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Comment by gvb | Hacker News Reader

I read the article hoping for something insightful, but when I read the paragraph ...a half-dozen tabs that auto-open on launch thanks to the dozens of extensions I've accumulated over the years[...] I had to stop and say "wait, what?"

To leverage his analogy that it is like coming home to a new house to find that most of your stuff is already there, it is like not cleaning your house and not taking out the trash for three years and then moving into a new house. Yeah, it's clean and new, but why is it better and will it stay better?

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The problem is using many open tabs with Chrome. If you use no more than 3 or 4 tabs, Chrome is generally fine. If you use more than that, Firefox has some built-in features to help with tabs such as delayed tab loading and tab grouping. It also has more and better extensions for helping with multiple tabs. Furthermore, it doesn't launch a new process for each tab.

In a browser comparison I wrote last month, I included a section for users who like to keep a lot of tabs open. Even Opera, which uses the same code base as Chrome, does tabs better than Chrome:

http://www.filterjoe.com/2015/01/23/best-browsers-2015-which...

I imagine this has something to do with the sandboxing in Chrome that prevents one tab from causing the entire browser to crash, no?

Yes. Sandboxing makes sense when you think of browser as operating system. Isolate each process to increase security and crash-resistance. Makes sense, but it takes more memory.

Frankly I have more memory than I need for most tasks so I don't mind this trade-off.

On the other hand memory memory takes more time to read, potentially leading to latency.

I don't know, I've had one tab cause other tabs to crash all the time, which is something that confused me considering the supposed isolation that should be happening.

edit: not sure why I've been dv, but I'd like to add that one thing I've noticed is that this will usually happen when I open links in a new tab, somehow all those tabs become linked and if one becomes unresponsive they all do. For those who claim I should stop opening links in new tabs, I say: welcome to 2004, this is the whole purpose of tabbed browsing. If you;d like to try to reproduce this: go to facebook and open the first ten links in your newsfeed in new tabs (either by middle clicking, ctrl+click, or context menu) I don't normally do more than one or two at a time but ten will force the issue. then go to another tab that isn't connect to those other 11 it'll work fine while those 11 will look like they're on pause.

Note: I haven't tested this in other browsers.

I switched from Firefox to Chrome right around Firefox 3.6. I have an average of around 20 tabs open at any given moment, and I tend to go around a week or two between reboots.

Other than the occasional tab crashing and quickly reloading (and by "occasional", I mean maybe once every couple of months or so), I've never had an issue with Chrome. It just works.

I also have better luck with tabs in Chrome. Overall CPU usage is lower, and the in-browser task inspector makes it trivial to ID bad tabs and close them.

Firefox is a lot better than it used to be, but it can still be brought to its knees across the board by a bad script, at least in my experience, and it's hard to find the one bad tab to kill.

Github will bring firefox to it's knees with many tabs open. But I suspect it's because of flash content.

Firefox 3.6 was pretty slow compared to Firefox today. I would switch again to Chrome if we were in Firefox 3.6 times.

Turns out, they fixed Firefox up pretty good over the years

This is probably b/c most people at Google use computers with 32GB of ram.

This might sound silly to some, but I wouldn't be surprised if Google limited its usability tests to high-end machines with RAM in the double-digits. I reckon most programming teams have this issue, since even if they're dogfooding, they're doing so on high-end hardware, meaning that low-end hardware is untested and often unusable. Google isn't the only culprit; many websites nowadays will start to lean heavier toward excessive features - making them borderline-unusable on slower computers - because they were developed and tested on fast computers exclusively.

I have 16GB and regularly have >100 tabs open in Chrome.

It works, kind of, as long as I don't try to run anything else at the same time.

The article persuaded me that Firefox may be worth a try again.

As for testing - you'd think testing on a range of hardware would be standard.

Testing exclusively on top spec machines is just unprofessional.

I've using firefox on a 4Gb linux machine for about two years so far.. and it's working just fine, each release it keeps better and better

Edit: I want to apologize to eridal. I misread his/her statement and though the browser in question was Chrome, not Firefox.

So, public apolgy: I'm very sorry, eridal. I thought you wrote something you did not. My comment was wrong as a result. I have corrected my mistake, and wish to apologize to you personally for misreading what you wrote.

Original message with the offending part removed, mistakenly assuming eridal was using Chrome (I'm not sure why I read it that way):

---

I stopped using Chromium in part because once I passed the 100-150 tab threshold, memory usage skyrockets to 4-6GiB. It's OK with 16GiB RAM, but usability diminishes pretty badly (the stock UI is NOT conducive to more than 80-100 tabs), and if you're stupid enough to visit a site with Flash, the probability of it leaking and eating up another 2+GiB begin to approach 1.

I like Chrome for its speed--if you have 20 tabs or fewer open. But I can certainly correlate my own experiences with that of the GP comment.

I don't doubt. Firefox with hundreds of tabs works well with 4GB RAM, and somewhat bearable on 2GB, with occasional restart once per week or so to clean it up.

On the other hand, I wasn't able to use Chrome the same way I use Firefox on PC with 8GB RAM.

> I don't doubt.

I misread eridal's comment. :) I thought he/she said they were using Chrome, not Firefox, hence my understandable surprise!

I've corrected my mistake. Sorry about the confusion. Surprised no one else picked it up...

I, at least, do typically run with anywhere from 50-200 tabs (or more!) at any given time. Yeah, there's some slowdown if you're running on an 8GB machine (I'm typing this on a Macbook Air with a Firefox session with at least 100 tabs open at the moment (SEE EDIT)), but it's certainly way more than I used to get with Chrome before I switched back to Firefox a couple years back (Tree View Tabs being the motivating factor). Currently using 5.4GB of RAM (OSX is reporting a "Compressed Mem" of 2.96GB), and it's currently pegging one of the cores of the i7 on this thing. This is after about a week of nonstop (i.e. same Firefox process) use, and with Flash present in a lot of places (like the 20+ Github tabs I have open, thanks to Github using Flash for its silly "click here to copy a link to your clipboard" feature; I really need to get those wretched things blocked); a lot of things will clear out pretty well after restarting and restoring the opened tabs (though this is partly because they're not loaded into memory again until they're accessed again).

EDIT: After posting this comment, I closed all my tabs (something which causes one of my extensions - probably Tree Style Tab - to throw a confirmation dialog with the number of tabs). The number was 233, plus another ten or so in another window. I must say, that's pretty damn good, all things considered.

I'm trying out Nightly right now to see if I can push that even further with the new e10s features.

