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Comment by KingOfCoders | Hacker News Reader

"Firefox would just be slow as hell"

Why is that?

The problem is they get into to web standards game which is driven by Google to create pressure everyone else to spend millions on the newest standards.

I don't need the newest standards, 2000 web works perfectly fine for me (except HTTPs).

Firefox is slow with many tabs open on Win10, Ryzen X3900 with 32gb of RAM (writing this from FF)

They broke exetensions several times without any benefit to users, but losing extensions on the way. One of the core features for power users dropped for nothing - well for their own fun rewriting the browser and rendering engine several times, I guess it was fun at least doing "interesting things".

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>well for their own fun rewriting the browser and rendering engine several times, I guess it was fun at least doing "interesting things".

Go on, install Firefox 3. Go see how absolutely _awful_ it was with multiple tabs open. How a single page would freeze the entire browser. How extensions broke XUL when the slightest thing went wrong.

Rewriting the renderer is not something done for fun. It was necessary for the to be able to do per tab isolation, as well as a not broken security model.

> Firefox is slow with many tabs open on Win10, Ryzen X3900 with 32gb of RAM (writing this from FF)

I literally have 432 tabs open at the moment I'm typing this. Firefox has automatically unloaded about 400 of those and is only eating 3GB of RAM. Check your custom config if you have any, because you certainly have something wrong. Win10, Ryzen 1600X and 16GB.

I'm using FF since Mosaic days and it was always slow. But how come if everything was bad back then, it isn't blazing fast with 100x faster hardware from my SGI days and several rewrites?

The old extensions were synchronous and ran in the GUI thread. Running firefox with extensions on a HDD would freeze all the time for me, before electrolysis.

There also was not a good security model.

WebExtensions fixed these problems.

> There also was not a good security model.

What security model? Pretty much every WebExtension i've come across asks for practically everything and even Firefox's own addon page tells you to only install extensions you trust. At that point if you trust the extension source why bother with the security model in the first place? You already trust the extension developer to not break anything.

The one issue there is with developers that sell out their extensions to shady people. While I love the XUL era way more than this current trash, the security model with XUL would have done nothing to limit the blast radius and the update system would potentially install it silently

That said there used to be a human review system in place for extensions. I'm not sure if they do that any more

That is an issue with the current system too, sure an extension isn't able to look at arbitrary files in your system, but it still is able to look at your bank site, passwords, etc and can still do a ton of damage.

Web extensions aren't safe by default, you shouldn't trust them any more than any arbitrary EXE file.

I have to say, even though webextensions are clearly better and the way forward, i still kind of miss the old tamper data extension. ZAP just ain't as convenient to start up

Strangely I had the opposite thing happen, there were freezes after electrolysis, and it ran super fine before.

The freezes were the network, where if anything was required from the network the page would just pause for many seconds, this happened on all tabs, and after the pause they would all load/come back at the same time. Something was holding up all the network activity in Firefox.

Also there was a large amount of memory used, actually made it better by changing cache settings, the biggest being turning off the disk cache, for some reason that lowered the memory usage drastically.

But as far as I can tell the network pausing issue has mostly gone away now in the last year or so.

> Why is that?

Because Firefox's "powerful extension model" basically constituted direct access to its internals, which prevented the Firefox developers from making the architectural improvements that were so sorely needed to make it performant.

> Firefox is slow with many tabs open on Win10, Ryzen X3900 with 32gb of RAM (writing this from FF)

Admittedly I'm on Linux, but I currently have approximately 7800 tabs open (no, that is not a typo). Firefox is a little laggy in its UI, but Chrome has never even managed to have more than a few hundred open without becoming unusable, so I'd say that Firefox is doing fine here.

Interestingly, the slowdown actually seems to originate from rendering the tab bar, not from the tabs themselves.

> Because Firefox's "powerful extension model" basically constituted direct access to its internals, which prevented the Firefox developers from making the architectural improvements that were so sorely needed to make it performant.

Not necessarily. They could have added and recommended stable APIs that solve most use cases while still allowing extension developers direct access to the internals at the cost of having to update the extension more frequently.

I wonder how you define 'open', if they are just URLs and perhaps content on disk (+persisted javascript state) - they are not open/live. What's the benefit compared to fetching the contents off the web and rendering them anew?

Personally, I use different windows with several tabs open related to each other, when I done with the matter I close the window.

What extension do you use for 7800 tabs? Do you search for the tab if you want to go for one?

Not judging you, but why do you have so many tabs open?

