My single largest issue with Firefox stability is constantly running into the 32bit memory barrier. Either split tabs out into multiple processes, or enable 64bit support already.
My browser crashes on average twice a day due to running out of memory and FF just giving up. It doesn't even crash gracefully, it just up and quits.
(I frequently have ~100 tabs open, and I am quite thankful that Firefox lets me search across my tabs! Very useful feature)
I work at Mozilla and many developers here are 100+ tab users, too. So the use case you describe is not a low priority. <:)
Do you have any Firefox add-ons installed? If you have the patience to identify a misbehaving add-on (by bisecting the add-ons you are running), Mozilla might be able to address the problem in the browser or reach out to the add-on developer.
My issue is, FF climbs up to 2.5GB of memory usage, then it dies. 100% repro.
My only add-ons are AB+, Reddit Enhancement Suite, and No Redirect. I am 99% sure this was happening before Noredirect, but I'll try disabling that as well. (Super useful though, wow!)
(GreaseMonkey is also installed, but I don't have any scripts loaded in it, disabling it anyway)
Of course if you run into the 32bit memory limit, I don't know if there is much FF can do about it! Right now I am at ~1,5800MB.
Actually this is sort of amusing, the memory usage counts up to 1590, then drops down to 1570, then counts up to 1591, drops to 1571, counts to 1592, drops to 1572, I am watching some stupid web app leak memory in real time.
(Maxed out at 1588 when I started typing, now maxing out at 1606, heh)
All of this is as reported in Windows Task Manager so numbers are wildly inaccurate I assume, still funny. (About:memory is showing the same thing happening!)
Ah the wonders of crappy JS programmers.
Edit: Haven't changed any websites or loaded any new tabs, now it is cycling up to 1630MB. :P
The performance of Firefox on Reddit is absolutely terrible. It regularly freezes my machine, at which point I do a global FF exit and restart / restore session so that it puts some tabs on "lazy load" state.
I wonder if the Reddit Enhancement Suite add-on is the culprit. The "Never Ending Reddit" infinite scrolling feature sounds like it could consume a lot of memory without releasing it. Unfortunately, if the Reddit add-on outlives any reddit.com tabs, it might inadvertently keep those JS objects alive in the background.
> Unfortunately, if the Reddit add-on outlives any reddit.com tabs, it might inadvertently keep those JS objects alive in the background.
With a 64bit memory address space, who cares?
OK so my page file does.
I think I've only given it 100GB or so to play around with, so, sure, if the 32GB of system ram I have available fills up, and all 100GB of my page file get used up, then I'll have to restart FF.
At ~5GB a day of usage, and lets round down for the sake of losses, that is about 20 days of up time before Firefox is denied malloc's by my OS.
Still not great, but a lot better than crashing twice a day!
The 64bit version works perfectly on Linux (and I can only assume OSX). There were some bad problems on windows which caused them to ditch the 64bit development, although the fact that plugins are 32bit doesn't help them either.
I really can't understand how many people consistently talk about having hundreds of tabs open. What are you so afraid of closing a website for? If it's that important, you will remember to go back to it later. Usually, it's not.
Once I get to 10 or 15 tabs I usually end up closing all but one or two just to stay focused.
> I really can't understand how many people consistently talk about having hundreds of tabs open. What are you so afraid of closing a website for? If it's that important, you will remember to go back to it later. Usually, it's not.
Well the hacker news homepage for instance.
I typically go down and middle click on any story I find interesting, and the comments section to go with it.
This can easily end up with 8-14 tabs open.
Now repeat the same thing for my Reddit frontpage (or just /r/programming!) and I can easily hit another 30 tabs within a couple of minutes.
Every URL someone posts in the comments that seems interesting also gets opened in a new tab. An active discussion easily results in another 5-10 tabs (and remember, that is per discussion thread!).
If one of those tabs goes to Wikipedia, then I'll middle click any links in the Wikipedia article that sound relevant. This can add another 10 tabs easily.
