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Comment by orthecreedence | Hacker News Reader

Firefox is awesome and I love it, but my one complaint after all these years is that I have to restart the browser every day. It's not the end of the world, but it's still frustrating, especially when I'm in the throes of debugging or important research.

Over the course of a day, the browser becomes unresponsive and CPU usage idles at 10-15%. Restarting with the same tabs brings it down to 0%. Yes, I know, disable addons, blah blah...doesn't work for me. Same problem.

I'm really looking forward to the new threading model coming up. I have a feeling that once each tab has a thread, things like this will be much more self-repairing. It's not always easy to kill a rogue execution path in an event loop, but killing a thread is pretty straightforward =].

Also, congrats on the firefox team for really taking performance seriously.

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Resetting might help: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/reset-firefox-easily-fi...

It resets your profile while preserving history, cookies, bookmarks, etc.

> I'm really looking forward to the new threading model coming up. I have a feeling that once each tab has a thread, things like this will be much more self-repairing. It's not always easy to kill a rogue execution path in an event loop, but killing a thread is pretty straightforward =].

First, it's "process", not "thread" :)

The plan is to start with just two main processes -- one for chrome (browser UI, mostly) and one for web content. So no processes will be killed in normal operation. This is because additional processes incur certain extra costs, particularly when it comes to memory consumption.

Still, it might help with your problem; it's hard to say for sure.

I have hundreds (not kidding here, it's the nature of my work) of tabs open routinely for days or even weeks on end and this is not an issue for me. This is under Linux (which may be a factor) on a machine with plenty of RAM (which may be another factor), firefox is extremely stable and if it goes down it is because I power off the machine.

Do you have any plug-ins or add-ons installed that might be the cause of this problem? If you do I suggest you disable all plug-ins and then slowly re-enable them to figure out if any one of those is the culprit.

I've heard other people say this too, but it must be a workflow or use case thing. I run Firefox as my browser of choice on Linux, Mac, and Windows every day, and have for 10 years at least. I do remember a time when memory was an issue, but those problems have been resolved for a few years. I routinely have dozens of tabs open, often with Flash video or lots of javascript, sometimes 50 or more (with the excellent TreeStyleTabs plugin for hierarchical side tabs) and I have never had these problems. I restart my browser maybe once a month, usually along with OS updates.

Interesting that you are talking about RAM, but it's hard to beat Firefox memory usage among major browsers. I'm impressed on my computers how Firefox takes ~750 MB of RAM and Chrome with the same tabs takes ~1.4 GB RAM.

Kudos to the developers.

It's not threading, it's processes that's coming up. I would be surprised if each tab didn't already have its own thread, because eg. multiple tabs can load at the same time...

And umm, not sure what I'm doing differently but I usually keep Firefox open for weeks at a time and have no issues. Though I cut back a bit on keeping tabs open, I used to keep like 60-80 tabs open all the time but now I usually clean up when I'm done with something (more to reduce cognitive overhead than resource utilization).

All tabs are on the same thread in Firefox. Tabs appear to load concurrently only because io is async.

I'll second the motion that there's something going on specifically with your setup. A reset as another poster suggests might be worth a go. Or even just creating a separate, fresh profile and trying that out for a day or two. [1]

[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-...

Genuinely curious if this is a common use case or not. I personally close chrome maybe half a dozen times an hour.

How old are you? I won't get anything done if I kept re-loading my ~200 tabs.

What does age have to do with the number of tabs you keep open? Don't pretend you are perusing the contents of each of those tabs any time soon.

Some people prefer to use bookmarks for that sort of workflow (as they are intended)

Yep, everything I need to know is bookmarked and synced to my google account. If something is interesting enough I'll bookmark it, if not I'll close the tab.

Really the only time I'll have more than 5-6 tabs open is when I'm trying to read through an API documentation and I want to be able to reference multiple points quickly.

How old are _you_?!

