check the syntax of something or fix a minor bug without disrupting the larger project you're focusing on.
From a Dev/LiveOps perspective, it would be huge- grouping all my AWS pages, CMS pages, custom dashboards, would be a huge help. I can easily sprawl tens of separate tabs to get different services to talk to eachother.
Currently we are in a position where we'll push for devs to provide the necessary APIs going forward and I'll be happy to have more people along to push for that.
(Also, AFAIK Mozilla will provide a LTS version of the last version that will work with real extensions.)
You may want to give this extension a shot: https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/session-manager/
By telling them about OneTab.
I tried making a chrome plugin for this, but with a lot of tabs it didn't work reliably, and I didn't have time to put more work into it.
The article that was originally posted was certainly more interesting and informative.
Mozilla really paved the way for electron with prism, shame it never really took off
Still have more stuff to land, so expect things to keep getting better.
What if it's easy to easily have multiple "Research containers"?
Container tab allows you to hide all tabs related to a particular container, so I feel like you can easily improve your workflow.
What about combining that functionality with snooze tab extension? But instead of snoozing individual tabs, snooze a container.
[1]: https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/snooze-tabs
[2]: https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/containerssadly they will stop functioning after Firefox 57, because progress, yeah.
I'm in the camp that cannot understand how having hundreds of tabs open can be practical...to me it would be like having hundreds of files open in an IDE or file browser, hundreds of terminals open, or hundreds of documents scattered across my desk. At some point the number of things you have in front of you becomes overwhelming to keep in your head and you have to clear away the things you don't need right now.
Chrome's UI is terrible for multiple tabs. Chrome will shrink tabs down as much as possible. Firefox stops shrinking once they're like 75% of their original width, and lets you scroll instead. On top of that, addons like Tab Center Redux make it much easier to manage things by putting them on the side (so they don't get shrunk at all) and adding a dedicated search box.
I'm pretty sure that's because Chrome's UX team don't expect you to have hundreds of tabs open. Why does your workflow require you to have that many tabs?
Hundreds of tabs just seems an insane number to me. Even if you could search by tab you'd likely forget the names of the ones that were there in the first place. Can you think of another app where you would have that many things open at once? If not, why are browsers with tabs different? The rule of thumb with UI design is that users can remember about 7 things in their short term memory.
The "tab search" is exactly the same effort as opening a new page, in fact, what often happens is I decide to switch to doing something else, and type in the URL bar for history search, and it tells me I already have tabs open for it (which means I also have existing state in those tabs), which is great. I usually know that there's a tab open, but my workflow is the same whether they are or aren't.
firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabist/
open source here: https://github.com/fiveNinePlusR/tabist
---
Hi Manishearth! I know you work at Mozilla.
If you see this: Do you have anything to share WRT the possibility of having extensions like tree-style-tabs in future versions of FF?
This is probably the one thing that leaves most Chrome users awe-struck and also is really really really useful to many of us.
It works. It's a bit unpolished UI wise, but that should improve.
There are two crucial missing bits of functionality in it. One is respecting tab order. Currently it just lets you organize the tabs, but will not actually reorder them under the hood, i.e. the ordering that ctrl-tab respects. What it should do is reorder tabs as they are moved around. Tab Center Redux does this, so I suspect the webextension API exists (in fact IIRC the google chrome webextension tabs API, which Firefox definitely supports, has this), so it just needs the stuff to be fixed. I considered fixing it myself, but the extension doesn't seem to be open source (you can of course inspect the source of the bundle but then there's no easy way to contribute back)
This may even have been fixed by the time I looked at it last.
The second is that it doesn't actually hide the tab bar up top. Neither does Tab Center Redux. This is a matter of a missing webextensions api, but it's one that's probably easy to add.
The other missing bits are mostly minor, like configurability etc.
Thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14823807
Original blog post: https://metafluff.com/2017/07/21/i-am-a-tab-hoarder/
I tried Pale Moon about a year ago. It had a nasty memory leak (my browser stays open for weeks). I really wanted to like it, but this was a serious problem.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/firefox-focus-the-privacy-br...
Removing the ability to even make tabs (which I love and hoard) is nice. Big button to delete your current page, which you have to do if you want something else. You're constantly at "inbox zero" for your tabs.
Will look through the comments here for similar solutions on the desktop. Perhaps something that limits the number of tabs you can open. Or automatically closes old tabs if they're on the website's "home page" as opposed to a specific article.
Is someone flagging this or has it triggered a flamewar-detector?
I haven't used Opera for a decade, so I don't know if the feature still exists.
[1] http://forums.opera.com/discussion/1866076/tab-stacks-in-sid...