I also have no idea what they do with all these tabs. I routinely close my tabs at the end of the day.

2000 web may work well for you but there are many of us who desire and even need the newer web standards. I am glad we are extending our applications with open standards rather than closed implementation-specific solutions of the past.

I think we all really under-appreciate the marvel that is our current web. We run large complex distributed applications with remote frontends on our sandboxed environments. For most of the things I don't have to install apps anymore, which means as a linux user I finally get to access a similar ecosystem as everyone else. From running businesses to having fun to tinkering around, everything happens in this single window in our computers.

I have my concerns about google as well but I am glad mozilla and google have led to the interesting new web that we have today.

>Firefox is slow with many tabs open on Win10, Ryzen X3900 with 32gb of RAM (writing this from FF)

How many is many?

I'm using up to 10-20 and it never felt slow on worse setup.

10-20 are so few you can get away with it in Chrome or even old IE.

Many is somewhere north of 200. Many of us are routinely on 400 and more.

As for why, I at least consider the computer an extension of my mind. What it remember, I don't have to.

Edit: Chrome can handle way more than that, it just becomes very tedious when you cannot see the tabs. Also I don't know if omnibar can search for open tabs like awesomebar?

FFS, learn to organize "your mind" then. 400+ tabs tells me you need to be using bookmarks

I have to disagree. In my case, bookmarks are the place where "tabs" go to die. I use Tree Style Tab addon, and tabs (mostly self-)organize as I surf, do research on different topics and whatnot, and I jump in with a window title changing addon or grouping parent tab. I cannot even imagine using a browser without it. But bookmarks do not preserve any of that relational data. Session managers are also luckluster solution at best, because merging a few tabs, a tree or window with existing session is clunky at best. After many years of frustration, I have started working on my own tab syncher/organizer.

Bookmarks are only the coldest of storage for me, with exception of bookmarks bar where I place often accessed web sites.

"Ahhh, finally I got you bug: I saw this just the other day when I looked at x" works so much better when x is an organized as a tree of tabs, in the memory of my browser, a short scroll and a click away instead of having to hunt through bookmarks reloading all of them in hope of figuring out which one it was.

At least with the work I do it isn't alway obvious what is going to be useful or not. But while I don't have a photographic memory (quite the contrary) I'm often able to figure out approximately where to look and also able to find it there.

I'd even recommend you try it. If it works for a simple farmer turned engineer like me, think what it could do for a smart person like you! ;-)

The bookmark menu supports the same hierarchical organization, and since you're pretty much using so many tabs as bookmarks anyway, I don't see much of a distinction. Deleting bookmarks is a bit more fiddly than closing tabs, but in my mind that is a good thing as I find myself accidentally closing tabs all the time. And I bet the "Close Other Tabs" option probably scares the crap out of you

Tabs are supposed to be short-lived, ephemeral things. Bookmarks have the functionality you want

I think you are kind of rude both in that you suggest you absolutely know better than me, and also in how you present your opinions.

I suggest you take a step back and reconsider both:

- computers as bicycles for the mind. If it can do so much for me, think what you could achieve!

- how you interact with others.

PS: no, "close other tabs" doesn't scare me. If I have to close down something I don't feel I have finished yet I can select that subtree and export it to the clipboard as a nested markdown list which I paste into Joplin where it is searchable.

Also if I accidentally close down something I can just press ctrl - shift - t the required number of times, alternatively ctrl - shift - n if a whole window has been closed.

I would consider 500+ as "many". 10-20 would be considered as "very few".

I currently have around 120 open in "Simple Tab Groups". But this can go up to 200+

> I don't need the newest standards, 2000 web works perfectly fine for me

How about layouts being broken because (funnily enough) web developers are desperate to use features such as grids and flexbox that make their jobs less painfully awful?

Presuming you're a developer - surely you can sympathise with the desire to get people to upgrade their browsers so that webdev's lives are made more pleasant?

I, for one, think the HTML API (as in, the interface presented to the programmer, not talking about any other API meaning here) couldn't be worse.

How many attributes do you need to enable to place two pictures side by side in vanilla CSS? Is that composable, would the same set of flags work for two paragraphs? What about two tables?

HTML/CSS was never designed for the web we have ended up with, and I don't see how flexbox and any newer standard is making developers lives anything but miserable.

I believe flexbox does actually work for those cases, assuming you set the images/paragraphs/tables to be block elements (or wrap them in divs)?

Flexbox and Grid seem to me like recognition that the existing CSS primitives were designed for laying out documents, and don't fit well for creating UIs.

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