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Comment by pllbnk | Hacker News Reader

From the experience I've had with Chrome, I would say that process per tab is overhead. Sure, there are some benefits from having a few processes that are managing different parts of the system, but not hundreds of processes just for browsing. The way I use Firefox is that having 50 or more tabs open is normal for me, sometimes there are even hundreds of them. Currently Firefox works great and although there are some unresponsiveness during some workflows, they are not so annoying.

I am really worried about this change because I have used Firefox since its version 1.5 and am very familiar with all its problems and successes through the years.

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"There are multiple competing factors when it comes to choosing the right number of processes.

- For security, more processes is better; one per tab is probably ideal.

- For crash protection, ditto.

- For responsiveness, one process per CPU core is probably best.

- For memory usage, one process is probably best."

as a dev wrote in the mailing list: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.platform...

For various technical reasons Firefox e10 will support a few sub-processes in near future, but nothing is set in stone. Rust based Servo supports (afaik) dozens of processes, as we know it from Chrome and IE.

With crashes, though rare in Chrome, when one does happen it usually kills all my Chrome windows instead of a single tab as is touted :/

It depends which process crashes. Usually and rare a sub-process crash which means a few tabs need a page reload. If your main process crash (which should be very very rare) then I would suspect you have a faulty memory module in your device or you have little free memory or your operating system has not optimal scheduler (e.g. server OS on a desktop).

I've seen it irregularly on multiple machines, Windows 7, Windows 8 and now Mac OS X. It's actually really soured me on the whole idea of a multi-process architecture. I understand the theoretical benefits, but I don't see messages that a particular tab crashed that much more often than that the entire browser crashed.

"Little free memory" means that Chrome has eaten all my ram though.

Chrome is really lagging behind Firefox in this, as it has no backgrounding / unloading process that I'm aware of to maintain a reasonable memory footprint.

It also attempts to render every tab at once when restoring after a crash - another obvious problem.

Let me guess, it's a process like Flash that kills all of your tabs?

That's why having proprietary technology in browsers sucks because you can't really implement it the way you want to (as a browser vendor).

If you can reproduce that, I'm sure the Chrome team would be very, very interested in that.

Or maybe not, I think they have automated crash reporting (I even used their library, breakpad) but my Chrome has been very consistent in crashing on Windows wakeup for over a year now.

This summer I'm going to be working on an implementation of software based fault isolation for my masters degree. We are looking to sandbox a web server without the need to partition via processes and incur expensive interprocess communication and context switching. I don't see why it couldn't work for Firefox either.

Here is the original paper: https://crypto.stanford.edu/cs155/papers/sfi.pdf

> The way I use Firefox is that having 50 or more tabs open is normal for me

I've never understood this. Isn't that what bookmarks are for?

I currently have 2014 tabs in my session (almost all unloaded, using around 2GB of ram that I wouldn't use otherwise). I had 1600 tabs a few days ago. They are links I clicked on in other apps or browsed to over the past few months.

When I get a chance to plow through a few dozen/hundred of these tabs I can read/view them and close them very quickly. Notice all the UI stuff I don't have to do: I never had to perform the the actions of saving a bookmark, opening a list of bookmarks, opening a specific bookmark, or deleting a bookmark.

I clicked a link once upon a time, and I will close the tab some time in the future.

When I switch to and close ten tabs, all I have to do from a UI perspective is type q ten times.

In terms of UI stuff, how do you find a tab among a thousand?

When the tab page title shrinks and all I see is favicon, I feel lost.

You can of course search open tabs from the address bar. But at least my workflow is to browse through the old tabs and read / close one by one.

Also in Firefox the tabs never shrink to just favicon, the tab heads become a scrollable list. Much better than Chrome imo.

I use Tree Style Tab for this, although I hate the actual tree functionality - it just happens to be the only reasonable vertical tab solution I've found. Unfortunately, it seems to get a little bit laggy with more than a couple hundred tabs.

Unless you specifically tweak the UI to enable really small tabs, which is among the first things I do on a fresh install. Favicon + a small number of pixels for padding, way way less than Google allows me to get away with! Slap on a bunch of tab groups and I'm set.

I'm quite comfortable with a tab group filled to the point where the tab bar only displays favicons, but hasn't gotten to the point where it lets me scroll yet. That way I can rely on spatial memory to get to the right tab, without necessarily seeing the title!

