Hacker News Reader

Comment by theamk | Hacker News Reader

I am using firefox, but it is pretty hard to keep using it. I don't want the whole world to converge on one browser engine, but I also want things to work, and Firefox does not make it easy.

Firefox on my laptop has a propensity for eating lots of RAM, and constant CPU usage, even if nothing is going on. Task manager is useless. Profiler just shows "GC collecting".

Mobile firefox is OK, it simply feels like it's designed for a different person. For example even Chrome has "force reader mode" button.. Firefox does not. And don't even get me started on the "new tab" [age - it gives me 6 choices and all of them are "AI" ones which never show what I want. The only way to show a manually curated link list is "collections" and those do not get synced, and occasionally disappear for no reason.

View on HN

I don't know why but I have a different experience. My daily driver is a 13 year old Thinkpad with 16Gb memory, I use Firefox all the time, I routinely have 50+ tabs open, I really have no complaints.

I also use Firefox on Android, I have less experience of using other browsers on mobile but what I've got is fine for me.

I'm not questioning your experience but I would like others, who might be considering using Firefox, to know that different people have different experiences.

> I routinely have 50+ tabs open

For what it's worth, I've been known to have 300+ tabs open all in separate windows (I just forget about them and they tend to accumulate), and for the most part it handled it just fine (it did use quite a lot of RAM, of course.) That was on an i7 7700k with 32GB of RAM.

I remember being quite impressed indeed.

Genuine thought: maybe it's the separate windows?

Maybe, yeah. It did seem a bit slower around the 400 mark, though -- there are definitely limitations.

I think it's the specific pages - some Javascript is much more memory hungry that others.

A few hundred HN or Wikipedia tabs work absolutely fine, I've tested. But there are much heavier sites, and only a few of those can cause the machine to start swapping until OOM, especially when left to work in the background.

(And unlike Chrome, Firefox does not seem to throttle/unload background tabs automatically... or if it does, it does it much less aggressively)

Yeah, that's it probably, I also notice that when I have certain pages open in tabs on the background, my Framework laptop fans start spinning faster, probably because of JS running on those sites. I don't know whether that wouldn't happen with Chrome, but yeah, if that's the case, then Chrome would have to reload / restore those pages and on Firefox they're still in memory. I rather just close those resource heavy pages, fortunately they're usally not the kinds of pages I need to use too often.

I don’t know you, but most people I work with for some reason keep so many tabs open, the tab bar is squeezed so you can barely see a favicon

Probably due to my age, I religiously close every tab after I read it. If that gets more than a dozen, I literally quit the browser and declare bankruptcy because it’s not worth it to sort through the mess of tabs I clearly am not using.

Firefox is old too. I’m sure it could manage memory better, but couldn’t we all? If you have tabs in GC and using CPU when you aren’t using them, kill them maybe? What else is that tab doing all day when you aren’t looking?

I’ve never understood why people keep so many tabs open and why they’ll literally switch to an entirely different browser platform rather than change a bad habit

I'm around middle age and keep tons of tabs open simply because I have a number of projects/tasks or soon-to-be projects/tasks going at any given point and managing associated websites is easier with tabs than it is with bookmarks. In other words, bookmark management UI/UX is inadequate and tab hoarding is the band-aid.

There's also a higher chance that things will slip through the cracks and be forgotten if I bookmark them, whereas with tabs they're staring me in the face any time I'm using my computer.

tab groups, a very recent feature, help a lot at keeping tabs organized. you can even archive whole groups if you no longer need them but don't want to throw them away

Exactly this. I used to be a tab minimalist, but vertical tabs + tab groups made having lots of tabs open viable for me.

My hot take: there are two kinds of bookmarks. 1. shortcuts to get to common sites and 2. stuff i need to get back to. And it's a UX mistake to keep #2 separate from open tabs; they are the same thing.

Broadly I agree. Unfortunately the major browser devs haven't moved bookmark UX forward since the late 90s.

I wish I had that level of executive functioning. I open tabs at a high branching rate, and faster than I have the impulse control to (for lack of a better word) run a garbage-collection pass over what I'd just done.

