> This is exactly how I'm using Firefox, right now -- 273 tabs open. It's sitting at ~5% of CPU and 450MB of RAM. And switching tabs is instantaneous.
Which platform are you on? Which Firefox version? Stock or tweaked? Any special add-ons? I use Firefox on OS X and it crawls after 10-15 tabs. Consumes many gigs of memory. Chrome isn't any better. It just splits the memory consumption among multiple processes.
I don't remember browsers being this slow on Linux. Time to go back to the magic land.
400 tabs. Including several active fancy SPAs, like gMail and two copies of Slack, a gDocs or two, sometimes the godawful work LMS.
Stock Firefox 50 (32bit), untweaked with no relevant add-ons (well, except AdBlock Plus), Windows 10, just over 400 tabs open, under 10% CPU, under 2GB of RAM (on a 16GB machine). If I freak it out by doing a bunch of flipping through dormant tabs, I can spike CPU pretty good as it does layout on fifty tabs at once, but who cares, I don't do that. I do find that I need to restart my browser every few hundred tab open/close cycles, which takes under 30 seconds (just did the restart, that dropped RAM use to 1.3GB, but it'll get back up to 1.9 pretty soon). Restarts used to be a lot less frequent, and a lot faster, before work required me to keep two slack clients open. Running multiple YouTube windows at once seems to be bad for uptime.
Regarding OP's complaints, opening a new tab take imperceptible time, a new window is about half a second (only marginally slower than notepad), and switching tabs can be done several times per second.
I have put ZERO effort into make Firefox run faster, unless you count running AdBlock. I haven't even bothered to figure out which is the best adblocker.
People use Chrome because Google (Alphabet?) advertises it heavily including a nag screen on google.com. Also Firefox goes through noticeable cycles of being awesome and being a buggy slow mess.
Chrome came out when Firefox was in a noticeable slump. Remember that in ?2008 being better than IE was the yardstick browsers were measured by and Firefox had passed that many years earlier, so I think they had lost their way a little bit. I remember Firefox 4 was noticeably bad on OSX and it took a long time to fix.
PS I use a browser salad daily (Safari and two channels of Firefox so I can have two instances open at once, and Chrome for Facebook / flash / testing).
uBlock Matrix is good too, if you want to manage all the things. You basically white/blacklist all the image, css, xhr, etc. requests on the page and can set up rules like allow iframe from youtube.com on all sites, to allow the embed youtube frame to show up on pages. Many sites are broken on first load until you get your rules straight but they're trivially fixed. You just click on boxes to allow or deny the particular thing.
Can we stop the "sellout" business? Having a clearly stated and one-click reversible whitelist is neither dishonest nor bad for the user. I like having the option to support sites I enjoy without massively inconveniencing myself. You prefer maximum adblocking, and that's fine, but there's nothing at all wrong with giving us both the choice.
> Can we stop the "sellout" business? Having a clearly stated and one-click reversible whitelist is neither dishonest nor bad for the user.
It is dishonest and bad for the general public. Users expect their adblocker to block adds; not block 'some' adds because of Mafia practices, or corruption (ie. advertising companies paying large, inappropriate sums of money to the company behind ABP in order to be whitelisted by default).
> I like having the option to support sites I enjoy without massively inconveniencing myself.
You can still do this on a case-by-case scenario with uBlock Origin.
> You prefer maximum adblocking, and that's fine, but there's nothing at all wrong with giving us both the choice.
This is false dichotomy. You have the same very choice with uBlock Origin. And uMatrix for that matter. I'm also not taking away your choice; nothing prevents you from installing and using ABP. What I will not do is stopping calling what ABP does sellout. Because as I argued above it is corruption.
On top of that, uBlock Origin is performance-wise better than ABP [1].