Of course, searching for the right tab is an option, just like you said. I love the fact that Firefox also activates the correct tab group automatically.

In all honesty chrome is by far and away the worst at handeling large numbers of tabs of all the browsers (bar perhaps version of IE).

Chrome is pretty special. "Oh, you have too many tabs to fit, time to hide the favicons."

Ironically, Chrome on Android handles this better than Chrome on the desktop. I have 15 tabs open on desktop Chrome right now, and it's getting a bit cramped. My Note 4? 33.

I said tab but I don't actually use the UI concept of a "tab", though I could by M-x tab-bar-mode, because you're right it doesn't scale very well to large numbers, in my experience

I use buffers (in Conkeror). Buffers are just tabs without the actual tab UI. So unless I'm switching buffers, the only visible UI difference between having one buffer and 2000 buffers is the string "[2011/2011]" in my status-line showing my current buffer number and total number of buffers.

I can press C-x b (switch-to-buffer, I bind to M-a) to show a filterable list of my current buffers (favicon, url, title). I can type part of the url or page title (even when tab is unloaded) to filter my buffer list before switching to one. I can also navigate tabs "spatially" (from tab #2 to either tab #1 or #3) or by recently used (bury/unbury-buffer or switch-to-recent-buffer which shows buffer list in most recently used order) or by domain (next-buffer-same-host) or by whether the buffer is playing audio (switch-to-audio-buffer).

Also, in the vast majority of cases I only access recent tabs near the end of the list. I can press 9 or 0 to go to my second-to-last or last buffer.

I don't quite have that many tabs open but I find that grouping tabs into separate browser windows and taking advantage of your window manager goes a long way.

If you are interested in grouping the tabs, have a look at this addon:

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

It allows you to use your tab-list in a hierarchical way, sort of like a filesystem. I group things under obvious roots, and then collapse it till needed.

ctrl-shift-e should open a canvas like area where you can group tabs. Similar to a file folder, I prefer it to bookmarks

Interesting, but seems to be very basic. I still prefer using a wm. I can use different layouts, group windows into hierarchies, display them side by side, take advantage of tiling, use workspaces and have configurable keys for each of these actions. You know, functions that a wm is built for.

And I can always switch to a different wm altogether if I'm not comfortable.

Once you get used to the tab groups they can be very powerful. I use them for contexts myself; one for casual browsing, one for development for client x, one for client y etc, one for research, and the list goes on.

Obviously you can easily achieve the same thing in separate windows as well, so ultimately I suppose it doesn't make a huge difference, but it's the way I find makes for the biggest difference in separating workspaces.

I use the "Tree Style Tab" add-on

The favicon is ok. I close them when there is no space to display the favicon.

Wow, I thought I was in the top "tabbers" with my 300 tabs or so (well, 300 at work and 300 at home), but I see I am far from that !

Nonetheless, that's why I like firefox, I can do that, not so possible with Chrome. So like other said, I really really hope that they take into account this use case.

Why don't you use something like Pocket? It seems like you are the ideal use case for their software. I use it religiously.

I do use pocket. Some of these links will end up in pocket, when I get around to looking at them closer if I decide they are long and I want to read them on my mobile devices.

Sounds like you'd need something like this:

https://www.one-tab.com/

I use it all the time whenever I get to 10-15 "idle" tabs I don't need that day anymore.

I like being able to switch to any of my tabs using the exact same UI technique as I would for any other tab, and press qqqqqqqqqq to view and kill many of tabs in succession.

There's tabvention, automatic 'tab list' backup as bookmark folders if you reach a certain (configurable) number.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabvention/kcjmdpj...

I used to do somethingng similar but I've been using reading lists and a little more self control to manage most of my favs now.

What extension do you use to unload your tabs? Or keep them unloaded, not sure of your workflow in that regard.

I use Session Manager [1] for this. It has a "restore tabs on demand" option. I usually end up restarting the browser every week or two, either due to Windows updates, Firefox updates, or getting enough active tabs that the browser crashes. When it reloads, I only have one loaded tab, and start the cycle over again.

I think the lazy loading on session restore has been built in to Firefox for a while now, but I still use Session Manager. It shows me the number of tabs in the session before I choose to restore it, and if I hit a problematic page that is making the browser immediately crash, I can remove that page from the session before restoring, as well.

[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/En-us/firefox/addon/session-manag...

I use one called UnloadTab. Works a treat, and does exactly what it says on the box!

