Comment by srean | Hacker News Reader

Comment by srean | Hacker News Reader

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Almost every other comment that have been posted so far are complaining that FF tabs are not independent processes. Let me express my contrarian opinion. For my use case FF is just excellent and has served me well, I have absolutely no complains now. There was a time when FF leaked, and held a lot of memory, that time has since passed, at least seams so.

I regularly keep several hundreds of tabs open for months on end on my PCs one a 32 bit m/c another a 64 bit both with about a Gig of RAM (one a shade below 1 Gig). Trying to do the same with Chrome has been a torture.

I have used Chrome, its pretty good, but am very happy with FF. Some people get allergic reactions when I mention keeping so many tabs open, I have commented about it here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2936369#up_2936784

A few others have a snark ready, "buy some RAM", I perhaps could, but I would rather use my RAM for other purposes than clogging it with a browser (cat pictures), window manager eye candy etc. In addition, this low RAM environment has turned out to be a good filter, software written without much attention to detail or resource efficiency just doesnt run well, and thats perfectly fine with me. I like hanging out with better ones.

I have been a long time FF user and can only echo your experience. But sometimes, on (badly written) JavaScript heavy pages, the entire browser locks up instead of just the rogue tab. I've tried enabling electrolysis[1] on my nightly, but it isn't quite there yet. Firefox may not be perfect, but it really is the only option for me, and it's getting better thanks to the amazing community behind it.

[1]: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis

Some time ago I made a very (very) light-weight extension for myself that works well for situations in which I have hundreds of tabs opened. It closes them all and stores the linked titles in a simple HTML page (thus searchable), ordered by tab session. It is inspired by OneTab and it is open-source.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-grenade/

Thank you! I looked pretty hard for a OneTab-like extension for FF about a year ago, and couldn't find one. It's the one thing I really miss about Chrome; making my own was on my TODO list.

My experience with multiple tabs has been same. In my exeprience (and I read somewhere as well), Chrome shows up UI faster, then responds after 2-3 seconds. Firefox is respnsive from start.

Multiple tab management with Panorama is much better (Chrome has a few similar extensions but don't work that well!) and I like the scrolling interfacce of multiple tabs rather than Chrome's approach of compressing everything!

Recently, Chrome has crashed more for me than Firefox and some of the extensions and features on Firefox are miles ahead.

Have to agree: For me firefox performance is much better. I currently have 413 tabs open, use a 3 year old lenovo laptop, everything works flawless and is responsive, unlike chrome.

413 tabs?? why?

Why not? That's the way I use the web. If i need it at some point the next week I don't close it.

Why not? Because finding an open tab is an O(N) problem, whereas searching bookmarks is O(1).

Its not you can search your open tabs in firefox. I also maintain sets through tab groups that allow me to bring up several things that I'm working on with out having to type in several urls.

I usually bookmark (^D) and tag everything that I think I'm gonna need in the future, then I look for it by typing the tag/s in the address bar.

what tab addon do you use?

Not op, but I just use the built-in one. On OS X, press CMD+shift+e and you'll get a overview of tab groups, you can create new groups, etc. I have a "main" group (the default one) and one group per pet project, subject, etc. I tend to use these instead of bookmarks, since they stay around even if the browser crashes.

Tab Groups are great. Its one of my favorite Firefox features.

Vimperator

Vimperator is the top reason why I use firefox.

I want the independent processes for security reasons, not memory reasons. Firefox continues to be the most hackable browser because it's lacking that, and also a terrible choice for Tor, as long as it doesn't get it.

As a Firefox stalwart, my only sustained complaint about it is that the plug-in architecture is pretty crappy, but that's mostly a minor complaint so long as you avoid installing anything but very well understood and mature plug-ins. Chrome doesn't do all that much better here, since although its plugin architecture doesn't suffer quite so badly reliability-wise, plugins can still violate your privacy pretty much arbitrarily (modulo the relevant appstore blacklisting it, which is a pretty impotent reactive measure, as we've seen).

Firefox memory usage has always been, and I suppose will likely to continue to be far ahead of Chrome, since the desktop implementation is now largely identical to that used in Firefox OS.