Same here. I'm regularly hitting 200+ tabs on multiple profiles for various reasons (news, documentation, etc.). This is precisely why I use Firefox for all my browsing usage (and have for some time). Chrome/Chromium chokes once you hit about 100-150 tabs, and the tab UI is not usable once open tabs fall off the edge of the window (there's probably an extension to fix this).

Now, I will admit that Firefox misbehaves once you hit about the 500 tab threshold (or higher) to the extent that closing it takes longer. But since tabs aren't loaded on restart until you click them, its memory usage tends to stay much, much lower during regular usage.

I want to like Chrome. It's fast, it's pretty speedy, but for my use case, it's not ideal. It's good for some things, but Firefox is much better behaved!

Tree View Tabs? Do you mean Tree Style Tabs?

Yeah, that. I can never get the name right :P

why don't? unused tabs won't consume much, or at least noticeable to me.

I do have a coffee-break whenever I open my IDE

> why don't? unused tabs won't consume much, or at least noticeable to me.

Because I COMPLETELY misread your original comment. :( I thought it read that you were using Chrome, not Firefox.

I'm truly very sorry about that, eridal.

My experiences are just like yours, though. Firefox works great for me (relatively low memory usage, up to and including 200+ tabs). Chrome, on the other hand, not so much.

Hopefully you can see why I was surprised, but it was through the entire fault of my own eyes apparently interleaving another comment with yours. I'm an idiot. ;)

hey, that's ok!! you don't really need to apologize, at all

Eh, I do if I did something stupid. :)

And you gotta admit, that was pretty stupid.

Cheers!

I have a 4GB Windows 7 machine with over 500 tabs in Firefox and it still runs Office, IE11 and various other stuff without any problems. Mind you, Firefox only loads tabs when you click on them, so only about 30-50 are actually "live"....

Google also happens to be behind the Chromebook effort, so I would be surprised if they don't do any testing on Chromebooks.

Maybe some testing of, say, a few tabs, but I'd be very surprised if a significant number of Chrome devs (or any Chrome devs, for that matter) use Chromebooks for Chrome development (maybe the Chromebook Pixel, but even that seems unlikely). The Chromebook is optimized toward content consumption; while I'm sure it's possible to do serious programming on ChromeOS (just as it's possible to do serious programming on Android or (jailbroken) iOS if you really wanted to), it's not going to be nearly as productive as a high end workstation (portable or stationary) with 16+GB of RAM and a quad+ core processor.

Anecdotal, but I know a decent number of Googlers using Pixels as their daily (development) machines, SSHing off into the abyss. YMM, of course, V.

I remember having a few Google engineers coming to my uni to do a talk - afterwards they mentioned that internally they've been doing a large amount of programming work using internal tools on Chromebooks.

Why not both?

Many Google engineers (including folks like me outside of Chrome) use Chromebooks as our primary laptops. In my case that also (mostly) makes my Chromebook Pixel my primary computer. I average 25-100 tabs, many of them doing 'heavy' things like editing large Google Docs or running Inbox.

I do have a beefy dev desktop that I access via ssh, although frankly it mostly exists for running emacs for the pedestrian task of actually typing out bits of code.

It's certainly not the only issue with running Chrome on machines that aren't configured just like Google's. If you try and run it on a Linux distro which limits the number of open files per process to 1024, like most do by default, it crashes when you try and open more than a handful of tabs. Turns out that Google run a custom version of Ubuntu internally with the limit raised to something like 32,768 open files per process, so they never ran into the issue.

I frequently have dozens of tabs open in Chrome on Ubuntu without any problems and I haven't touched the open-files-per-process limit. You must be talking about a problem with older versions.

We are in the weird situation where even most web application developers run their dev environment on beefier machines than the VMs they are hosting it on.

Great point. I think this is horrible practice and I've seen it lead to lots of slow/clunky code and UX.

Next time I start a new team we're all getting Raspberry Pis for development.

I'm just using Vagrant VMs for that :). (I work on databases, though)

I have a Raspberry Pi (albeit one of the new ones) sitting on my desk right now; I should implement that idea :)

Yup. Similar to the mobile html5 app I am rescuing that ran smoothly in chrome om the developers desktops with 16 gb of ram and core i7 and what not but the complex animations are shockingly less smooth on the iPad 2. Weird

I've run into this with software vendors before. You complain of memory problems; they express confusion. "We never run into memory problems!"

Then you discover their smallest development/test machine is 128GB.

Talking with vendors is always great -- those moments when their eyes get wide and they say "You mean you're doing that? We never intended for anyone to do that!" I had a moment like that just last week on a visit to one of our hardware vendors.

So there's an open source developer out there with just 2GB of ram that comes in and offers solutions to the memory problem, right?

RIGHT?

(Firefox was heavily criticized for having huge apparent memory usage, which was ignored up until at least FF 4)

probably not. few macs will run 32GB even if it offers user replaceable ram.

I regularly have several hundred tabs open in Firefox with no problems. Some people may think this is crazy or messy but I find it very useful for organizing the various projects I'm working on for different clients and my own personal projects. Tab groups and delayed loading make it all very smooth. Such usage is just not possible with Chrome. I tried to switch to Chrome but couldn't find the features I needed and did not wish to change my workflow.

Back when Chrome came out Firefox was buggy. Since then it has become much more stable. Chrome is the one that's buggy now. One process per tab means that a bug in one tab does not take down the whole browser but it is much better to just fix the bugs and not crash at all.

I do the same thing; it's incredibly easy to do with the Tree View Tabs extension.

For example, while browsing HN, I'll frequently just middle-click a bunch of article links and (occasionally) their comments, then read them once I have a sizable queue. Same goes for trying to look up documentation to fix some bug in my code; I'll start with a DuckDuckGo search and, suddenly, I have at least a dozen (sometimes multiple dozens) tabs open with Stack Overflow questions and blog posts and official online docs and such with clues pointing me in the right direction.

What is the name of that extension? I searched and get over a thousand results. Thanks!

"Tree Style Tab". http://piro.sakura.ne.jp/xul/_treestyletab.html.en

At least that's the one I use.

Search DuckDuckGo for "Tree Style Tabs"; it should be the first result.

It should also be the first result if you search Mozilla's add-on marketplace thingamajig for "Tree Style Tabs". Here's the link for convenience: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

For me I keep tabs open in case I need to go back later. This works except I only end up reusing 20% of the tabs that I opened.

What would be awesome is some sort of auto tab closer that assumes you'll never use the tab again after 15 minutes of idle time.