> It is dishonest and bad for the general public. Users expect their adblocker to block adds
You still seem to be under the impression that ABP is deceptive. It's not. It explains the "acceptable ads" list and gives you the option to disable it first thing after install. It is not doing anything without the user's knowledge. They're providing a perfectly honest service that you aren't interested in, and you think they should feel bad for that.
> You can still do this on a case-by-case scenario with uBlock Origin.
I specifically said without inconveniencing myself. Building up custom adblock settings for various sites is a chore and I have better things to do with my time. I choose to use a product that takes care of that chore for me, for the most part. You choose to take the time to personalize things, and that's fine; I've done the same in other circumstances. But that's a personal choice, not a moral one.
Nice way of quoting specifically, ignoring the arguments your discussion partner made. I made the point regarding corruption from the company behind ABP. The sums they receive to put companies on white list, are inappropriate. They've also added harmful companies/providers to their white list. Sorry, I can't take that product serious.
> I specifically said without inconveniencing myself.
You said you wanted to support your fav site. That is not hard to do with uBlock Origin. You are actually supporting most sites.
You also make it seem like the ABP whitelist isn't inconveniencing. It is; see above.
> I like having the option to support sites I enjoy without massively inconveniencing myself.
So do I, which is why I use Patreon and subscriptions.
The side effects of viewing ads are that in addition to supporting the sites you enjoy, you're supporting malware distributors, and helping companies compete on ads rather than the quality of their products. Maybe you don't care about your own attention or data security, but your actions don't just affect you.
> The side effects of viewing ads are that in addition to supporting the sites you enjoy, you're supporting malware distributors
No, I'm not, because I'm using ABP's vetted ad provider list. This risk of getting malware from one of those is greater than zero, but a whole lot less than the risk I accept by using the internet at all. I might get struck by lightning too, but I don't waste a lot of time worrying about it.
> and helping companies compete on ads rather than the quality of their products.
I'm sorry, you do not get to blame me for the continued existence of capitalism. That's just ridiculous.
> Maybe you don't care about your own attention or data security, but your actions don't just affect you.
Once again, you are trying to turn your personal software preference into a moral issue. My actions re:AdBlock affect you or anyone else exactly as much as my choice of desktop wallpaper.
> I'm sorry, you do not get to blame me for the continued existence of capitalism. That's just ridiculous.
If you choose to participate in harmful systems, you are in fact partially to blame for the harm done by those systems, and simply staying that I don't get to blame you for our doesn't change that.
Incidentally, criticizing ads isn't a criticism of capitalism: capitalism could exist just fine without ads, and in fact I think removing ads would make capitalism drastically more likely to yield the positive results capitalism purportedly yields.
> Incidentally, criticizing ads isn't a criticism of capitalism: capitalism could exist just fine without ads, and in fact I think removing ads would make capitalism drastically more likely to yield the positive results capitalism purportedly yields.
Indeed. Ask yourself the following question: say a user is not interested in advertisements. Is it therefore not a waste of the advertiser's time and/or money to force the ads upon this user?
I don't know what Firefox you're using but I always find it very slow and sluggish compared to Chrome.
Especially Google maps and YouTube. I always have to switch over to Chrome to use these sites because they always bring FF to its knees. I wonder if this is deliberate on the part of Google.
On a 4 year old MacBook Air running Firefox, google maps takes a second or so to open fully, after browsing around in two google maps windows for a while my memory usage is stable at 1.25GB.
Firefox is pretty sluggish for me on my MBP. It sits around 20% CPU usage idling on certain web sites. Playing back videos makes the fans spin up. It's just terribly slow.
> Stock Firefox 50 (32bit), untweaked with no relevant add-ons (well, except AdBlock Plus),
Same setup, but my Firefox leaks memory like a sieve. It will crash 2x a day easily.
That said, I also have LastPass installed, I am using uBlock instead of ABP (though uBlock uses less memory anyway), and I also have RES installed.
I have seen websites leak incredible amounts of memory. To some extent I don't even know how much it matters what browser is used, if the JS is bad enough.
