this post was submitted on 08 Nov 2023
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I tried, nearly every system I tested it on (Physical and virtual, 16 GB RAM to 64, Windows, MacOS and Linux (Ubuntu and Arch)) it bogs down and crashes after 60-100 tabs. FF has performance issues and can't keep up with me, chrome might eat a lot of ram to do it, but at least it'll keep up at 300, 400, 600+ tabs.
Unfortunately, I can't switch until these performance problems have been fixed :(
Edit: lol at the downvotes for bringing up a legit potential issue
Edit2: lmao, c/Firefox: come over to Firefox and our community we're welcoming. (As long as you only talk about how perfect and infallible FF is)
If you have that many tabs open you are doing something seriously wrong. Consider a better book marking system, download what ever PDFs you are looking at or context switching way way less. I cannot even imagine a scenario that would warrant this many tabs
No, not really. This is rather common. The line might be blurry with tabs unloading, but bookmarks and tabs are still different things. And don't just reject people's workflows - that's how you end up with chrome.
One common scenario is shopping for parts for complex systems, like cars for example. One might have a dozen tabs open for parts themselves, a tab or two each for specifications, a dozen tabs per part for listings in different shops, each with a few tabs looking for ways to deliver the thing. It blows up to 100+ really quickly. And you really need them all open because you need to jump back and forth comparing and cross-checking all of them. And then if you haven't managed to get everything done in one session, bookmarking them and re-opening again later takes considerable amount time, so you're better off just opening a new window and keeping it all in the background until you return. At least that's how I've seen people do it.
You should be putting parts and part stats into a spreadsheet in this instance. It will reduce jumping back and forth. Include the link as a hyper link in the ods or Excel file. Shouldn't need to referencing this many websites in any scenario
Is it really "something wrong" if it works perfectly fine in other browsers?
It just seems like shunning an audience that might have a legitimate concern that could be looked into.
Have you tried using Firefox's auto tab discard extension? It automatically puts tabs which have been inactive for a while to sleep. When you click on a sleeping tab, it wakes up.
I am using it. I had to turn it off for some sites because it would discard a site that didn't properly save info, so I'd lose data.
Also had to turn it off for youtube because I'd have a stream that hadn't started yet (they can be setup hours before the stream starts), and it wouldn't auto-start because it would get discarded before the stream started so i'd miss some of the stream.
So yes, it helps, but it has it's issues too.
How can you even see the tabs you have open if you have 600+ tabs open that's insanity. Browsers while leaving that an option where never designed for even viewing that many tabs
While i'm not the person who claimed to have 600+, i'd assume that what they do is a mix of:
-Multiple Windows, so the tabs are spread out. Essentially like having different workspaces in an OS
-using the icons to determine what they are.
And lets never talk about what a browser is designed to do. Because I bet if we went into detail we'd find there's not a person in this thread using browsers exactly as how anyone intended them to be used, either because technology at the time never made them think it was possible, or because you know, people are different.
Use-cases is like design 101, designing for things you didn't expect the user to do.
Ofc that is a valid design philosophy but there is a range. At some point it's like asking your tax software to be a video editor too. Should still probably not be context switching that much mentally. Anyone I've ever met who uses lots of tabs is better off with lots of book marks or taking better notes. It's just silly to have that many tabs open no matter how you spin it
Who are you to judge my workflow? It's what works for me and a browser should be able to support my workflow, not the other way around and it's obviously not an impossible workflow for a browser to support if Chrome can do it.
Your work flow is ineffective it sounds like, you should consider adjusting your work flow to increase your productivity and decrease your CPU usage. Your browser should be using 16gb + of ram due to having 600+ tabs open
How can it be ineffective when it literally works just by changing browsers?
I really don't believe there is any browser that can manage that many tabs without using large amounts of ram, unless it starts caching them on disk or compressing then in ram or a browser that keeps "virtual" tabs that are just really book marks that re-query the website
I was thinking I haven't had this issue but
I'm finished way before I have that many tabs open
60-100 tabs is a ridiculous amount of tabs. My husband makes fun of me for my "tab carcasses" pretty regularly, but I'm usually hitting the Onetab button around 40 open tabs. What this person is doing that they legitimately need hundreds of tabs open is beyond me.
i usually just hit onetab when i have just 10, but that depends on the size of my monitor.
having that many tabs makes finding ones i actually care about harder
I gotta know what it is that you are doing with those tabs, i can't comprehend attempting to use that many. Do you also have some sort of system to keep track of them?
