I agree. One partial workaround I use is to test sketchy pages in a second Firefox process. If things go bad, it takes out all of those tabs, but not my primary browser tabs.
Running tabs in a separate process has been a boon IMO. It’s better security and a crashed tab doesn't bring the browser down and an unresponsive tab can be killed independently.
yes, if firefox gets ornery (with entirely too many tabs open all the time), i just kill some/all of the "FirefoxCP Web Content" processes (on macos) and then reload only the tabs i'm interested in at the moment. not the ideal level of granularity, but works ok in a pinch to reduce memory/cpu usage.
Please do! I agree that logging would be interesting.
Do you know, does Firefox defer/discard tabs again if they do fully load but you don't use them for a long time? Or are the only deferred tabs, ones that you never looked at this session?
I regularly have several hundred tabs open in Firefox with no problems. Some people may think this is crazy or messy but I find it very useful for organizing the various projects I'm working on for different clients and my own personal projects. Tab groups and delayed loading make it all very smooth. Such usage is just not possible with Chrome. I tried to switch to Chrome but couldn't find the features I needed and did not wish to change my workflow.
Back when Chrome came out Firefox was buggy. Since then it has become much more stable. Chrome is the one that's buggy now. One process per tab means that a bug in one tab does not take down the whole browser but it is much better to just fix the bugs and not crash at all.
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.
I think I went one step further because all of my tabs by default is another temporary container. I have been using https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-con... extension which allows you to create completely clean tabs every-time you open a new tab.
I know this might sound crazy but I am so used it by now so it doesn't hurt much anymore. Also, I can login to any website with 1-3 clicks thanks for password managers so not a big deal.
I get this, but I prefer this tradeoff instead of the browser unloading something I wanted to keep loaded.
When I start Firefox, most tabs (4 or 5 nowadays) won't load, but be there as placeholders for things I need/want to solve through the week (e.g., Amazon search for a gift for my nephew, Youtube list of tutorials). They won't load until I'm ready to use those tabs.
On the other hand, I've had tabs loaded from the start of one session and used sparsely through the day. I would not want those tabs to be unloaded without my consent, even if they are memory hogs, as it would interrupt my workflow. Crashing is fine (and accepted as a last moment failsafe move) by me.
I've been asking browsers to provide per tab security isolation for a long time. Would make many of the attacks much less efficient. Each new tab should be clean as well as closed tabs should get destroyed.
Could you elaborate on the contents of those tabs? I often have more than 20 tabs open, but even in Chrome this can cause some issues. Nonetheless Firefox seemed worse at it, and perhaps this has to do with the nature of the tabs I have open?
This resonates with me. I also learnt the hard way to simply close all the tabs and then re-assess history if I really want to access the tab. On that note: sometimes I also just use OneTab [0] if my tabs are important but are hogging the system's performance.
I’m sure they have telemetry and know that almost nobody leaves hundreds of tabs open.
When you tell me you open thousands of tabs, I wonder if you’re just stress testing the browser. I expect software not to work well when I stress test it.
You can ask Firefox to restore the tabs from the last session. So restarting becomes cheap. (You can also do this to Chrome and Opera, and probably other browsers.)
The reason I have thousands of tabs open is that Firefox stopped losing tabs on crash/restart in recent years... a decade or more ago this would not be a "problem".
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