17
(Biggest culprits are Discourse forums.. which is a shame b/c I really like the platform)
I recently quit Firefox on Linux (they no longer support ALSA and require PulseAudio for sound). I used to think FF was a memory hog. Moved to Vivalidi (Chrome based). Consumes more memory and I'm sure it has a memory leak. On FF I would have ~ 30-60 tabs open. On Vivaldi it's 10-20. I have to close Vivaldi every few days to reclaim the memory.
Pulseaudio is sold as easier to manage, but for me it simply wasn't.
The assumption is that people are running systemd, and Pulseaudio presumably works well with that. But I'm not on systemd. If my distribution had a simple way of running pulseaudio and have it work more or less right out of the box, I'd go for it. But it doesn't.
They stopped supporting it because no developer stepped up to support it - that's all. Apparently the Pulseaudio API is straightforward for developers, whereas dealing with ALSA directly is not.
Why would I want any of those in bookmarks when I can have them open when I need them, which is now.
> open when I need them
Well, what do you mean with "open". As I said IMHO there is something wrong here.
There's no use trying to change people's behavior. And this particular one really shouldn't need to be defended. Some people have simpler workflows than mine. Ahem...
Bookmarks are a pain to manage. Tabs are meant to be temporary - even if I have one open for weeks on end. They are like a TODO list. Bookmarking the tab blurs the line between temporary and permanent stores.
Blindly bookmarking to solve the problem will leave you with thousands of bookmarks.
>FF also has Pocket for keeping references to pages I want to read later.
And you'll end up with thousands of entries in your Pocket.
They already had the power users, which they have now told to get screwed when they killed the extensions to chase the performance benchmark
Trading Usability and the ability to customize the browser for something that is "fast" but you cant do anything with it...
Useless is what it is IMO
This is the difference between a sports car and a truck. Me I drive a truck, it might be slow and cumbersome but it is versatile and customizable, I haul people and things, I can add a camper, I can do all kinds of things with my truck. If I had a sports car it might be fast but I would be limited in the places I could go and the things I could do
They are taking the FF Pickup and turning it into a FF Sports car... I have no interest in a sports car
The new Chrome Replica Web Extensions can never be as powerful as the old system.
It will end up being a far cry from what we have today and more like the Ridiclous and unusable "SideTree" menus that are available in chrome.
No TreeStyle Tabs, no FF for me. that is non-optional. I will switch full time to vivalidi that has a less feature complete vertical tabs built in.
There are also many other Addons I use today that look like their are going to be discontinued post FF 57 for API or other reasons.
I have used Firefox since Version 1, I was beta testing Firefox back when mozilla suite was still the focus
I never adopted chrome, and I do not like the User Experience or the limitation of Chrome.
From EME/DRM, to Web Extensions, to who knows what else, Mozilla is killing the identiy of FF all in the name of chasing market share it will never get back.
FF should be focusing on privacy, stability, and the ability to customize the browser for you. Instead they are focusing on Mainstream placation, performance, DRM, etc
Mozilla has made it clear they no longer want people like me as users, that is fine after over a decade of support I will see myself out...
As long as I can still do that, it should be acceptable. Ideally this would be in the main version, though.
That's not to talk down the chromium forks out there. Opera and Vivaldi are great projects. I just think they can't change the core engine much
Safari is still a thing, if only on Apple's OSs.
If they're going to make me throw away all my addons, I have no reason not to use Chrome. Literally every non-enterprise Firefox user will have this dilemma in the near future.
Maybe there are some other things that cause this on your machine?
Firefox 1.0 was released in November 2004 by the way.
This might be interesting to quantify.
People can blame mine (and many others) particular system as much as they want but the fact remains: FF on some MacOS systems is a big CPU hog while Safari, Chrome and Opera just work fine.
In Linux (with the same plugins) it works rather well though (except when using some stuff like Google docs).
I'm currently running >300 tabs on Firefox 54.0.1 spread across four Windows, on a 16 GB, 15-inch 2016 MacBook Pro, 2.9GHz Intel Core i7, under macOS Sierra.
The primary extensions I use to keep performance in check are Auto Unload Tab and Tree Style Tab. Post the two pages you are loading, and I'll check them out on my setup.
HTML5 games can ramp up the fan very quickly. For example, until Auto Unload Tab kicks in, Game of Bombs will pretty reliably chew up Firefox [1]. Most of my content that I keep open are text-heavy, and not crazy on Javascript ("crazy" to me is re-implementing the browser UI and taking over the entire screen experience with that; I don't mind the UI change, but heavy DOM manipulation with Javascript isn't kind to batteries or memory at this time).