I've got lots of open projects at any given time and jump between them a lot. My system is generally just a window is one project (sometimes multiple windows for one) + 1 or 2 "General" windows
Personally, I have a window with
-Pictures that lead to sites I want to keep up with
-2 manga sites
-A tracker for streams
-2 sites for looking up information for games i'm playing
And a second window with
-A series i'm keeping up with
-2 spreadsheet trackers for games
-a dozen or so youtube pages, most of which are music I want to alternate looping
I feel like it's just one of those things that once you get used to doing, you generally always have a lot of tabs open.
maybe im misunderstanding here but cant you just set bookmarks
Bookmarks lack anything visual to make me think "Oh you know what I want to look at that again"
and in the case of waiting for an upcoming stream if I forget the upcoming stream 8-12 hours later, then i'm usually pretty upset I missed it.
Sure you could just say "Well if you forgot you probably didn't care that much"...but my memory sucks and a lot of it is also meant to destress from a stressful day, which can contribute to forgetting things.
I have like 10,000 bookmarks and I only look at like 5 of them
Up until the web API stuff I was using opera, and it had like...a collage view where you could put a bunch of sites on, with pictures to represent them. That was nice to have. I couldn't find anything similar in the firefox extensions.
Have you heard of bookmarks?
Dude… you are the problem in this situation. Get “tab sessions manager” for firefox or one of the many alternatives.
Nobody but your “workflow” uses over 300 tabs ACTIVELY. And that coming from someone who routinely gets told that I have too many tabs open. Break your tabs into groups and save those instances.
Also take the criticism like a champ instead of whining about how you’re being ganged up on by a community when you misuse the software.
Ah yes, blame the user when they can literally point to a product that is not just adequately but completely supporting their use case and tell them they're the problem here.
That always works.
Lmao, sure even though a browser should be able to just work, let me go install more extensions and make changes to my usage patterns to fit a browser.
This is an optimization problem that needs to be fixed and I sought to bring attention to it, not to bandaid it with this and that extension and go through the pains to change a well established years old workflow that works well for me.
I'm a busy person (as evidenced by my unique tab count apparently), I don't have the time or energy to spend to change myself to fit FF, that's a whole new project to heap onto an already embarrassingly long backlog of other things I have to do.
Thanks but no thanks, I'll revisit FF in a year or 2 of updates and retest.
Runs 5 video games on a computer at the same time and complains about performance issues.
It does work, when you use it correctly.
Being busy isn’t an excuse for your lack of organization skills. Backlogs shouldn’t be open when you are actively working on something else bruh.
Please point me to the FF docs that recommend staying under a certain number of tabs, point me to anywhere in the docs that FF is only intended for less than a certain number of tabs.
At this point I don't even get to that 300 mark, it's getting unstable and crashing around 100.
I see it constantly "FF is rock solid!!" "FF can handle what you throw at it!" "FF can beat chrome hands down!!" But it didn't hold true in my testing.
What you're saying now is "FF is rock solid (Most of the time)" "FF can handle what you throw at it! (Unless you throw 200 tabs at it then you're using it wrong)" "FF can beat chrome hands down!! (Except in raw tab count)".
I tried it for months dealing with it's crashes, it wasn't even just a day thing and I gave up after its first crash or something.
This is an optimization problem, I can and have replicated it multiple times on all manner of hardware and OS configurations.
Ok right here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-uses-too-much-memory-or-cpu-resources
“Close tabs that use too many system resources Some websites use scripts that use a lot of memory and/or CPU to keep them up to date, such as online mail client pages. If these scripts are not optimized, they can lead to the use of too many system resources. You can see which tabs are using the most system resources by opening the Firefox Task Manager (about:processes page). If you do not need these tabs open all the time, you can close them to reduce system resources usage.”
FF is rock solid and they do tell you to limit your tabs.
