Comment by redm
8 years ago
I agree, sadly its never that simple. I tried diligently (all in) to use Quantum when it came out, for over a month. It just wasn't stable/fast enough when running a larger number of tabs. I'm hopeful it will get there soon and I can ditch Chrome but its just not there for me, yet.
You might want to try it again. I have over 80 Firefox tabs open in multiple windows, multiple containers, and two Firefox profiles. It's still extremely fast.
Last time I tried Firefox, a few months ago, tab switching was painfully slow as compared to Chrome. I intend to give it another chance soon, though.
What about a hardware upgrade?
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Are you using any plugins to achieve this number of open tabs and and still have good performance?
It appears to work fine even without extensions (Ubuntu 16.04, Firefox 62), but I have some garbage-blocking extensions installed.
In my main Firefox profile, I use umatrix[1] to browse the WWW with all CSS and JS turned off by default, enabling them only when needed. Reader mode makes most articles readable with a single click.
Firefox's built-in privacy protection is also enabled.
If a website doesn't work with my settings, it takes about the same time to override the CSS/JS settings than the difference between an unblocked page load and a blocked page load. Pages load much faster in general, so it's a net gain in free time.
I also use Stylus[2] to turn off all CSS animation and add custom styling to websites.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/umatrix/
[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/styl-us/
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It might depend on your system resources, but I have +300 tabs open right now and I don't experience any problems. The only thing that's a bit slow is if I restart the browser, it takes a bit long to start up.
Firefox for Mac has animation-related speed issues that don't occur in Windows, that may explain the discrepancy between your experience and the GP's.
Why would you want so many tabs open in the first place? Is this really a common way to use a browser?
> Why would you want so many tabs open in the first place?
Some reasons:
- Ctrl-clicking to open tabs since I can then load them in the background (because I'm impatient, and because I don't want to get distracted by clicking into all the references in the main tab while reading.
- using tab tree extension I can then easily see what path lead to some interesting page I found
- by default, if you type ab address you already have open in another tab, Firefox will jump to that tab.
> Is this really a common way to use a browser?
Yep. Bot extremely common but I do it and a number of other HN-ers as well. Mozilla seems to be aware of it and seems to have it in their performance tests or something.
My workflow is the same. I'll usually have 100 tabs open on a particular device, going up to nearly 1000 tabs across my phone, laptop, and desktop in rare instances.
I'm currently using FF 61, I've been using FF for a decade, with no special configuration. I currently have over one thousand tabs open, no sweat. Of all the reasons to prefer Chrome to FF, I don't understand how performance on larger numbers of tabs could possibly be it.