I've been told that the main version of LastPass currently available from addons.mozilla.org has known problems that cause the browser to lock up and hang indefinitely.
Instead, if you click through to list all releases and select the latest 4.x version, those problems should all be fixed:
Yes, IIRC. They're still imperfect and can lag the browser quite a bit IME, but what can you do... Switching to a different password manager is not easy, and the ones I've looked at all have this/other problems.
I think those of us using LastPass stick with it because no one better supports Linux. It looks like SafeInCloud is yet another option with no Linux support.
My worst problems were with Toptal's website. I even tweeted them about it, but it still leaked memory like crazy. Maybe they fixed it already, but I wouldn't know - they didn't have articles that interest me in a while.
Anyway. I have Firefox with uBlock, on Archlinux. With JS disabled. 400MB, about a hundred tabs. I do recommend using it that way. I also have Chromium, for things that require JS - youtube, facebook and the like.
Easy: add it to something that's alive while the site is alive. Here's an example that leaks some memory every 100ms while you have the site open:
window.leakyArr = [];
function leakStuff() {
leakyArr.push("This is leaked" + Math.random());
}
setInterval(leakStuff, 100);
Of course if you unload the page this will all be collected. But if you have a page you leave open for a long time and it does stuff like this, it's possible for the page to use hundreds of megabytes of RAM. In fact, twitter does just that if you leave it open for a day or three, for reasons more or less like the above: they're showing or caching all the stuff that came in since you opened the page. That's more and more stuff as time goes on.
Nearly 400 tabs open across several browser windows. Firefox with Tabmix plus and noscript addons. Performance and memory use is very comfortable with very few browser crashes.
I use Chrome for websites that use huge amounts of JavaScript links, which are pain to use with noscript. Chrome does not like a lot of tabs open and chews up memory and performance if forced to run large numbers of tabs.
Firefox is going for at most N+1 cores worth of processes, as I understand it (one per core for websites and one extra for compositing and the UI) and is doing to use cooperative threading (Quantum DOM) to improve responsiveness within those processes without the overhead of running a process per website.
I opened up 12 tabs on thingiverse.com on FF, clicking on random links on the page, scrolled to the bottom of several of the expanding lists, and desktop Slack (implemented using Electron) is still consuming more CPU than FF on my laptop.
(Lots of extensions, including Tree Style Tabs, Session Manager, Tab Mix Plus, uBlock Origin, RefControl, Cookie Controller, etc.)
Oh you are like my mother. I do appreciate Firefox respect for standards, but their UI hasn't innovated since 90s. Two months ago it took me 20 minutes on my moms Windows laptop to find current version of Firefox! It lacks unified search bar, tab expose, even some basic hotkeys are backwards.
I can't believe it uses so little resources though. It's not uncommon to see a single tab use 400 MB of memory on Chrome/Safari.
I have some similar usage patterns... I really hope this is true because I think you just inspired me to switch from Chrome to Firefox! Chrome can't handle 100 (w/ a bunch of apps like Gmail) on a fully loaded Macbook very well.
The only other thing I'd use is a few Chrome apps like Keep and Signal.
This Firefox instance I reply from has a bit under 1.3Gb allocated, with 7 open tabs. Three of the tabs are primitive blog articles, a couple weren't even loaded until I clicked on them now. Adblock Plus, PassFF and NextPlease are the only extensions running; I remember though the extensions didn't make a dent in memory footprint.
about:tabs (see https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-stats/ ) is showing me "151 tabs" and "57 tabs have been loaded" for my current session. The other 90-some I haven't looked at this session, so they're left unloaded. I can post a screenshot, but I could fake that just as easily as I could fake my claims above, so it's not any more "proof".
I'm certainly doing other things right now (e.g. compiling).