Within 10 minutes of turning on my computer I am now easily up to 50+ tabs.
I understand how easy that is to do. But when do you have the time to read them? Part of the fun of the web, is getting a little lost in it. But I totally loose focus. Have you ever tried limiting yourself to one window and the judicious use of the back button?
> I understand how easy that is to do. But when do you have the time to read them?
I am a very fast reader. :)
> Have you ever tried limiting yourself to one window and the judicious use of the back button?
Well yes, but then Tabs were invented!
My browsing is like a tree, pages branch off every which way. I used to have to keep track of that entire tree structure in my head, now the browser does it for me!
> My browsing is like a tree, pages branch off every which way. I used to have to keep track of that entire tree structure in my head, now the browser does it for me!
And how does it do that? Have you got some pictorial representation of the paths? Do you use a plugin? When you have opened a link in a new tab, how do you then find out where that tab originated from, or rather where you spawned it from? How do you organize them? A tab is just a cheap window isn't it?
> And how does it do that? Have you got some pictorial representation of the paths?
IE actually attempts to kinda sorta organize tabs properly. FF is odd because if you left click a tab and have Open In New Tab set, the tab is opened at the end of your tab bar. If you middle click, it is opened adjacent to your current tab.
I forget which browser attempted auto tab groups by color. Never worked out that well for me.
When I say the browser keeps the tree structure for me, I meant that I no longer have to remember how many pages back I need to go to click the next relevant link. If I am 10 pages deep into Wikipedia, remembering which originating article has another link on it I want to explore is difficult. If I just open each link I want to read in a new tab (instead of immediately following it) I can finish the current page I am on.
Really I was just suggesting trying the one tab approach as an experiment. You can't read in parallel, but I do understand the idea of backgrounding links to visit later - so you don't necessarily break the flow of the page you are currently on.
Back in the day of dial up, I'd use Opera and disable images - to make page loads quicker. I would connect the modem, go online, open as many links as possible in different tabs, and then disconnect. And read at my leisure.
It would force me to think upfront at what I wanted to look at, and in the main it was a pretty good system.
Pages back then would take a long time to load, especially with images - so background loading your next link, was a habit that you just got into.
I forget which browser has which behaviour with new tabs. Some place the tab on the end. Which makes sense in terms of using a stack. Your last link being opened being on the end. Firefox as it does tab scrolling, makes it hard to see what you have open. So I think now the default is to open the new tab next to the current tab. Which highlights another inconsistency in between application tab behaviour.
I used to have loads of tabs open of stuff, that I'd get around to reading at some point - but I'd basically never read, or it would become overwhelming - and I'd just periodically shut all the tabs and start again. Later I thought I'd bookmark anything that grabbed my attention, and go back to it later. Recent bookmarks can help there.
I don't see much difference between a bookmark and a tab, a tab though just feels a little more accessible but it's more expensive. Better bookmarking tools could make tabs easily redundant.
The 'group your tabs' feature of Firefox, just doesn't work for me, and other tab plugins haven't worked for me either. Opera has tab stacks, but I can't say I'm that fond of them either. I'd rather something a little more automated.
I organize projects on multiple virtual desktops -- I usually have 3-5 personal software/electronic projects going at a time, and I switch between them throughout the week depending on what I feel like focusing on. Add to that 1-2 work work projects, and I'll have between 4-7 activate project desktops at any time.
I do most of my project research and documentation lookup in the browser, which means I might have anywhere from 10-30 tabs of pertinent information corresponding to each project on each virtual desktop, across multiple browser windows.
This is just convenient for me; I never have to swap in application/desktop state, because all my information, files, IDEs, etc are right there, exactly the way that I left them.
That comes out to 210 tabs at the absolute maximum; right now I seem to have around 100 Chrome tab process running. Fortunately, RAM is cheap these days.
Comments
My single largest issue with Firefox stability is constantly running into the 32bit memory barrier. Either split tabs out into multiple processes, or enable 64bit support already.