I had a similar experience with Chrome (or rather, Chromium) on my netbook. It consumed so much memory with normal usage that I had to switch to Midori[1] so I could do other things while browsing.

[1] http://midori-browser.org/

I also keep several hundreds of tabs open for months on end. I use Firefox and have simply accepted that it will crash about four times per day, requiring me to wait a few minutes while it restarts and reloads the tabs.

You can set Firefox to only reload tabs on access.

I think that's the way my browser is set up, but there's still a huge spike in internet connections whenever I restart it. Maybe Firefox doesn't load every tab, but still loads one page per open browser window, and it feels slow because I sometimes have 30-40 windows open?

PRODUCTIVITY of 100 TABS? Why not show us how productive you are with hundreds of tabs open in FF? Or for that matter any other browser?

It's really easy with an extension like [Tree Style Tab](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...), or by using Tab Groups.

Now why would I need to use this tree style tab versus just setting bookmarks?

Plus, show me how productive you are with hundreds of tabs EVEN with the tree style tab versus say just using bookmarks?

With bookmarks I can save it, export it, move to another computer.

But lets go back, how productive can one be with hundreds of tabs open even with a tree style versus bookmarks?

How exactly do I quantify my productivity? I like the workflow better. It works better for me, and apparently it works better for the parent poster. What's it to you?

In fact, the infamous memory leak Firefox was 'famous' for was fixed in version 2.5 which tells me that anyone who still complains of memory leaks in Firefox is one who you do not want to listen to for advice.

EDIT: I may have the version number wrong, it's been a long time, and, yes, the "leak" was a combination of things and not just one thing but my point is the same.

No memory leak was fixed in 2.5, because there was no 2.5 release[1]. What firefox then became famous for was a team of developers who adamantly insisted there were no memory leaks in firefox... right up until some of them admitted there was a problem, and the healing process began[2]. Any software product of this size is going to have SOME memory management problems, and that's fine. Firefox's history of even admitting these exist is spotty at best.

[1] Go ahead and check. I'll wait: https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/ [2] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Performance/MemShrink

What makes you so sure that there was ever only one memory leak? What makes you so sure that one or more new ones haven't been introduced since then?

I've seen and heard a lot of reports from many different Firefox users about Firefox using an unreasonably large amount of memory, even when using fresh installations of the most recent version, and when engaging in very reasonable browsing patterns.

As a software developer faced with a large and frequent volume of reports of such a nature, the only responsible thing to do is to assume that there is truly a problem. This should be assumed even if the developers themselves may be having trouble reproducing the problem. Denying that the problem exists is usually the most counterproductive thing that can be done, because the problem likely does actually exist, and it doesn't get fixed.

By the way, I don't believe that there ever was a Firefox 2.5 release. Perhaps you mean Firefox 3.5?

Once again, nobody is denying anything about memory problems. But there are two things at play here:

1. One person's experience is not universal. With a web browser as customizable as Firefox, there will be certain configurations causing problems that aren't caught by tests or by dogfooding. Some people are probably seeing leaks that users with a default configuration don't see. For example: https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2014/08/15/the-story-of...

2. People need to report their problems in ways that are actionable. HN is not a bug tracker. If somebody on HN (Hacker News! News for programmers who presumably know how a bug tracker works!) is having memory issues, (s)he should have no problems filing a bug in Bugzilla. Firefox has had about:memory for years now; save that report and attach it to your bug.

Users have been reporting memory leaks in Firefox up to and including last week. Users should not be used a source of what a memory leak is cause 80% of users do not know what a memory leak truly is much less be technically competent to recognize and report one.

I often make the error of saying the fix was in version 2.5 but perhaps it was in v1.5 or v2.0. It doesn't matter. They were fixed long ago is my point.

There have always been memory leaks in Firefox, and before 4.0, they were always worse on a new release, and improved with bug fixing releases. I don't know whether it's aurora, or the increased pace of the development cycle, but I haven't noticed any serious memory leaks like there were back in the day.

Of course, any program the size of Firefox is bound to have memory leaks. So we can't totally eliminate them while we still use C++.

The leak points to a slack development/release process (is there one?). Its expected to check for leaks, crashes before releasing a point build. That this dog got out points to a systemic problem. Was that fixed by 2.5? Or was just the leak fixed.

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