It _really_ depends on what you have in your 100 tabs. If you have 100 copies of gmail, you're more likely to have a bad time than if you have 100 sane pages. ;)
After being burned by incompatible bookmark formats years ago (I used to keep everything in bookmarks that were tagged within firefox) I ended up with a habit that whenever I have something that I want to read (or refer to) later I leave it open in a tab.
Only browser that could handle this habit was indeed Firefox, running on Windows 7. How it usually went down was that whenever I hit 1000 tabs I reserved some time to read what was worth reading and close tabs that weren't interesting anymore, until I was down to about 200-500. I didn't use addons much, I remember only having vertical tab list, one of the (ad)blockers and an addon that displayed current tab count below the tab list.
That setup had 8GB of RAM, and I didn't have problems playing games without closing the browser. IIRC it usually reserved around 2-4GB. When I installed Windows 10 on the same machine the browser had 1370 tabs open. I know I still have the sessionstore.js backup somewhere, but I did start from 0 again with the new install.
I'm quite sure that some Mozilla people have noticed my crash reports every now and then :) (though mostly the browser was running fine without problems)
I've since started to use things like Google Keep and Stash to keep the tab count down a bit. Browser that I'm currently on has 229 tabs open, mostly temporary, work related things.
> Stock firefox can't go further than 100 tabs, and you can't do literally anything else on your computer at that time.
Perhaps it's because of what else is running on your system and your system's hardware and OS. I regularly use Firefox with a few hundred tabs open across a couple of windows. On Windows, I find that if I have IE or Edge or Chrome running, each with a few tabs, most of my RAM just goes to them. I also hibernate my system and restart it only once every few weeks.
I use several extensions with Firefox too:
- uBlock Origin (block ads)
- Privacy Badger (tracking blocker)
- Perspectives (distributed certificate checks and better error handling)
- HTTPS Everywhere (default to https on sites and avoid plain http)
- Self-Destructing Cookies (self-destruct cookies for a tab after closing it)
- Tab Mix Plus (better tab management)
- Session Manager (better session management between restarts)
- Tree Style Tab (hierarchical tab list management)
- TooManyTabs (almost self-explanatory)
- Lazarus (save form data to restore or reuse)
- Link Alert (so I know if a link is a file or an internal site link or external site link or a popup and can then decide if I want to click it)
- FoxyProxy (switch proxies easily)
- Foxclocks (handy clocks in different times zones)
- DownThemAll (easier downloads of multiple items, which I need occasionally)
- and many more
Although I experience slow starts and long shutdowns, in general, and in comparison, the browser is not RAM hungry compared to opening just a couple of tabs on Internet Explorer/Edge or about ten tabs or so in Chrome (with fewer extensions than above in Chrome). On OS X/macOS though, Firefox seems more RAM hungry, is a bit more sluggish and consumes more energy than Safari.
Shutting down the browser and opening it again will also help since Firefox by default does not load tabs until they get the focus (this "load tabs on demand" behavior has been around for quite sometime). It will load some stuff from the cache though. One more thing you can try is create a new profile (take care to get bookmarks from the old one) and see if that avoids any problems with extensions or other cruft in the older profile.
Ha ha, what proof would satisfy you, where my word does not, O doubting Thomas? If I was going to lie to you on HN, I'd also be able to fake a screenshot. Maybe you'd like administrator access to my machine, so you can satisfy your smug certainty of what is not possible?
I haven't had my FF (stock plus a few plugins) under 300 tabs in months. It doesn't stop me from playing AAA titles, max settings at high resolution, at 30-60 fps. Sometimes while running a VM (because Windows is a gaming OS, not a work OS). I only mention that to disabuse you of the claim that...
> you can't do literally anything else on your computer at that time
Firefox Developer on KDE Neon (stock KDE 5 on Ubuntu LTS).
Tab Tree (instead of TreeStyleTabs) and Suspend Tab (instead of UnloadTab.)
Edit: and yes, Linux often feels like magic land. I happen to like Windows 10 better than most earlier Windowses but a good Linux is better for me as a developer on every point except support for MS Office and (niche) tools.