For Chrome look at Tab Wrangler, it does this for you.

The Great Suspender will remove the tab's contents from memory after a freely configurable time, while still keeping it where it was in case you want to get back to it later. I've found that this works best for me: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspende...

I use tabs-as-history and tabs-as-queue, but (despite the initial effort hump) I find bookmarks are better for cold storage.

As a Chrome developer, I agree that process-per-tab absolutely should not be a replacement for fixing bugs. However, I think it's important to point out that process-per-tab is not just for stability: it's also critical for security.

I found your statement very interesting, and would like to learn more. If you're allowed, would you please provide more details or links to resources that further explain the security issues that process-per-tab resolves?

There's a bunch of good public docs on the Chromium security architecture. One big thing that having a separate process per origin does is that you can use OS sandboxing techniques on each process separately, and even if there are renderer bugs, an exploit can't immediately get to another origin; it provides defense in depth by also requiring a sandbox escape.

Here's an old paper that talks about the architecture (it hasn't changed much at a high level):

http://seclab.stanford.edu/websec/chromium/chromium-security...

Chrome is way ahead of Firefox in terms of security. It's worth the performance trade-offs.

Each website is rendered in a separate process with a sandbox, each with an empty chroot + process namespace + network namespace + tiny seccomp-bpf + syscall whitelist.

Chrome also has a stronger sandbox, pioneers better SSL, supports PIE on binaries, uses pepper - doesnt use native Flash plugins, the JIT compiler does randomization / encryption tricks to make it hard to heap spray exploit code. They have their own hardened memory allocator called PartitionAlloc.

Etc Etc.

Firefox also had more critical CVEs in 2014 than Chrome: http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=2CRyJkmV

And reports of sandbox escapes are less common in Chrome for a reason.

Worth the performance trade-off for who?

For my own use cases, Chrome drags my whole system performance into a gutter and shoots it full of bullets.

In other words, it’s not just a “trade-off”, but rather Chrome is completely and utterly unusable, while both Safari and Firefox handle the load with no problem.

I actually have more problems with Firefox's performance than with Chrome's (in terms of processor power), Chrome definitely uses more memory, but it's super fast; firefox is just abysmally slow and can;t handle more than a few tabs. Tried both browsers on Windows 8.1 and Linux, with different machines (home and work computers), too.

However, my high memory consumption in Chrome was due to using AdBlock, which is much lower now that I switched to uBlock. Even back with AdBlock, memory was never an issue with many tabs open.

My only problem (which is probably not Chrome's, but my laptop's fault) is that sometimes, when having ~20 tabs open, and certain tabs are idle for a long time, they take a bit of time to re-render once I visit them again, but that also used to happen in Firefox.

uBlock is now available on Firefox too, and makes an even more dramatic difference in performance.

I really don't know what you're talking about - Chrome is a dog after ~10 tabs are opened, uses crazy memory and becomes unusable fast once it starts paging. Firefox remains stable, backgrounds tabs you're not using in a graceful way, and doesn't try to open and render every single tab at once on a session restore.

It's unbelievable that Chrome still does this, after the problem has been reported for years.

Are you on Windows? I'm not seeing this on Mac, I often have 30+ tabs opened and apart from high memory, I don't suffer of any performance issues.

I regularly have dozens of tabs open in Chrome on both Windows and Linux and I haven't experienced the unusably fast (slow?) behaviour you're talking about. That said, Chrome seems much more unstable than Firefox for me lately.

My typical browsing has about 50–100 background tabs (stuff kept around to look at later), with spikes up to 300+ (when I’m actively researching something). This kind of usage in Chrome absolutely trashes system performance, especially if any of those tabs happen to have gmail/gdocs/gmaps/g+ stuff in them (ironic, huh?), or other heavyweight sites like facebook. Safari and Firefox mostly don’t have a problem, though restarting the browser once every few days can sometimes help clear up some memory/CPU.

You should also keep in mind that everyone dosen't owns a high end machine or even a macbook. I have 4 machines at home , maximum specs are 2.5ghz with i3-4gb , and I guess this should be sufficient for running chrome alone , well atleast theoritically. In reality , chrome starts being unresponive , crashing tabs and stuff occurs beyond opening tabs beyond 7-8 and flash player crashes more often. Anddd , firefox is sure late to start ( a longer startup time ) , but idk how it manages to sustain itself throughout. In one of my machine , I have arch installed with bspwm as WM ,and firefox takes about 150-200 mb only ( when I'm aggresively testing it ) , with 7-8 tabs. Chrome , well ...

I use chrome on an atom netbook with 2 GB ram, and it generally performs well even with 8 tabs open (some sites can bring it to its knees though)

That's the thing with anecdotal evidence, it's a sample of one.

It depends on the user's risk/benefit model.

There are WebKit-based browsers far lighter and faster than Firefox. Chrome, Firefox in Linux, and the Tor browser provide better security. Isolating browsers in separate VMs or Qubes AppVMs provides even better security.

I'll just throw that in there but Firefox Linux - since you refer to that (99% of what you just mentioned doesnt exit on windows/osx) - so yeah, Firefox for Linux uses the Chromium sandbox. You know, the exact same code, with a different filter and options applied.

Sure, its process model isnt as "secure" as chrome since it has the trade off or sharing more memory among other examples. But as a user, it seems like a freaking good enough trade off right now....

http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/file/a7c177546ca0/secu... its not actually hard to read/find

Chrome does not load every website into its own process: it does a lot of cross-site process sharing, and often very large numbers of sites can end up in the same process. It also does not keep each website into only one process, so in practice if a lot of tabs exist for one process (whether malicious or vulnerable) you can be assured of an overlap as you can end up in every process.

We should also keep in mind that Google is a content company, and is leverageing their market share to bring us such wonderful features such as HTML5 DRM support in our browsers.

I have a whack of tabs open all the time as well, and if I do it in Chrome it just kills my battery where as in firefox it doesn't. (on fedora 20)

Running down the battery is a well known feature of Chrome on on Windows https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2013/07/08/windows-timer-r...

I find that over time I end up with a bunch of tabs whose content seems interesting that grow over time. My working set is off to one side while the 'to read' tabs stack up over to the left.

I'd found a big boon for this workflow in the very simple extension "Export Tabs[1]." It's really simple: click an icon on the toolbar and it lists open tabs by title and then by URL.

Now when I notice that I've got a real glut of tabs open I dump them into my bookmark software so I can comb through later.

Like I said, really simple extension but tremendously helpful.

[1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/export-tabs/odafag...