So what you want is for bookmarks to be automatically created and accessible from the top menubar.

Yes, that's called "tabs". Especially now that tab content is not autoloaded and autorendered. The bookmark metaphor simply doesn't fit everyone's mental model; tabs work much better.

Wh-whoa . . . I think you just set some sort of a record over there.

How do you find out the number of open tabs?

"Open Tab Count" works nicely for me.

Often you need to preserve some state that is lost when using bookmarks (e.g. scroll position, a confirmation message that will be lost on refresh, a paused game/video etc.)

With bookmarks you have to put additional time for organization and saving them. When I am researching something, I prefer just opening a bunch of tabs and they may stay open for quite a long time. When I am done, I close all of them. The main sites that I use daily, are usually bookmarked, yes.

I have 9 workspaces, two screens each, in a 3x3 grid. Most are browser - terminal pairs. 4 tabs per workspace is fairly common. They're grouped with working checkouts by task. I'm not quite at 50, but getting there. For example:

1. Support Ticket workspace -- one for RT, more tabs for related research

2. internal wiki workspace -- one for the wiki, another for the wiki's github repo, another for a local build of the wiki

3. email / meetings -- one window for calendar+tasks, one for email, with and 1-2 extra tabs for documents or links sent my way

4. Site Reliability -- one for nagios alerts, one for site testing, one for munin, and one for github PRs

5. management -- weekly management meeting agenda google doc, a key report or two, and maybe a slides for a presentation I've been asked to give or review

Edit: IMO, I'm perfectly happy to give up Memory if it means one tab crashing doesn't kill the entire process. Even at 100MB per tab, 5GB is like under 50 bucks.

I run something similar with 4 workspaces. I solved the "browser crashes taking down everything" problem by setting up 4 different profiles in firefox. Create a batch script to fire up firefox in the right profile for the right workspace.

It's worked well for me, when flash inevitably crashes it doesn't take the other workspaces with it, but it's perhaps not the most elegant of solutions.

Bookmarks, tabs, pinned tabs, etc. all sit at different places on the same continuous spectrum of UIs for saving web pages for later. Once you implement unloading of background tabs (which you can in FF via add-ons), they can start to look a lot like bookmarks.

You don't need to use an add-on (anymore?) for keeping them unloaded, although you do need one to get a more manageable user interface. When you have more than about 1000 tabs, startup end closedown get rather slow though.

> although you do need one to get a more manageable user interface I know this get mentioned every time there's a discussion on Firefox UI and extension, but Tree Style Tabs [ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta... ] is one excellent example of such extension.

I'm trying the builtin Tab Groups feature now.

For Chrome, there is this great extension called "Tabs Outliner". Gets work done really great! Pity that after so much time there is no FF equivalent...

It's called tab hoarding and it's a mental disorder, I have it too.

I'm also a very heavy tab user but I refuse to call it a mental disorder. It is simply an aspect of a workflow among another dime dozen. Web page hoarding may be a disorder though, but in this case it'll be disorder regardless of you're piling them on tabs, bookmarks or Pocket.

It depends on what you do. Doing research requires a lot of resources (tabs) especially if you do it in an non-linear way. Consuming a content requires only on tab.

I open and use dozens of tabs (up to 100, then I bookmark all with one click and close all). But all tabs are active in memory in IE11 or Chrome so I can switch between them (sure I trade GBs of RAM for time, but that's okay). Firefox unloads tabs, so it reloads the page - that's better if you re-open Firefox as it only loads one tab instead of loading all tabs like in Chrome/IE but worse if you have it open and actually work in the browser. So for me it's a trade off, and I find it good I have a choice for different tasks I can choose the best way.

Ever since the dialup era, when all we had was "open in new window", I would browse by reading down a page and opening interesting-looking links in new windows and letting them load while carrying on with the original page.

Tabs are a good LIFO stack of things which are currently "live", or at least not dealt with yet. It's easier to navigate than history or bookmarks. You could argue that at some point tabs should "spill" into bookmarks, but that requires making a decision.

It's like a super convenient temporary bookmark, without any of the hassle of bookmark management.

I currently have 80 tabs open, and process-per-tab is not something I'm looking forward to.

All changes will disrupt someones workflow[1]. I suppose browsers are no exception.

1: https://xkcd.com/1172/

Is Firefox really better than Chrome here, or is it worse because it is enabling bad user behavior?

Bad according to who?

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