Yes, the browsers (Chrome, Firefox) work noticeably worse than on Windows for me. Also they tend to freeze the computer completely at some point (after taking all the available RAM for themselves).
Browser performance seems to be pretty much as random as printers these days.
Mac El Capitan, FirefoxDeveloperEdition (which iirc is basically equivalent to Firefox Beta), not many addons (Tab Groups, uBlock Origin, No More 404s).
Even more impressive, the Nightly versions of both Chrome and Firefox are (almost always) stable enough for daily use. I use them as my everyday browsers at work, and they probably crash / have bugs about 1 day out of every 2 months.
Agreed. I started using Nightly — instead of my usually Beta¹ — for the up-to-date GTK+ 3.2x compatibility, but I like some of the pre-release features, and it almost never crashes on me
1: On Ubuntu you can use their Firefox Beta PPA² as long as you don't mind that it replaces release-version Firefox.
I started using Nightly for kicks and giggle around 6 months ago and my about:crashes shows me only 6 crashes (none of which were able to kill anything more than a tab (and in all the cases, the offending website was YouTube)).
Nightly is amazingly good even if it is built from the HEAD of the trunk (branch in git terms).
If you have Flash installed and don't have an adblocker, for most textual content (not Imgur, YouTube), your browser is working 10x harder than it needs to.
It's depressing that an image viewing site and a video playing site are in the same list of resource uses. YouTube plays 1080p videos. Imgur shows photos. It's a testament to the brazen disrespect of client resources that went into building the latter.
If you're viewing imgur without ad blocker your computer isn't working 10x harder than it should, but 100x.
I remember when imgur was started because there were no good image sharing sites. They were all bulky, slow and terrible. imgur came along and made sharing images easy. Now they are one of the ones they set out to fix.
It sucks, but I don't know if they had much choice. Imgur is the classic example of the "treadmill" inherent to business models like image hosting:
1. All the existing image hosting sites suck
2. Someone gets sick enough of it that they launch a new one, with all the features people want: free, direct linking, no/unobtrusive ads, etc.
3. Because this new site is so much better, everyone flicks to it. Bandwidth costs skyrocket.
4. The operators need to cover their costs, so they start adding more ads and blocking direct links. The site starts to suck. Go to step 1.
Sometimes investor dollars get involved, but it doesn't change the basic formula. This is why we've seen Photobucket -> minus -> giphy-> imgur -> gfycat, and it will continue in his vein forever. I don't think there's any way to run a site like this profitably without pissing people off sufficiently that they go elsewhere.
There is an additional components for imgur : it became more than an image sharing site, it's now a weird looking social network with a very niche community with its own rules and culture.
Imgur was originally developed 'as a gift' for reddit. As any HN commenters would tell you, your business model should never rely on external companies.
Maybe we need a more distributed model for image hosting for it to be sustainable?
I'm thinking about something like a P2P solution, IPFS-style. You could pay for upload space in two ways - either directly, the bog standard way, or with your own drive space. So for instance, you get 1GB free space for image uploads if you agree to set aside 1GB on your drive as a cache. Couple that with your own "seeding" CDNs storing all the images, and maybe this would be enough to distribute bandwidth costs across all the people who want their images hosted?
Not sure if the browsers are capable enough to pull something like this off without relying on some sort of plugin or an application.
Before imgur, there was photobucket, imageshack, whatever - they were beyond dumpy jankey messes that you truly didn't know what you were going to get when you clicked on them. There was a good chance a new window was going to open behind your current target, or that the images would be intentionally low res until you clicked into them (for more CPM's for the host).
Imgur came along and stole their bread and butter, but then they took on a bunch of VC money and had to figure out how they were going to profit. I'm not sure if they've figured it out, but their site has definitely suffered - although not nearly to the degree as the predecessors that they replaced.