You are complaining about what is at best an edge case scenario causing an issue while being fine with sucking up the multitude of problems that chrome has because you are too stubborn to organize your browser.
That's a "if you're having problems" not a "This is the intended limit"
Hell it doesn't even say how many tabs they intended to support. This could very well fall into an optimization issue. Which you know, could improve things for everyone including potential users who may want to jump to firefox.
Yes because computers and their capabilities vary immensely. How could they know what your pc is capable of versus someone else’s?
This exactly explains that there are limits to the amount of tabs a system can handle. 300+ is not a normal amount for any system and definitely falls outside of normal use case testing.
The optimization issue is you and op not using your brains.
limits that they're not exhibiting in other browser software.
I'm kindof shocked you still can't see the issue there. That they're not pulling this case out of thin air but rather it's how they used their browser previously.
I mean maybe we just want to say Chromium has better tab management under the hood. Or we can see if something can be improved. Especially because as hardware improves and more users are enabled to being able to open more tabs this should become more glaring, not less.
I routinely run 5+ instances of a video game simultaneously. Am I forbidden from complaining about performance issues now? It's a f'ken computer, not an xbox, it should run as much stuff as you need, maybe slowly, but it should run. But the guy said it crashes - then it's definitely a problem. Especially if it's on a 64 gig system and he said it works fine on chrome.
And there are legit workflows that involve 3-digit tab numbers. 60 tabs is really nothing
It’s a fucking computer, doesn’t mean it’s a common practice by developers to test out their games running many times simultaneously. That’s fucking ridiculous to expect. Some things are just common practice that it would be ridiculous to test for such edge cases.
If you overload your system with enough it will crash regardless. Running merely slow is definitely not a sign of optimization. Have you tried rendering out 3d models that are too big for your gpu/cpu? Definitely can crash not just the program but the whole system.
I routinely have 60+ tabs open. 300+ being actively worked on as op claims is nonsense.
In what world do you live where crashing the whole system is an expected and accepted behavior?
Yes. RIP my SSD that was swap'd to death.
Umm did you read what you just posted?
Says crashes aren’t expected then states that you’ve experienced one and lost a drive. 🤦♂️
Those things happen all the time. You might think it’s normal use but then bam you’ve overloaded the system. Who would expect a system to run 100% of the time under max load without the potential for crashes. Come on.
What? You must've responded to a wrong comment, because I certainly didn't say that.
How do you navigate this many tabs? With an extension?
Well, generally speaking, Firefox handles lots of tabs better than Chrome. It's hard to say what problem happens on your specific system, but you shouldn't assume that it's universal...
Not in my testing it doesn't, I don't have just one system to test with either.
Like I said, I've tested it across all manner of systems virtual and physical.
I've tested it from a system with an i5 7th gen w/16gb RAM on windows 10 all the way up to an i9 12th gen w/64 GB RAM on MacOS to Intel server e5 dual processors with 256 GB RAM on Win Server 2016 to ryzen 5 series 32 GB RAM on Ubuntu and a myriad of Win10/Ubuntu/Arch VMs in between.
The story is the same between them all, somewhere around 100 tabs it gets unstable and eventually crashes.
If you're using that many tabs you may be interested in vivaldi, it's made for power users like you
we have firefox on an old c2d era dual core, 8gb ram and now (had 7, and originally 4gb ram) win10. 170+ tabs currently, always restored on relaunches (which are infrequent). system never gets shut off--updates are 'managed', always left on, with firefox running, to sleep with that massive tab collection open. runs like a champ. only once in the last three years has that session been lost or any other issue been encountered (we've since added a session saver addon but haven't needed it).
Idk man, maybe you have the fluke, maybe it's a problem that arises on newer CPUs, maybe it's a conflict with another common piece of software I install. Either way, it's happened multiple times over multiple systems over multiple configurations and OSes. I really don't have time to fuck with my browser and diagnose it fully, I need it to just be ready to install a couple extensions and hit the ground running
At least you can get 60 tabs. Firefox brings my RAM to 98% just by starting it, and if I try to open more than 3 tabs it becomes the next victim of the OOM killer.
Get more RAM?
Windows 11 (unfortunately) with about 8GB of RAM (iirc). I can't check specs right now but will tonight.