That's amazing! Much easier than managing the mess that is chrome bookmark manager, when you just want to save something for a while and not forever.

I'm old school. My to-read queue goes off to del.icio.us. After all the switches and selling and buying, in the end, it's not half bad. Bookmarklets plus droidicious on Android and I have a dependable bookmark store.

I just released a similar Chrome extension called TabAttack[1]. I would love to hear what you think of it.

[1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabattack/ginflokh...

Instead of exporting tabs as plain text it exports them as Markdown. And it allows you to download the resulting document with one click as a *.md file, instead of having to copy and paste it in an editor.

It also uses the screen real estate in the toolbar a little bit more usefully by showing a tab counter (similar to what Chrome does on mobile).

And of course there are keyboard shortcuts for everything.

Here is my Show HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9047945

In Firefox you can just put them into groups, so they stop being tabs. Later, you can open a whole group when you need it. It's much more organized...

More than being more organized, it's really changed the way I browse. Throughout the day I'll build buckets of things to read/deal with and keeping them in groups makes it incredibly simple (and less stressful) to run through.

https://pinboard.in

I find this essentially when I run high numbers of tabs:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

Though another comment has led me to wonder if FF doesn't have something similar built-in.

Tree Style Tabs is essential if you keep many tabs open. Not only does it make it possible to read the window titles and use screen real estate more effectively, it facilitates tab hierachies (parent page A opened links to B, C, D, parent page B opened links to E, F, G, etc).

There is a very simple extension called Tab Counter which works very well together with TSTs and it helps to remind me when it's time to clean up the tab bar. It also appears to bring peace of mind that all tabs are still there, it's just the missing status bar. :)

Between Tree Style Tabs and The Fox Only Better[0] I can't see myself going to Chrome or any other browser. The UI is pretty much hidden until I need it, giving me maximum browsing space.

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/the-fox-only-...

Thanks, just installed The Fox Only Better which restored Vimperator to its former glory. That url bar was painful.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/spa/quq37nq1583x0lf/u_g2cx...

Thanks for that, TFoB is promising so far, though it seems to notch up CPU usage.

> Such usage is just not possible with Chrome.

In your opinion, what makes this "impossible"? I also use a few hundred tabs at any one time (also to the consternation of everyone who sees any _one_ of the Chrome windows I have open) and I'm very happy with Chrome.

How do you see which tab is which? (I gave up on Chrome about 20 months ago for Firefox's superior tab handling, better stability, and being less of a resource hog. Oh, and for not spying on me.)

Not GP, but: multiple windows and intuition. Generally, for ~20 tabs per window I still can tell pretty okay what is what, only large swabs of similar tabs (e.g. 10 ebay product sites) are a bit annoying. A tab switcher that shows the headlines would admittedly be helpful.

In Firefox, I either scroll quickly though readable tabs with the mouse-wheel, or click the right down-arrow for a text list of tabs, or start typing in the address bar of whichever tab I'm in. For example, if I type twi then the drop-down list offers Twitter, and I select "Switch to tab". That gets me to the half-dozen tabs I want to look at several times a day.

With those options plus tab groups, I find it pretty easy to handle several hundred tabs in Firefox, where Chrome was a nightmare. The drawback is that you just keep adding tabs ;-)

I use an extension called switch to tab. It uses the omnibox interface to auto complete what you type and switch to the right tab. (and when I'm switching back and forth multiple times between two tabs, I just have muscle memory for how many tabs apart they are).

What are you referring to specifically with the "spying on you" claim? I wasn't aware of any behavior like that other than features that you can turn off that end up sending info to Google servers (like tab sync).

If you tend to accumulate tabs and forget to close them then the Unload Tab [1] extension is a must. Your browser becomes laggy after opening 5 pages with flash elements? Just right-click on the current tab > "Unload Other Tabs". You can also set it to automatically unload background tabs after a certain amount of time.

[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/unloadtab/

>I regularly have several hundred tabs open in Firefox with no problems. Some people may think this is crazy or messy but I find it very useful for organizing the various projects I'm working on for different clients and my own personal projects.

It still is crazy and messy. For organizing the various projects there are bookmarks and bookmark folders. Having tons of tabs open != organization.

Why is "a list of bookmarks grouped by folders" organized, but "a list of tabs grouped by windows"(potentially with the support of tree style tabs or something similar) crazy and messy?

List of folders:

+ user is able to see a tree-view / list of them all at one.

+ searchable.

+ loadable on demand on the same "tabs", even whole folders (projects) at once.

+ persistent (even across computers with bookmark sync).

+ doesn't waste memory (not even mininal).

+ Was even designed for actual organization (Manage Bookmarks...), instead of a viewing content feature that was abused for that purpose.

Note that Opera also has delayed tab loading option in its advanced configuration (my main browser is Firefox though, since 2006 or so).

> It also has more and better extensions for helping with multiple tabs.

Exactly. Tree Style Tab being the biggest reason I've never switched to Chrome.

+1 for Tree Style Tab. I like to keep dozens of tabs open, and to drag and drop 'em into hierarchical groups. I also like to additionally organize the tab trees into multiple windows; the windows can be distinctively named with the FireTitle extension to identify them quickly.

I admit that I never learned Panorama or Tab Groups. Tree Style Tab does just about everything I need.

I'm not sure what Panorama or Tab Groups are, though I suppose I could infer the purpose/function of Tab Groups based on the name.

> I like to keep dozens of tabs open

Only dozens? Son, I just closed a Firefox session (in order to switch over to Nightly) with 233 tabs (plus another window with 10 or so). Didn't even push the 6GB mark.

When it comes to browsing, Chrome is like a modern soldier with all his gadgets and gizmos to keep him nice and sandboxed and safe from his adversaries ("adversaries" being poorly-designed "responsive" "web-scale" "mobile-first" "semantic" "Wangular.js" "jQWOP" "SASSy" "single-page" "web applications"); a good marksman, but easily overwhelmed should he find himself at close range and significantly outnumbered.

Firefox, in the meantime, is better likened to what would result if SkyNet had based its Terminators on Viking berserkers: almost naked, wielding nothing more than battle-axes (axen?) in each hand, charging at hundreds of foes in a magic-mushroom-fueled frenzy and winning. Yet, even if he should fail, 'twould matter not, for he only dreams of dying in such a great battle (as he does every week or so when I inevitably need to restart the Firefox process) and ascending to Robot Valhalla; and someday, Servo Firefoxson will grow from boy to man, and upon doing so, himself join the epic battles to avenge his father.