My browser crashes on average twice a day due to running out of memory and FF just giving up. It doesn't even crash gracefully, it just up and quits.
(I frequently have ~100 tabs open, and I am quite thankful that Firefox lets me search across my tabs! Very useful feature)
I work at Mozilla and many developers here are 100+ tab users, too. So the use case you describe is not a low priority. <:)
Do you have any Firefox add-ons installed? If you have the patience to identify a misbehaving add-on (by bisecting the add-ons you are running), Mozilla might be able to address the problem in the browser or reach out to the add-on developer.
My issue is, FF climbs up to 2.5GB of memory usage, then it dies. 100% repro.
My only add-ons are AB+, Reddit Enhancement Suite, and No Redirect. I am 99% sure this was happening before Noredirect, but I'll try disabling that as well. (Super useful though, wow!)
(GreaseMonkey is also installed, but I don't have any scripts loaded in it, disabling it anyway)
Of course if you run into the 32bit memory limit, I don't know if there is much FF can do about it! Right now I am at ~1,5800MB.
Actually this is sort of amusing, the memory usage counts up to 1590, then drops down to 1570, then counts up to 1591, drops to 1571, counts to 1592, drops to 1572, I am watching some stupid web app leak memory in real time.
(Maxed out at 1588 when I started typing, now maxing out at 1606, heh)
All of this is as reported in Windows Task Manager so numbers are wildly inaccurate I assume, still funny. (About:memory is showing the same thing happening!)
Ah the wonders of crappy JS programmers.
Edit: Haven't changed any websites or loaded any new tabs, now it is cycling up to 1630MB. :P
The performance of Firefox on Reddit is absolutely terrible. It regularly freezes my machine, at which point I do a global FF exit and restart / restore session so that it puts some tabs on "lazy load" state.
I wonder if the Reddit Enhancement Suite add-on is the culprit. The "Never Ending Reddit" infinite scrolling feature sounds like it could consume a lot of memory without releasing it. Unfortunately, if the Reddit add-on outlives any reddit.com tabs, it might inadvertently keep those JS objects alive in the background.
> Unfortunately, if the Reddit add-on outlives any reddit.com tabs, it might inadvertently keep those JS objects alive in the background.
With a 64bit memory address space, who cares?
OK so my page file does.
I think I've only given it 100GB or so to play around with, so, sure, if the 32GB of system ram I have available fills up, and all 100GB of my page file get used up, then I'll have to restart FF.
At ~5GB a day of usage, and lets round down for the sake of losses, that is about 20 days of up time before Firefox is denied malloc's by my OS.
Still not great, but a lot better than crashing twice a day!
I have 200+ (sometimes 300+) tabs open, and I never ran in the 32 bits memory limit.
It MUST be an add-on !
The contents of those tabs might make a difference!
All of my add-ons except for Ad Block Plus are disabled right now, 2.1GB of memory is being used.
I'm sure I could open up 200 tabs of Hacker News without problem. ;)
The 64bit version works perfectly on Linux (and I can only assume OSX). There were some bad problems on windows which caused them to ditch the 64bit development, although the fact that plugins are 32bit doesn't help them either.
I really can't understand how many people consistently talk about having hundreds of tabs open. What are you so afraid of closing a website for? If it's that important, you will remember to go back to it later. Usually, it's not.
Once I get to 10 or 15 tabs I usually end up closing all but one or two just to stay focused.
> I really can't understand how many people consistently talk about having hundreds of tabs open. What are you so afraid of closing a website for? If it's that important, you will remember to go back to it later. Usually, it's not.
Well the hacker news homepage for instance.
I typically go down and middle click on any story I find interesting, and the comments section to go with it.
This can easily end up with 8-14 tabs open.
Now repeat the same thing for my Reddit frontpage (or just /r/programming!) and I can easily hit another 30 tabs within a couple of minutes.
Every URL someone posts in the comments that seems interesting also gets opened in a new tab. An active discussion easily results in another 5-10 tabs (and remember, that is per discussion thread!).