> It's a testament to the brazen disrespect of client resources that went into building the latter.
I particularly like how imgurl flat-out refuses to work if you disable JavaScript. It's an image-viewing site. Browsers have been able to download images since the beginning, and have been able to render them inline since almost the beginning. There's no need for JavaScript at all, and yet imgurl deliberately choose not to work. 'Brazen disrespect' doesn't begin to describe it.
I don't mind that they try to use JavaScript to minimise the data they serve. They could always show one or a few images without JavaScript, and provide a link to more (and hide it when JavaScript is enabled).
Note that this has nothing to do with ad blocking — they could display all the ads they want to a non-script-executer.
'Brazen disrespect' really doesn't begin to describe it. 'Rank unprofessionalism' starts to.
YouTube's videos decompress to much larger quantities of data than Imgur images, but that's not what really affects browser responsiveness, especially when the video decoding is handled by dedicated hardware.
Whether you're displaying a static image or an animated GIF or a H.246 stream, drawing the next frame doesn't require interpreting or JIT compiling any JavaScript, it doesn't require thrashing the garbage collector, and it doesn't require re-computing the page layout.
To be entirely fair: there's a lot of video content on there now too, with the gifv and related shenanigans. Personally I find it incredibly convenient that uploading gifs or mp4's there automatically converts them to gifv, gif and mp4. That's really handy, especially for a free service with no strings attached (that I know of) to offer.
The developer edition was mentioned, and that runs Electrolysis already. Even the normal release does if you don't have incompatible plugins.
(FWIW, before electrolysis Firefox was unusuable with many tabs for me, now it is perfectly fine, so either I made a random setup change at the same time, some other optimization landed or it actually helps)
Yeah, to me it seems like a mistake given that such a high performance penalty will likely be incurred, and given the existence of Rust which could address a number of the security problems for which the multi-process model was devised in the first place.
Note that e10s currently only splits the browser into a content process and a browser process. I don't think they will ever move to 1:1 tabs per process.
Ctrl+tab'd thru all 56 tabs in this group, waited for them to finish loading, opened activity monitor: CPU at 20%, RAM at 811MB. So yea, a fair amount weren't loaded, but loading them didn't make too big of a difference.
CPU at 20%, "loading didn't make too much of a difference"??? 20% is obscene for a process without interaction. Imagine a paused video player taking 20%, or a minimised word editor. Even at 58 videos or documents.
You forget that webpages are allowed to do what ever the hell they want, and so each is probably running a script or two in the background. We put up with a lot in webapps that would never stand in a desktop app.
I don't forget, I just don't forgive. It's unacceptable either way. Someone has to take responsibility---might as well start with the browser. Then we can push it down from there; maybe if browsers were held accountable for pages' resource usage they'd implement resource controls. Like they currently do with limiting setTimeout on inactive pages, but more comprehensively. And maybe they'd implement better inspection tools for resource usage (chrome was ahead of the game; I'm looking at you, Firefox )
This is a huge problem. Javascript has become a blight on the web, and browsers really need to make it easier to manage stopping scripts on background tabs and such.
Well hell, maybe it's time for me to look at FF again. I switched away because it was a memory hog... And now chrome's a memory hog. I read that they made improvements, but 800MB for 240+ tabs is pretty good.
About that, I've noticed some weird stuff as well while debugging why our web app was crashing the tab on chrome after extended use without a page reload.
After a hour normal workload, chrome on mac used almost a GB ram, while on windows was at 120mb. Same page, similar workflow etc.
I still have no idea what's going on but there's definitely something about how memory is handled across platforms.
Which platform are you on? Which Firefox version? Stock or tweaked? Any special add-ons? I use Firefox on OS X and it crawls after 10-15 tabs. Consumes many gigs of memory. Chrome isn't any better. It just splits the memory consumption among multiple processes.
I don't remember browsers being this slow on Linux. Time to go back to the magic land.