Tree Style Tabs looks like it has a potential to allow querying HTML via SQL. I have been thinking about this for a while. I do not have a concrete idea for an application, but it would be cool to retrieve titles of all open sites in certain group/tree. Almost like some sort of scraper.

I had similar thoughts recently. This kind of hierarchical and persistent 'view' into a graph (the web) could possibly be useful in other contexts (perhaps even as a general computer interface), and not just for graphs but generally as a hierarchical scratch board for queuing and structuring tasks and information. I'm thinking about implementing this in an experimental package for Emacs.

As for existing things, I've found Tab Counter quite useful in combination with TSTs.

Vimperator has fuzzy matching on tab titles if you press "b":

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/spa/quq37nq1583x0lf/sr732e...

Yep, this is worlds faster for me than mousing over and clicking on tabs.

Is vimperator still actively developed and compatible with the latest Firefox? I switched over to the fork, Pentadactyl some years ago.

It's also the reason why I switched from Chrome to Firefox. Sure, having 150 tabs open does slow down a machine at least a little bit, but god damn does it feel good to be able to do that without having to horizontally scroll though all 150 of them individually.

The whole point of having separate processes for each tab is that it isolates them. If one crashes, the others remain up. It supports multiple processors, too.

I would ask you to open up your task manager and try picking the largest-in-memory Chrome task and kill it, then see if you still think they are completely isolated. I agree with your point, but give it a shot.

I don't think that's really fair, the largest Chrome task in memory isn't a tab or extension. Yes I suppose it isn't perfectly isolated and if something happens to the main program task it will obviously cause problems but if a single page or extension crashes everything else lives on.

It's a perfectly fair point. The fact that the largest Chrome task by far is not a tab or extension at all, but is the core of Chrome itself, indicates that maybe - just maybe - Chrome isn't doing as good a job of keeping things isolated as it should. That process shouldn't be doing a whole lot beyond driving the UI and managing the lifecycles of its children.

The point is to isolate any code which renders HTML, plugins, etc., i.e., anything which processes untrusted external input, something which the main process does not do.

That is chrome itself...of course closing the parent process of a bunch of processes that are tied to it and that it monitors is going to close them all.

I've used the Chrome task manager to kill tabs. There is one process in there that's just called "Browser"--that's obviously the parent, and the UI won't let you kill it.

You might be referring to the OS task manager, but I don't use that--don't need to. I think the fact that Chrome has its own task manager is a killer feature.

Firefox followed Chrome's lead. It also has separate processes for each tab now.

In the stable version? I would doubt that, because my Firefox still freezes.

No. Firefox's multi-process support ("Electrolysis" aka e10s) is only enabled in the Nightly channel. Firefox does not yet use tab-per-process like Chrome. Nightly only uses two processes: one from the browser (the "chrome" process) and one for all tabs (the content process). You don't get crash or security isolation between tabs when they all share one content process, but that process can be sandboxed by the OS and it reduces memory overhead. Firefox will later experiment with multiple content processes, comparing one vs N tabs per process.

It already does. Electrolysis allows you to specify how many processes you want to allow maximum.

Firefox on my PC seems to disagree with you. Try to use any site with a Flash video player since some of the recent updates and you're very likely to see a hang. I don't know whether the cause is Firefox or Flash, but the end result is still taking out the entire browser session, not just the tab with the Flash video.

Tabs were one of the major reasons I switched over to Chrome. At the time, firefox resized the tabs as soon as space became available, making closing a bunch of tabs a pain. They don't do that anymore, but now they have the tab scrolling feature which adds a gui element if there are too many tabs. Thing is, once you close enough tabs, those elements go away immediately, making closing a bunch of tabs a pain.

Biggest reason I switched, which is still the true (though less so), is that Chrome takes up less screen real estate.

Ctrl-w kills a tab. Makes that kind of thing completely painless.

As does middle-click, which is super-handy.

Sometimes Ctrl+w can lead to horrible pain if you accidentally hit Q which is just next to w.

Chrome has a menu item toggle called "Warn before quitting" that I just enabled, and it has already saved me a bunch of times!!!! In OSX it's under the Chrome menu item (before File), don't know where they stuck it in Windows.

I don't think Windows has it, also because the keyboard command to exit an application is alt+f4, which isn't easy to hit on accident.

I can't seem to find this in my settings : (. This bit me every once in a while, and as I keep hundreds of tabs open, it's a huge pain in the ass to restore Chrome. I ended up remapping the ctrl+q shortcut to do nothing.

On Mac OS X at least, you can just remap Command-Q to something that's harder to press by mistake in System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts

Restart Firefox, then choose History/Restore previous session.

This is pretty horrible but fortunately easy to fix. I use an extension called disable ctrl q or similar.

BetterTouchTool: map 4 finger swipe up to cmd+w.

I switched to Chrome a few years ago for the same reason. Another reason was Chrome had an 'omnibar' that takes in both urls and search queries. I was instantly sold on that.

Browser world has change a lot in the past two years.....

I use Chrome as my only browser. On my desktop, I run an average of 20 tabs open at any given time, across two windows. I also run Chrome on my Android phone (Samsung Galaxy Note 3) and keep 4--8 tabs open at any given time. I reboot my desktop once every 1--2 weeks, and my phone maybe once per month.

Other than the rare tab freezing up and needing to be restarted, I've had absolutely no issues. Chrome just works.

Our workflow sounds similar, except that when my system reboots, Chrome is frozen for a minute as every tab tries to reload simultaneously, following by confusion as any youtube tabs all start playing.

On Firefox I had no such issue as each tab would only reload on focus.

That's...very strange. I don't recall Chrome trying to open up every tab that I've had open before rebooting.

[digs into settings] Ah, that's it: on Settings > On Startup, I've selected "Open The New Tab Page" which (I think) is the default.

Yeah, trying to open up a couple dozen tabs at once, several of which are videos, could be problematic.

Chrome on my girlfriend's PC did that in the middle of the night once or twice. I guess Windows or Chrome decided to update or something, not sure which, but all the YouTube videos in all the tabs started playing in the earlier hours of the morning.

Actually my main problem with Firefox is that if it "chokes" on one tab, I can't use the whole browser until that fixes itself. In Chrome I generally have 20+ tabs open and I don't have any issues.

Firefox needs to get itself a multi-process system. I really don't mind a little extra RAM being used as long as tabs are separated and sandboxed. I'm also looking forward to a complete rewrite in Rust. That should make Firefox much faster than anything else out there. Hopefully sooner rather than later.

lol. You really think a new programming language will increase speed?! Rust is not faster as C++ for sure.

