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Comment by toomanybeersies | Hacker News Reader

Firefox has definitely been getting better over the past year or two.

I've always used Firefox, since Chrome doesn't have the ability to scroll through tabs, they just get smaller and smaller on the tab bar. I've never understood why the feature hasn't been added, it seems pretty minor. Firefox also lazy loads existing tabs on startup.

Anyway, for a while, around 2011-2012, Firefox had terrible memory and stability issues. It's good that they've largely been fixed. Firefox is the most extensible and free browser, I'm surprised more tech people don't use it, considering the tech communities love for power and the ability to customise things.

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> I'm surprised more tech people don't use it, considering the tech communities love for power and the ability to customise things.

I used to be pretty fanatical about Firefox. But when it got so slow that simple scrolling started dropping frames, I had to switch.

Thankfully Quantum is silky smooth (been using it on the Nightlies and now the web developer edition).

That is because of smooth scrolling. I had to reduce the time for smooth scrolling to complete. I forget the key I modified in about:config.

Some people do perceive smooth scrolling as annoying, but for the most part what he's referring to was because of JavaScript ScrollEventHandlers being run in between the user moving their mouse wheel and the page actually scrolling.

This was fixed with Asynchronous Panning and Zooming (APZ) which moves the webpage and runs the ScrollEvents in parallel on different processes.

Consider giving it a try again with the Firefox Beta (or wait for 57 final next week). I switched back from Chrome.

Already switched to quantum nightly about a month ago :)

When was the last time you used firefox? There's been a ton of improvements in this area in the past few years (off the main thread compositing, async pan/zoom, e10s etc...). Scrolling is now smooth even when pages are loading, or there's activity in other tabs etc...

I actually use Firefox over Chrome on my xps 13, mainly because firefox's scrolling is considerably smoother than chrome (only beaten out by Edge)

> I've never understood why the feature hasn't been added, it seems pretty minor.

I don't want it. I don't like Firefox's approach, I much prefer the shrinking tabs paradigm.

We're also experimenting with making it configurable. You can ratchet down `browser.tabs.tabMinWidth` in `about:config` to pack more tabs in per window.

This has been added back? That'd be awesome news.

It existed once, but was removed because of "complexity" and since then the recommended solution was editing userChrome.css manually (or using an extension that did so, but that of course doesn't work in 57+). Still haven't quite tied down what the CSS has to be in recent versions.

Here's the bug from back then https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=574654 (yes, I'm still salty about the attitude in there)

Firefox tabs do shrink. Then, once they get to a width where shrinking any more would start negatively impacting the ability to use the UI, they start to scroll. Until you reach this point, the tab scrolling UI is hidden, so there's no concern for anyone who doesn't use tabs heavily.

> Until you reach this point, the tab scrolling UI is hidden, so there's no concern for anyone who doesn't use tabs heavily.

Which is me. :-)

>Firefox is the most extensible

Not after quantum.

I think it still is, aside of older versions of itself.

Only if you consider Pale Moon as "an older version of itself".

I would love it if Chrome could enable hiding the tab bar and real panel support for extensions so I could have tree style tabs. I use both browsers in tandem for different things, although primarily Chrome at work.

> since Chrome doesn't have the ability to scroll through tabs

How can you scroll through tabs? What do you mean by this?

Scrolling the mousewheel while hovering the mouse over the tab bar to switch between tabs I guess?

This. This was the feature I missed most when I moved away from Firefox.

I have always just used ctrl + pgup/pgdown in Chromium for tab switching (same in Sublime). I am guessing OP is referencing the fixed min-width of the tabs though?

I know it is completely insane, but I have a strong compulsion to keep my tab count low. Once it starts approaching 7 or so, it is time to evaluated which 3 or 4 have to go.

Meanwhile I go look at someone else's monitor and they have 25 open all the time, and I can recognize some haven't been touched in weeks. I just think to myself "Clean up after yourself. How can you live like this?"

I use ctrl+tab and ctrl+shift+tab to cycle tabs. Good to know that there are other options.

I also don't see how people have the RAM to have 50 tabs open. If I can't read part of the title of my tab, it's being moved to a new window or closed.

Actually having 50 tabs should not be an issue RAM-wise. The problem is that chrome (and firefox quantum) open many many processes and therefore consume a lot of ram. Quantum is expected to be much better than current Chrome in Ram consumption. Because chromium allegedly opens seperate processes for each tab(?), quantum uses the same process for a couple of tabs and thus allows resource sharing.

In a single processed browser, ram is not an issue. I've been using 25+ tabs for many years, only recently in Chrome I experienced a low ram warning (i have 8GB). I switched back to firefox 56.

With light pages + efficient ad blocking, 50 tabs seem actually light on memory. This may be less true with video pages or many heavy online newspaper websites.

Since I got a 32 GiB RAM computer, I don't know what is the memory usage of Firefox anymore.

tab groups! that is the way to live. Grouping tabs based on theme keeps the bar clean and makes it easy for theme based workflow

I love them at times. Do you know if a Firefox 57+ compatible extension exists for that?

In Chrome, the more tabs you open, the smaller they get (infinitely). They all remain on the screen. Once they get tiny enough, you can no longer tell what any given tab is.

In FF, after a certain point the tabs stop getting smaller, and instead you scroll through them left to right, either using little arrow buttons on each side of the tab bar, or using your scroll wheel.

ah, thanks.

If you have that many tabs, one should use tab tree style anyway, i guess: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15652124

I used to have tab trees and they are amazing. The extension I used had some stability / slowness issues and I also like having nothing on the sides of the webpage.

I would still appreciate a tree view that shows when clicking a button when I need it, maybe something like the Netsurf History that shows when long clicking on its previous button (by the way, this next/previous tree feature of Netsurf is awesome, it would be great to have this as is in other browsers).

But I usually have many tabs and Firefox is usable without tree tabs.

I use CTRL+tab to cycle through most recently used tabs. If you enable the browser.ctrlTab.previews about:config setting, you get a nice alt+tab-like window.

The order of tabs in ctrl+tab is changed when using browser.ctrlTab.previews (from simple in order tab circle to circle through most recently used tabs, lastly used first). I have become dependent on this to the point that Chrome or Firefox without it feel like they get in my way when I browse.

I also from time to time used the list of tabs provided by the ctrl+tab previous window, but it seems to have just disappeared in a recent Firefox update?

Anyway, I find that the most efficient way to go to a not so recently-used tab is to just search for something in its title or its URL in the URL bar (CTRL+L) and use the "go to tab" feature (and I disable search engine suggestions in the URL bar). And if you closed the tab, the page will be proposed because it is in the history. Chrome's URL tab just feels useless in comparison.

The URL bar of Firefox and its CTRL+TAB tab preview feature / cycle order are two killer features for me. Losing them would be painful.

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