If one of those tabs goes to Wikipedia, then I'll middle click any links in the Wikipedia article that sound relevant. This can add another 10 tabs easily.
Within 10 minutes of turning on my computer I am now easily up to 50+ tabs.
I understand how easy that is to do. But when do you have the time to read them? Part of the fun of the web, is getting a little lost in it. But I totally loose focus. Have you ever tried limiting yourself to one window and the judicious use of the back button?
> I understand how easy that is to do. But when do you have the time to read them?
I am a very fast reader. :)
> Have you ever tried limiting yourself to one window and the judicious use of the back button?
Well yes, but then Tabs were invented!
My browsing is like a tree, pages branch off every which way. I used to have to keep track of that entire tree structure in my head, now the browser does it for me!
> My browsing is like a tree, pages branch off every which way. I used to have to keep track of that entire tree structure in my head, now the browser does it for me!
And how does it do that? Have you got some pictorial representation of the paths? Do you use a plugin? When you have opened a link in a new tab, how do you then find out where that tab originated from, or rather where you spawned it from? How do you organize them? A tab is just a cheap window isn't it?
> And how does it do that? Have you got some pictorial representation of the paths?
IE actually attempts to kinda sorta organize tabs properly. FF is odd because if you left click a tab and have Open In New Tab set, the tab is opened at the end of your tab bar. If you middle click, it is opened adjacent to your current tab.
I forget which browser attempted auto tab groups by color. Never worked out that well for me.
When I say the browser keeps the tree structure for me, I meant that I no longer have to remember how many pages back I need to go to click the next relevant link. If I am 10 pages deep into Wikipedia, remembering which originating article has another link on it I want to explore is difficult. If I just open each link I want to read in a new tab (instead of immediately following it) I can finish the current page I am on.
Really I was just suggesting trying the one tab approach as an experiment. You can't read in parallel, but I do understand the idea of backgrounding links to visit later - so you don't necessarily break the flow of the page you are currently on.
Back in the day of dial up, I'd use Opera and disable images - to make page loads quicker. I would connect the modem, go online, open as many links as possible in different tabs, and then disconnect. And read at my leisure.
It would force me to think upfront at what I wanted to look at, and in the main it was a pretty good system.
Pages back then would take a long time to load, especially with images - so background loading your next link, was a habit that you just got into.
I forget which browser has which behaviour with new tabs. Some place the tab on the end. Which makes sense in terms of using a stack. Your last link being opened being on the end. Firefox as it does tab scrolling, makes it hard to see what you have open. So I think now the default is to open the new tab next to the current tab. Which highlights another inconsistency in between application tab behaviour.
I used to have loads of tabs open of stuff, that I'd get around to reading at some point - but I'd basically never read, or it would become overwhelming - and I'd just periodically shut all the tabs and start again. Later I thought I'd bookmark anything that grabbed my attention, and go back to it later. Recent bookmarks can help there.
I don't see much difference between a bookmark and a tab, a tab though just feels a little more accessible but it's more expensive. Better bookmarking tools could make tabs easily redundant.
The 'group your tabs' feature of Firefox, just doesn't work for me, and other tab plugins haven't worked for me either. Opera has tab stacks, but I can't say I'm that fond of them either. I'd rather something a little more automated.
Anyway - way off the original topic...
I organize projects on multiple virtual desktops -- I usually have 3-5 personal software/electronic projects going at a time, and I switch between them throughout the week depending on what I feel like focusing on. Add to that 1-2 work work projects, and I'll have between 4-7 activate project desktops at any time.
I do most of my project research and documentation lookup in the browser, which means I might have anywhere from 10-30 tabs of pertinent information corresponding to each project on each virtual desktop, across multiple browser windows.
This is just convenient for me; I never have to swap in application/desktop state, because all my information, files, IDEs, etc are right there, exactly the way that I left them.
That comes out to 210 tabs at the absolute maximum; right now I seem to have around 100 Chrome tab process running. Fortunately, RAM is cheap these days.