You have 200 tabs open? How do you find the tab you want? How often do you look at each of the 200 tabs? What happens when you're on another computer? What happens if you accidentally close Chrome, do you open all 200 tabs again?

You have 200 tabs open?

120-200 in each Chrome, FF, Safari.

How do you find the tab you want?

For me each window has tabs on a particular topic, e.g. database api docs plus stack overflow (10 tabs), a javascript one (7 tabs), hackernews (18 tabs), paleo recipes (12 tabs), etc. Tab creation and deletion basically acts like a stack with the most recent/specific tab on top—and I'll garbage collect (command-w a bunch of tabs) when I finish with the specific task.

What happens when you're on another computer?

Laptop goes everywhere with me. 99.5% of the time I'm not. But that other computer also has fuckton of tabs open. lol

What happens if you accidentally close Chrome, do you open all 200 tabs again?

Yup. Various plugins make it less painful but it does hurt. I make sure not to accidentally close the browser.

I generate maybe 60 tabs a day, and finally came to the conclusion that I was using tabs incorrectly. Tree Style Tabs is great, but I found that I was using tabs as combined bookmarks + todo list. So I wrote a Firefox addon that pops up a sidebar every morning and steps through every tab prompting me to either close it or save it as a bookmark. (with tags) It has definitely helped with this vague uneasy feeling I have about occasionally restarting Firefox and having to automatically reopen hundreds of tabs, most of which could have long ago been garbage collected.

Is that available online?

It's not quite ready for other people to use yet, but the source is available at https://github.com/mnutt/tabbers-anonymous.

Genuinely curious as I thought I was a heavy tab user.

What do you use 18 tabs of hackernews for?

I often have the front page in one and my threads in another.. then at least a few comments pages in others.. but never more than 5-6.

In Firefox you can search among open tabs by typing % in the awesomebar, I use this everyday with hundreds of tabs open. And there is also tab groups feature (which is activated by ctrl/cmd+shift+e). I don't know why this feature is not advertised more.

The "%" search sounds really interesting, but I can't seem to get it to work. No matter what I type after the "%", it initiates a web search. This is with Firefox 33 for Mac.

Probably because you have to put a space after % (not sure why, but likely to disambiguate it from other sorts of typing).

It rocks. And I have 1200 tabs open at the moment on Linux64 Nightly (~120 actually loaded). Yes, I'm a tab-hoarder. Bookmarks are useful, but don't give me the easy "I want to come back to this" aspect - once I do close it, I'm done with it; if I bookmark it it's there forever (and the number of bookmarks became unmanagable eventually).

Every so often I do a pass and close out 50 or 100 tabs I no longer care about. Usually I sit at 900-1000; it's time to cull.

I suspect that the reason people keeps tabs open is a deficiency of all modern browsers -- if we had the ability to search the contents of our history of sites, it would dramatically reduce our need to desperately hold onto tabs.

Right now you can search the history, but it searches only the title and basic metadata, and as we know well from HN, titles are often wholly unrelated with the content.

So many times I've found a page that has interesting information, and I can easily remember snippets of the page, but without walking through my history manually for hours, I'm left with trying to remember unique phrases and instead searching the world of information on Google, having to winnow through a lot of chaff. It would be so great if a browser (or an evil cloud-synced variant) generated a search corpus of every page you visit -- understanding the overhead and costs, made viable by many cores and massive IO performance -- allowing you to say "I saw a site about banking regulation and overcommitments in the past week...where was it?"

Assemble a team or otherwise generate enough interest in making Permafrost[1] a reality, and you could have this. I'd love to work on this with somebody...

1. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Permafrost

In Firefox, opening a browser with 200 tabs doesn’t mean that 200 tabs are immediately loaded. The browser will retain your tab state without loading the contents (apart from the tab you previously had open and any pinned tabs). If you click on an unloaded tab it’ll load the contents dynamically.

I'm 22 and I'm a software developer/university student.

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