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Comment by SamWhited | Hacker News Reader

That's actually really interesting; I don't tend to have a ton of tabs, but coworkers always told me Firefox did a terrible job with 100+ tabs and that Chrome worked better. This always made sense to me because of the multi-process architecture of Chrome, but I've never seen it myself.

So you're suggesting that Firefox actually performs better now? Maybe all my coworkers complaining about it are just repeating lore that no longer exists?

Many tabs aside though, I still have a lot of performance problems with Firefox (although it's getting better; Quantum was fantastic, I was getting really fed up with Firefox for a while before that).

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> This always made sense to me because of the multi-process architecture of Chrome, but I've never seen it myself.

If you have hundreds of tabs in Chrome, you'd have hundreds of processes. In this case, Firefox used to perform much better with lots of tabs because it didn't spin up a process for each one. The downside of this model is that a crash would take down all your tabs in Firefox rather than a single tab in Chrome. Of course, now Firefox is also multi-process.

I can never have hundreds of tabs open in Chrome because the UI just doesn't handle that nicely. In Firefox I use multi-row tabs and can comfortably have 40 tabs open without issue.

I don't understand how anyone can claim FF is faster. I love FF and I switched completely from chrome. But Chrome is far faster. I don't know maybe it is because I have an abundance of RAM (32 GB) and others don't and that's why they think FF is faster.

But for me, it's easy to test. Go to http://addic7ed.com/ and open the (very long, nearly 5k entries) [Select a TV Show] drop-down. On FF (and IE/Edge FWIW) there is a noticeable delay in opening. I'd say 200-400ms. On Chrome it opens instantly.

Next, have something playing that consumes decent amounts of CPU in a tab. I used twitch. Then go somewhere and rapidly open new links (I middle-clicked around on Wikipedia). After about 10 tabs, FF starts slowing down (opening tabs that look like blank tabs and only starting to load after a delay) and possibly interrupts playback in the background tab. IE/Edge are even worse and will start opening tabs slower than you click and keep opening for a while after you are done. In Chrome on the other hand, everything is instant.

I'm on Windows 10 and everything is up to date. I'd love for someone to tell me that it's different for them.

Interesting. I have pretty much the opposite experience on MacOS; with Chrome, if I open a bunch of tabs (~50), my memory usage quickly goes to 15.9 of my 16 GB, and then my whole system slows to a crawl. In Firefox, the same number of tabs are using less than half of that, and everything is still running smoothly.

Just did the test with the drop-down menu on Chromium 71.0.3578.80 and Firefox 63.0.3 both running on Ubuntu 18.10. I can confirm the difference in performance, FF takes at least 1s longer to open the menu

I have 8GB RAM. It doesn't matter to me that Chrome would be faster if it could eat 4 times the whole RAM I have - what matters is that it's not.

Also, it's a pretty weird test case to compare performance, probably not related to anything that actually matters. What's more, Firefox tries to style the drop-down to match with the system UI, while Chrome doesn't even bother.

> I have 8GB RAM. It doesn't matter to me that Chrome would be faster if it could eat 4 times the whole RAM I have - what matters is that it's not.

I specifically said that I can see it being a problem in low ram cases.

> Also, it's a pretty weird test case to compare performance, probably not related to anything that actually matters.

This is not some random benchmarks. Both of these problems are things that I regularly encounter on actual websites. And it's great that FF styles it, but I'd rather have performance than system appropriate dropdowns.

The only reason 8GB RAM can be considered "low" instead of "appropriate for most workloads" is Chrome.

I don't even run Chrome outside of testing compatibility. I do run Visual Studio, often multiple instances. Right now I don't, only FF, a few apps and Stellaris (which only uses around 500 MB), yet I'm still at nearly 16GB of Memory usage. 8GB might be enough for many (most?) people, but not for me, and it has nothing to do with Chrome.

I also sometimes long for more RAM, but those situations definitely aren't what can be sanely considered "most workloads".

I filed https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1513256 to track that drop-down issue, which is quite easily reproducible.

Chrome has separate processes for each tab, as well as for each extension. In my Windows install I right now have only 3 tabs open, but it's using 24 processes. And in my experience, those processes all carry a goodly amount of overhead: even a simple page seems to consume 10s of MB, as does even a simple extension with no UI. I just created a HelloWorld page with nothing but that text, and it alone is consuming one process with 22.9MB.

In contrast, Firefox pools those processes. I currently have 56 tabs open, but only 6 Firefox processes running, consuming a total of 1.7GB. So for example, there is (AIUI) just one single process that's responsible for all rendering behavior. I don't have the same detailed information about how much resources that HelloWorld page is taking, but it feels more efficient to me.

The Quantum change introduced multi-process to Firefox too. With a proper adblocker, hundreds of tabs are not a problem in my experience ( Chrome needs one too: in hundreds of random pages it's just too likely some crazy ads stress the system by playing video, constantly loading data, ...).

Quantum did a bunch to speed up rendering, and Electrolysis added a multi-process architecture that makes more sense than Chrome, IMO. You essentially have a main process and multiple content processes. The number of content processes is limited to some sane amount, instead of 1/tab.

I have 1450 tabs open and Firefox is fine, Chrome would be an unusable mess.

I use ~1200 tabs. I used to deal with Chrome stalling by periodically killing all Google Chrome Helper processes, and a few months ago switched to Firefox (less sluggish) from Chrome. Last week I decided to try Chrome again and was pleased to find that (with the same tab set) Chrome 71 is amazingly fast; new tabs open instantly, I can immediately enter a search query or URL, and the browser remains stable over time. Firefox, by contrast, is noticeably slow (but better than older Chrome) when opening new tabs or handling queries. So it's back to Chrome for me; it is now only slow when starting for the first time, when it processes the 1200 tabs for a few minutes.

(I do use The Great Discarder, but did so before switching to Firefox, too.)

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