Actually re-writing things might make it faster.

yes we have enough proof of that concept... I do not believe you. It's a urban myth that rewriting always make things faster. Especially when looking at a C(++) code basis. Rust will maybe make the code safer but I doubt it will make it faster.

Improving the design is part of a rewrite, which would make it faster, even if the rewrite was in C++. Sufficiently large, old projects (and Firefox certainly qualifies) tend to accumulate a lot of gunk and design choices that used to make sense, but don't any more.

Rust also allows one to safely use patterns that one couldn't use in C++ without screwing things up, thanks to the borrow checker. And quite a lot of Firefox is written in Javascript, which definitely would be faster when rewritten in a compiled language.

This extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspende... helped me a lot keeping multiple tabs under control. I tend to leave tabs open for days, sometimes weeks, and come to them later. I don't want to waste memory all that time to just keep a tab open. So this extension helps with that.

The one at Chrome store is rather dated. The latest one is available at https://github.com/deanoemcke/thegreatsuspender, and must be installed in developer mode. t

I just released an extension that "suspends" tabs to the file system instead:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabattack/ginflokh...

It's able to save tabs and windows to the file system as Markdown and restore them from these files, too.

I would love to get feedback on it.

The main reason I stuck with Opera 12 is how well it handled dozens of tabs (I remember counting 96 in a long-lasting session). Yes, the memory usage was high, but it never felt slow. After switching to the new Opera, I was pretty disappointed, and even switched to Chrome (because the new Opera is a poor man's Chrome in a way), but after a while I came back to Opera. With that said, Vivaldi looks very promising, but it's still too buggy! I'm holding my fingers crossed.

I wish the Firefox address bar wasn't something stuck in 2005.

It chokes on all 1 word phrases, spending many seconds attempting to find webpages for that word instead of searching. Chrome instantly searches.

Also, having a separate address bar and search was novel in 1999, when search was novel.

However, let's get real: a single address bar capable of nearly instantly deciding between search and location isn't a pipedream, it's the competitors reality and has been for many many years.

I have a feeling I'll migrate from Chrome sooner or later because I dislike Google's approach to standards and new features (no respect for standards, passionate desire to pump chrome full of backgrounds jobs and proprietary vendor features).

But I just cannot wrap myself around the fact that the Firefox address bar hasn't been meaningfully changed in what feels like the entire history of the modern web.

Firefox awesomebar has worked nicely for me for years across linux, mac and windows installations.

I'd say you either have a seriously old oc, have something weird in your profile or you are doing something seriously wrong.

Furthermore, awesomebar lets me automatically do full text searches across titles and urls, something chrome still cannot really do (with firefox you can search a couple of fragments of the url or title and off it goes and finds it, quick.)

Furthermore, two separate boxes are the best of both worlds, both awesomebar and quick (ctrl+k)access to your preferred search engine.

> It chokes on all 1 word phrases, spending many seconds attempting to find webpages for that word instead of searching. Chrome instantly searches.

If I've understood what you're saying, I believe this was fixed in Firefox 33: https://msujaws.wordpress.com/2014/08/01/faster-and-snappier...

As for the general complaint about Firefox's address bar: I find it to be vastly superior to Chrome's at finding sites I've visited before. I can type in fragments of URLs and/or page titles (even partial words) and get matches immediately in a way that Chrome (and Safari) can't compete with.

For years I wondered why the other browsers were so much worse at this. Then somebody pointed out to me that, for the case of Chrome, Google would much prefer you find a page via Google search than via your browser history...

I regularly use Chrome on windows with ~100 tabs, and it ... just works? It is a bit annoying that it loads everything immediately on start-up, on the other hand once it's done everything is available without further delays. Firefox seemed to get slow/stuck easier, but I haven't tested it extensively for a while.

Well, as one piece of anecdotal evidence: I only use one browser extension (Vimium on Chrome, VimFx on Firefox) and still find Firefox significantly faster than Chrome.

Also, I like using the same browser on my Android tablet as on my laptop and websites that use MathJax render incorrectly on Android Chrome (these sites render perfectly well on Android Firefox and on both desktop Firefox and desktop Chrome). So I'd probably use Firefox even if it were a little slower than Chrome.

There is a Vimium equivalent for Firefox?! I'm sold!

There are several; vimperator has been around since before chrome even existed.

Chronologically it's the other way around I think: Vimium was inspired by the Firefox plugins Vimperator and Pentadactyl.

(The one I mentioned, VimFx, is more recent and more minimalistic that either Vimperator or Pentadactyl.)

The minimalism is why I vastly prefer Vimium to e.g. Vimperator, personally.

You're kidding right? Vimperator and the much better fork Pentadactyl have been around for years on Firefox, and implement everything Vimium does and more, in a much more reliable way. Every single control interface is available, and scriptable in Pentadactyl.

Vimium isn't even the best vimperator clone for Chrome - cVim has now taken that crown by a very large margin, and is worlds better in terms of features, configuration and reliability.

To be fair quite a few users left Firefox because they found it "bloated" or "it didn't work anymore" but never realized they were the ones that installed the bloat/adware/malware.

I left Firefox because it was measurably slower than Chrome at the time (and not by a small margin) and because crashes/hangs would usually take the whole Browser down.

This. Have the scales tipped the other way recently? Chrome still feels faster to me, but I only have one active extension (Ad Blocker).

I think most people on HN using FF are running nightly versions, I know I was. The nightly versions of FF have always had the edge on Chrome, but I think it's just recently that the stable version of FF has really gotten pretty much on par with Chrome, and I'd say definitely better on the Linux 64bit.

Nightly -> Stable every ~12 weeks or so, so should feel just as fast. I noticed this difference too, but I believe that's as I use it with a fresh profile each time.

Chrome doesn't work well for me on Linux at all, whereas Firefox functions beautifully.

While "work well at all" might be an exaggeration, I have found Firefox to run much better than Chrome/Chromium on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS as well.

The Ad Block Plus extension is itself a notorious memory and CPU hog [1]. Chrome's slimmer uBlock extension has now been ported to Firefox [2].

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2014/05/14/adblock-plus...

[2] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/releases

Please don't put the blame solely on AdBlock Plus. Most of the problem is due to the rulesets, not the extension itself. EasyList and friends have a truly frightening number of broad CSS element hiding rules, which are much less efficient than the URL blocking rules that were the original AdBlock mode and should have stayed the primary means of blocking.