When it balloons into the low thousands and starts hurting performance, I dump Firefox's open-tabs store (file called recovery.jsonlz4) into a different file and start over. At some point I'll point an LLM at that junk pile and see if I missed anything important. (Probably not).

You could probably just use an extension that unloads inactive tabs from RAM, and maybe another that closes tabs that haven't been touched in over a week. Between those and an extension that closes duplicate tabs, it's pretty easy to get down to a sane number, no LLM required.

If a tab is important, you'll be using it more often than once a week. I have a similar rule with impulse purchases: anything I want needs to sit in the cart for 24-48 hours before purchasing. If I still need it, I buy it. Probably cut the crap I buy down by 75%. Steam? It goes on the wishlist (personally capped at ~50) until I can commit to playing and finishing it right then and there.

>You could probably just use an extension that unloads inactive tabs from RAM

Doesn't Firefox already do this? (Or at least have an option for it?)

Some of it, yes, but you get finer control with extensions.

I have maintained Tab Wrangler for both Chrome and for Firefox for years: it auto-closes tabs based on a configurable timeout and when they were last active. I'm not sure how people keep dozens or hundreds of tabs open either. It's FOSS, no ads, no tracking, no monetization:

https://github.com/tabwrangler/tabwrangler

Nothing makes me happier than holding down ^W at the end of the day.

I also discovered the joy of shift-selecting a big range of tabs and pressing ^W only once. It also feels pretty good, but in a slightly different way...

>Mobile firefox is OK, it simply feels like it's designed for a different person. For example even Chrome has "force reader mode" button.. Firefox does not.

I'm using Fennec from F-Droid, but I have a little document symbol on the URL bar I tap for reader mode. I guess the issue is it doesn't show on all sites then?

From my experience it's inconsistent and incredibly frustrating, but that's my experience with Firefox mobile overall.

From my experience it's inconsistent and that's incredibly frustrating. Overall the whole mobile interface needs to be overhauled imo. These guys need to simply copy Safari and call it a day. I still have never used a mobile browser that's as thoughtfully designed as Safari, and I've used basically all the major ones.

I have exactly the same problem. Firefox uses far too much RAM. I ended up going back to Chrome over it, even though I prefer Firefox otherwise.

> Mobile firefox is OK, it simply feels like it's designed for a different person. For example even Chrome has "force reader mode" button.. Firefox does not.

This is false. I am seeing that button right now in Firefox, on the right side of the address bar.

Firefox's button is flaky - it seems to disappear depending on the page. For example it appears on HN comment page, but disappears on HN's top-level page. There is clearly some sort of heuristic which maybe tries to determine if there is "main content", but it fails on many blog-like pages, like current #5 [0].

It seems that any time I find a website with a horrible design and start looking for that "reader" button, that button is disabled in Firefox. Sometimes I tolerate the design, sometimes I switch to Chrome - because reader mode works on all sites there.

[0] https://masteranza.github.io/weedout/

We should find a clear example of a webpage with an article-like content where the reader is unavailable and file a bug.

This is a very good example what I meant when I said "it's designed for a different person"!

For me, it's pretty clear that a much better idea is not to fix the broken concept, but do what the Chrome does, and show the button on every single page. Then users won't have to report the pages where button is missing, and Firefox devs won't have to keep updating that functionality all the time as the new types of pages appear.

Yes, this means that sometimes reader mode might miss some relevant text, but that's OK, reader mode does this occasionally already. And Firefox is supposed to be for power users, right?

Found one: Blog of Scott Aaronson. E.g. this post https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=10046

Also: Substack posts don't seem to show the reader symbol immediately, often only after switching tabs or a page refresh, e.g. posts linked here: https://dynomight.substack.com/

Yeah similar. When I leave firefox running on the macbook, after a couple of days I get an out of memory, 32GB used type error (8GB macbook). Maybe it's the sites I have open keep requesting stuff? Not sure.

Too much RAM use is rare for me, but when it happens I just open the tab unloading page and unload all the tabs. Usually it’s Jira’s fault.

This ^^^

Reply on news.ycombinator.com