Multi-process browsing. It is incredibly annoying when my entire browser locks up because one of the fifty tabs I have open is doing something stupid. That never happened in several years of using Chrome, and it happens several times a day in Firefox.
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis
You can track the E10s team's progress through their weekly meeting notes:
I have to re-start Firefox every 48 hours or else its resource consumption starts affecting the overall system. This is my primary issue with current Firefox versions, although I am aware that I'm an n-sigma outlier.
Intrestingly, however, the Firefox team has been greatly improving memory management, so that currently, even with my completely pathological browser session, Firefox remains usable for 48 hours with 900 tabs open.
Additionally, the history-tracking of the browser is good enough and my google-fu sufficient so I can find anything I need that I've previously visited.
Keeping my tabs lean makes me much happier!
Then once the browser is restarted it only loads the tabs you actually click on. A kind of tab lazy loading. I wish Chrome had that feature.
The Page Alarm/Tab Snooze extensions are also good for snoozing tabs for say a month until you need them again http://superuser.com/a/533498/7018
I'm sure you've tried them with your browsing habits, but just to make sure.
A crash usually boils down to Javascript taking too long and/or maybe rendering issues with CSS (hardware acceleration). However Chrome is not immune to bad JS and will also slow down your system until the single tab is killed/crashes.
Overall, a crash is not really that dramatic. The browser restarts, all tabs are still there and only load if you click them, you can use Lazarus to auto-save all form inputs and not lose a single point of data and it resumes at the exact position in seconds (no need to scroll either).
Just add NoScript and block the sites where developers can't write decent JS.
>> it happens several times a day in Firefox
If it happens frequently regardless of the sites you're visiting then it must be extensions or hardware acceleration or plugins. i.e a configuration problem and not a FF one
That's true, but with like 8-or-so cores I don't really care or even notice that much (if I notice some tab is eating a lot of CPU power, I just go into the task-manager and kill it, until I need it, at which point I reload it.) No disruption to my browsing experience happens. In firefox, I'll have to close the tab, possibly restart the browser, et cetera.
> The browser restarts, all tabs are still there and only load if you click them
I haven't really used firefox for a while now, but it used to lose tabs occasionally for me. I hope that's fixed nowadays.
Doing one process per tab, which is what Chrome does, comes at a very steep cost in increased memory usage. If you compare a Chrome and Firefox instance holding 20 or 30 tabs, the memory consumption is going to be dramatically different.
Bill McCloskey did a nice writeup on this back in December: http://billmccloskey.wordpress.com/2013/12/05/multiprocess-f...
His article explains how you can try out the experimental multi-process support in Firefox, but that it works differently to Chrome's. I think Chrome's way of doing it wastes a lot of system resources and that we need to be more clever about how we spend a user's system resources.