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Comment by sleavey | Hacker News Reader

Just to give a contrasting data point: I always see people complaining about resource consumption in Firefox in these threads, but I have honestly almost never had trouble like this and I use it for hours every day with lots of tabs and lots of rich media websites open. It happened more in the past (maybe 5+ years ago), but I am sure some of the blame in those cases would have been down to Flash. Now that I think more about it, that whole time I've also blocked ads, which surely helps too.

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A friend of mine has over 4,000 tabs open in Firefox at the moment - they just never close a tab, ever. Their Firefox' memory usage is only a little higher compared to mine with 3 open tabs.

I wonder how many of those are actually “open” - disconnect the internet and try looking at them. I suspect many just are the URL and nothing more and on view it reloads.

Yes, Firefox unloads old unused tabs.

So bookmarks but less organized and more risk of losing them all at any given moment. Suddenly I don't feel so bad about discovering the ":D" easter egg in mobile chrome.

I used to have 1200 tabs open but I noticed more lag around above 800. That said my computer are far from last gen and I wouldn't blame mozilla for not supporting 1000+ tab hoarders anyway. But yeah firefox is not bloated even when abused.

that said I despised the UI redesigns and the recent FTP kill.. I want a broswer, not a fashion magazine

The most disappointing part of the redesign to me was that they actually REMOVED icons from menu items. It is harder to find what I'm looking for.

can you explain what the value is of having that many tabs open? i hear people do this but never understood it. what's the point?

There's no point. It's just a blend of laziness / hoarding / fomo

There is no value to it, this is what happens when you don't know what bookmarks are for.

Honestly I simply need an autotagger. I tried doing one a few time but never finished.

This is just a blatant lie. Come on, man!

I can believe it. I have over 2,000 tabs open over the last year. Before the last "clean up", I had 4,000 tabs open. As GP noted, most of them are unloaded (I would say around 3/4). I have 32GB RAM, so firefox issues are a distant memory. (pun intended)

Nope, it's possible, as long as most of the tabs stay around inactive. (Sadly it doesn't handle too many tabs becoming loaded very well, so if you hit the limit it usually ends with something crashing...)

2650 tabs open right now. I'm sure I had more open in the past. No major performance impact. If I click on the "List all tabs" button it takes a second to render the list. The PC is 5 years old, not even close being state of the art.

This might not be the fault of Firefox. The problem is that Chrome is the most used browser even amongst web-devs, so you tend to profile/benchmark your site in that browser and optimize for it.

In my experience, Firefox uses a lot more memory on Windows than on Linux. It feels faster on Linux, too. The reasons might rather complex, though.

Try using Firefox on the world's most popular streaming site Twitch.Tv and report back, let it sit there for a while and try for example use multiple streams to check different perspectives. It slows down to a halt.

Also I can't for example leave Firefox alive while playong some games or it starts to create stutter in the games.

I tried profiling but the Firefox profiler just hangs all the time or uses so many resources it becomes unstable ironically

Sounds like Twitch is allocating resources and not releasing them.

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