This is patently untrue, as I subscribe to the exact same filter rulesets in uBlock, and it makes a dramatic, incredible difference to the browser's performance.

I didn't say that there was no difference in performance between uBlock and ABP. I was explaining that the performance problems with ABP are a result of it being misused. uBlock tolerates the abuse much better, but URL based blocking should still be the first line of defense.

Thanks for the link to uBlock. I've been growing frustrated with Ghostery and AdBlock Plus, but didn't know of a good alternative. I'm giving uBlock a try, and so far, so good.

Although µBlock might be a lot slimmer than AdBlock Plus, according to this article [1] it's comparable with Ghostery. Ofcours µBlock is open source where Ghostery is not and I personlly really like µBlock's philosophy [2] about tracking and privacy.

[1] http://www.extremetech.com/computing/199188-%C2%B5block-aims...

[2] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock#philosophy

> I left Firefox mainly because it was measurably slower than Chrome at the time (and not by a small margin)

I have no idea what your experience was, of course. Many people said this for years while Firefox consistently won or tied in objective comparisons.

Having dealt with end-user complaints for years, I've learned to doubt reports that rely on subjective perceptions of things like 'speed'. Sometimes the new, cool thing feels faster. Perhaps Firefox should pump in some fake engine noise.

Those "objective comparisons" then probably compared the rendering engines or some other micro benchmarks.

My main problem was the GUI, not the rendering (though the latter probably played its part in slowing the GUI down).

Opening/closing/moving tabs was sluggish.

Just opening Firefox with my ~20 tabs open would take many times as long as opening Chrome with the same number of tabs.

You didn't need a stopwatch to see the difference.

Of course, things have changed since then....

I was one of the small group suffering (I think back around Firefox 24). It indeed was winning reviews & praise- but it was also completely unresponsive on my high-end machine. Several seconds of unresponsive, as if it/I were having problems with interrupts.

I realize most people didn't have that problem; it was probably a freak corner case on my machine.

I switched to Chrome primarily because of that doubting. For a while a pretty good chunk of people were complaining about Firefox's speed and memory usage, and the dev team stuck their head in the sand and blamed plugins, extensions, slow hardware, OS problems, malware, and everything under the sun except Firefox itself. At some point people just said, "Fuck it, I'm not even trying to convince them any more, I'm just switching to Chrome."

Also note that Firefox was "winning" objective benchmarks on things that didn't matter. Rendering speed doesn't mean much to me if it takes 10x longer to open the tab before rendering begins.

There was a time where Firefox was slow, used lots and lots of memory, and crashed all the time. And yet, developers doubted that was true at bug discussions.

It took some time, but the developers finally convinced themselves that the problem existed, and started fixing it. It also took some time to fix most thing, but now Firefox is stable and fast. Nowadays Chrome it is slow and too "smart".

Anyway, complete comparisons of megabyte-sized sofware, with gigabyte-sized states must take longer than the age of the Universe to run. Anything smaller is not complete enough to exclude bugs.

YMMV, but--after switching over to Firefox recently--I have it space out at random. Chrome has problems (its penchant for lighting my laptop on fire being the biggest reason I switched) but I don't have it just stop in the middle of my day.

The toss-up between junk battery life thanks to badly designed attempts to shoe-horn an application model into a document model (and Google employs plenty of the worst offenders, my biggest perf suck under both Firefox and Chrome is GMail!) and random stops is disgusting. Gary Bernhardt's right: we put up with entirely too much bullshit in this part of our lives.

Or the users were comparing a Firefox profile that had years' worth of extensions and history data with a Chrome profile that was empty...

When the V8 javascript engine came out for Chrome, it was objectively faster than the other browsers. I was a web developer at the time, and it was night and day.

Then, the other browsers made their new engines, and the leading performer has gone back and forth since.

It wasn't subjective perception. You could run the same javascript code in multiple browsers, time it, and see the results quite clearly. Since javascript was (and is) such a huge part of most websites, this speed difference was very noticeable during regular browsing.

The reason I quit using Firefox wasn't because pages loaded slowly. It was the overall responsiveness of the interface. Tab management, opening menus, pressing buttons, and even scrolling were (and are) incredibly sluggish in Firefox on my computer. I think most people who say Firefox is "slow" are actually referring to this, and not the things benchmarks measure.

Chrome's interface is perfectly snappy. This is with no extensions on either, and brand new profiles. Every once in a while I go through a free software stage and switch back to Firefox, but I always end up going back to Chrome.

For me the bloatware was Firefox 3.0 that installed itself against my wishes.

I was using then Firefox 2 or 2.5 (don't remember) quite happily.

It was just great (compared to Explorer).

Chrome showed up... But Firefox 2.5 was still much better.

Then one day, Firefox started to INSIST to install 3.0, then 3.5, then one day it just did, no matter how hard I tried to keep my old version.

And then behold, Firefox 3.5 had a bigger interface, that used more screen space (and I am in Brazil, bigger screens and bigger resolutions get expensive FAST, my current laptop, that is a ASUS gaming one, is still 14 inches and the maximum vertical res is 768, screens better than that were unaffordable to me), and it was SLOW, VERY, VERY slow, like RIDICULOUS slow.

So I hopped into Chrome... and I wish I could say I never looked back, but hogging 600mb just to load reuters.com webpage is NOT nice.

I am only still using chrome for google-ecosystem reasons.

If I could get rid of relying on google stuff (several work-related things depend on google) I probably would get on Firefox or Opera (or see if I can put Konqueror on Windows? I never tried that...)

Can you people explain why you are downvoting me for my anecdote?

Feedback as requested: It's the all caps hyperbole. It contributes little; it undermines interesting, valuable discussions; it's contagious, spreading from one poster to another; and it's also used so much in so many forums that long ago it became tiresome and dull.

That wasn't your whole post, but when I see it I stop reading and move on. Anyway, don't worry too much about a few negative mods.

Apparently Rekonq has a Windows version, at least according to a Google search and resultant blog post and winkde repo. http://lpapp.blogspot.com/2012/09/randa-rekonq-installer-for...

Generally Rekonq is considered the better maintained KDE browser nowadays.

I'd hate for this to become the revisionist history of the migration from FF -> Chrome.

When I finally made the move FF had no extensions, no malware or any add-ons. I ran the same (mostly) version on Ubuntu, OSX and Windows 7. It had become unusably slow on all platforms. Looking around on the Internet in those days saw enough validation of the problem being widespread in terms of speed and memory resources that I tried Chrome and found it significantly snappier.

In fact, I still do, although I note the great strides FF has taken in that regard. My problem is I haven't seen the same degradation in Chrome that I saw in FF a few years back. If it's getting bloated, I've missed it (in terms of palpable heft with slowdowns, crashes).

The historical FF record: https://areweslimyet.com/

That site is the historical record of memory usage on one automated benchmark on one particular test machine. It's useful for finding memory regressions but you really can't draw general conclusions from it.

In particular, it's worst-case behaviour (esp. spikes) that hurts the most with memory usage, and Firefox is much better in that regard than it used to be.

Right. That paragraph about the extensions makes me question the credibility of his claims. Disappointing. I haven't experienced the performance problems he describes, and I use the Chrome dev channel for my main browser.

I've noticed Firefox has been getting faster over the last couple years, but when I use it I still get the feeling that it gets in my way more than Chrome does.

Edit: fix typo

He's part of the rule that tech writers aren't technical people and often write about things they don't understand. As some famous person recently said, there's a huge amount of "intellectual dishonesty" in tech journalism.

To spin it more positively, he and his ilk more generally represent our users than more "in the know" tech-journalists.

I think this is a rough article, but likely one that either many users will empathize with, so the overarching idea that browsers should be doing something to prevent bloat is probably a sound one.

I guess I see journalism the old-fashioned way: you're not an expert on everything, but you do research and distill the concepts for regular readers.

This guy clearly didn't do research. Yes, Chrome uses a massive amount of memory, but that was originally a feature. Most people had way more memory than they needed at any given time, so Chrome heavily used memory to decrease processing time and therefore improve rendering speed. It also split into many processes to insulate each part of the browser from crashes and security holes.

Now that the age of SoCs/tablets/etc is upon us, people don't have as much extra memory as they did when Chrome first arrived. That may have an impact on how usable Chrome is (don't know if it's smart about "dialing down" its memory usage).

But this guy didn't mention any of that. Like a modern "journalist", he just wrote about his own anecdotal experiences without learning about the underlying concepts.

I agree 100%, I think the article is worthless, as a journalistic piece.

However, if you treat it as a blog post, and one that's likely to be parroted by other users of his same ability, it's a decent canary for popular opinion.

> Now that the age of SoCs/tablets/etc is upon us, people don't have as much extra memory as they did when Chrome first arrived. That may have an impact on how usable Chrome is (don't know if it's smart about "dialing down" its memory usage).

To me, the worst part is that Chrome seems, even without significant extensions, to be a CPU hog. And that translates into worse battery life. I switched to Firefox strictly because of the better battery life; with Chrome and GMail open it was like my battery had a hole in it. (Now I get to deal with random hangs that lock input for a while because a tab has a sad in Firefox. I hate us.)

Chrome may be killing your battery to make it feel "peppier" https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2013/07/08/windows-timer-r...

I'm on a Mac. That said, I wouldn't be surprised if it was sacrificing my battery life on the altar of convenience.

Throw bartab heavy on to firefox - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bartab-heavy/...

Now you can have HUNDREDS of tabs (in firefox's nice tab groups, of course) and they'll only stay open / in-memory for a configurable amount of time after you stop using them.

Keeps memory utilization tight. I'm currently south of 500MB utilization with hundreds of tabs open and lots of extensions: Disconnect Search, DownThemAll, FoxyProxy, Greasemonkey, HTTPS Everywhere, Imagus, Stylish and uBlock

He mentioned importing all of his plugins and preferences from Chrome back into Firefox, so it stands to reason that his benchmark between the two is roughly the same.

As for the question of will it change? Well, to be frank, it shouldn't. It's known, however, that it will: Chrome in particular is known to not handle the accumulated history well. I haven't had a similar experience with Firefox, but that's only one data point.

plugins / extensions are not imported between chrome and firefox, which is the bulk that is being referred to.

Given that the OP installed "cloud to butt plus" into Firefox, I think it's fair to say that he's doing a fair comparison.

Despite that fact I've run both without add-ons and I'm very happy to be back using Firefox. Like the author there was a point when I switched to Chrome, but even without add-ons it has become bloated and slow. My breaking point was when it decided to auto-install a Google Now notification center that started up with my computer.

You could have realised this was linkbait from the domain name - dang can we please lower the rank for gizmodo.com links?

It doesn't matter. The user gets a bad experience and blames Firefox. "Oh, it's those naughty extensions slowing everything down!" smirk the developers.

Do you think the user cares? Firefox is the one who opened themselves up to get abused by. (Same things happened on Windows, you'll get a machine full of crapware if you install popular apps. OSX has a curated app store. Look at the difference on an average windows and OSX machine.)

Some solutions instead of blaming the user:

* Name & shame poorly-performing plugins in the interface. (OSX does this with "apps using significant power" in the battery meter)

* Have a plugin speed rating in the store

* Have performance requirements for plugins (users will report usage data, you have X seconds to startup, if you average higher you will be reviwed/yanked.)

Asking users to not install extensions when extensibility is one of your selling points is not a good idea. Fix how they interact with the browser.

I'm not a Chrome-by-default user. But when it is closed and I drag a link to its icon, it is very infuriating that it just doesn't open the link that I asked it to, but whatever else it felt like opening alongside it.

You can disable the "open all the tabs I had open last time" behavior in the settings, though. Is Firefox more clairvoyant about what you want (e.g., startup with arguments does not load prior tabs, but normal startup does)?

I still use pentadactyl, even though it isn't being supported AFAIK. These kind of customizations are not possible on chrome. This is why I never switched even when it was cool.

I love Pentadactyl too, that's why I'm amazed it's no longer supported. Seems to me that with all the vim and Firefox-using devs out there, a lot of people would want to support it. But I have no evidence of that.

I had the exact same reaction. Why would an extension automatically open multiple tabs? That sounds pretty malware-ish.

I remember one or two extensions I liked started injecting ads into pages with updates, which led me to uninstall them but would probably go unnoticed by a lot of users.

Happens all the time. "Ghostery is updated!" "Thanks for updating RES!" "More update tabs opening up!"

I had to stop and say "wait, what?"

To be fair, much of the huffing and puffing "I'm leaving Firefox...Chrome is so much better!" was based upon the same sort of rhetoric. Early on Chrome didn't even have extensions, much less bloated monstrosities like Ad Block Plus and Firebug (don't get me wrong -- they both are fantastic, but most don't realize how incredibly onerous they are). So those people kicked Firefox to the curb and talked about how grand everything was with Chrome. Now that Chrome has an ecosystem, they put themselves in the same situation again.

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