> The second issue is the lack of tab sand-boxing. A fairly large part of my job is testing for edge cases in our products. Our products are JavaScript heavy. I often find issues which crash the browser... well.. they crash Firefox. In Chrome the tab shows an error in the console and I have the option to close the tab. In Firefox I never get an error in the console. The whole browser freezes and stops responding.
Why not simply run two FF instances in parallel (e.g., via the profile manager) - one for actual browsing, and another for testing, that can blow up as often as it "needs" to?
> consider that Firefox is the only one of the major browsers that does not handle each tab independently, leading to obvious performance and security problems.
Well, here's the reality: having each tab in individual process greatly reduces performance and increases memory consumption. When you open many tabs in Chrome or IE they become as slow as FF with perhaps 5-10 times more tabs.
While performance generally isn't a field where FF does a good job, I think reliability of FF is unmatched by other browsers despite the dirty tricks with tabs. Let's just wait 'till they stop losing the list of tabs that were open in the previous session from time to time, it's the thing that did happen to all of them, but never to FF with Session Manager addon.
> For most FF is very responsive and there are no problems what so ever.
Open dev tools, type `for (;;) {}`. Notice the whole browser becomes unresponsive. This has been improved upon (as in it doesn't block the whole Firefox UI, just merely every single content tab) thanks to Electrolysis partially reaching stable but "there are no problems whatsoever" simply isn't true performance wise (and this is the most obvious one, there are numerous other very well known performance issues with FF)
The problem is that when you get more and more tabs going, Firefox's single-threadedness becomes more and more painful. When one misbehaving tab locks up (or crashes) the whole browser, that's bad.
A lot of the things being said here are true. I gave FF a chance again (after nearly a decade) last month. I switched back to chrome for two reasons:
1. After a couple of days of use, page interaction began to 'stutter'. Every 2-3 seconds the page would lock up.
2. They still don't sand box tabs, so a crash brings down everything. I lost work because FF locked up on one tab while I was working in another. Everything came to a screeching halt.
That was enough for me to forget FF all over again. #1 consistently happened on two different machines, but I couldn't find a fix (just similar issues related to graphics HW acceleration from two years ago.) I have no idea how isolated these incidents are, but if I can't rely on FF to work > 99% of the time I can't use it.
> And occasionally FF hangs when I have 20 tabs opened.
?
That's really suprising to read when on my low-end laptop from 2012, Firefox runs with 20 open tabs without ever facing any issue (I have something like 30 tabs open right now).
My biggest problems with Firefox after using Chrome for so long is stability. I find that web pages can lock up the entire browser rather than just a tab, and this isn't just a rare occurrence, when I tried to give it a chance a week ago, it happened several times. I am amazed they still haven't picked up the separate process per tab feature yet.
I have had the opposite experience. While individual page loads were a bit quicker in Chrome after a number of tabs were open it bogged down so badly (coupled with the lack of customization) I ran back to Firefox every time. A few months later I would try again with similar results.
I agree that when a tab would crash FF would die in spectacular ways but this was perhaps a once a month experience? Tab restore brought everything back each time. As a result I usually only opened Chrome for site testing.
>Really? I haven't had any such problem with Firefox in years, and I tend to browser with a few hundred tabs open. What platform are you using?
Windows at work and Macos/Linux at home. The situation has gotten better since browser extensions that save and restore all tabs reliably don't work with FF anymore. Now the browser usually forgets about 50% of my open tabs when I restart it...
> This might partly be due to the "one tab, one process" architecture.
With site isolation/"Fission" it looks like this isn't going to get any better in Firefox, either, as they'll have to move to "one domain/origin, one process", which could be even worse in terms of memory overhead due to the number of separate processes required.
Although, does Firefox not use separate threads for each tab? If so, then it would seem like in normal operation, it should be possible to achieve parallelism. Of course, I do still see whole-browser lockups in Firefox, and what I really miss is the ability to actually diagnose misbehaving tabs.
Also, I think the Chrome debugger has surpassed Firefox's, especially with the experimental stack traces in asynchronous flows of control.
matthiasv, I don't know what your secret is, only 1 tab open in 1 window open at time, JS disabled, or what, but this is a very real issue. I have Firefox installed on all 4 of my machines, work desktop, home desktop, laptop, and a netbook. 2 of which are fresh installs. On all 4 when I visit multiple HTML5 heavy sites, FF's UI gets unresponsive. Chrome and newer versions of IE do not suffer from this, and I'm pretty sure it comes from FF running in a single process.
Chrome and IE have their issues too, like thrashing memory a lot sooner than FF, which is why FF is still the default browser on my laptop and netbook despite its unresponsive UI under heavy load.
The fact is, different people experience different things.
Many people report that Firefox holds up better with many tabs open than Chrome. Perhaps since Chrome has one process per tab, which ends up straining some OSes. And many people report the opposite. It probably depends a lot on the OS, the specific tabs, their number, what addons they have, etc.
There are definitely a variety of bugs that some Firefox users hit, and those users get a frustrating experience. I don't think anyone is denying that. But there are also plenty of users that are clearly very happy. And there are users of other browsers that also hit bugs - for example I recently noticed that Opera was churning my HD for no reason. Never seen that on any browser until then. I had to stop using Opera because of it.
I use FF on OpenBSD as my daily browser. I have at least three different profiles running simultaneously with multiple tabs open in each (though I don't go nuts with tabs like some do -- I never tend to have more than 10 or so open).
It does occasionally seem to get stuck in a state where it just starts chewing CPU cycles and RAM. I've seen this mostly with Google sites like gmail or docs, so I assume it's JS-related. But it's fairly rare, and seems to be improving with each release.
I'm curious what Firefox could have done in this case beyond just killing off the tab. The issue was a check in old kernels that was being triggered by some insane code.
This example had me remembering the discussion from earlier today about why modern code is so slow even though the machines are so fast. I doubt there were many Win32 programs that attempted to pass in 20,000 parameters to a function.
> In Firefox on Windows. I write a bad bit of JavaScript and the browser just freezes and there is nothing I can do apart from ctrl+alt+del. I really don't know why tab's aren't sand boxed to at least let you exit them.
In Chrome they are, that's why I switched. Try it and see?
It had tabbed browsing, but at the time Chrome came out there was no or limited tab process isolation for FF.
I used to work with a guy who always invoked Firefox in gdb so that when it crashed, he could fix the bug (null ptr deref etc.) and continue. As a “tab hoarder” he would lose a day or two of context and productivity otherwise.
One anecdote - 5 years ago FF was the clear winner for coping with tab abuse. Stable and coped with hundreds of tabs happily, Chrome started crashing pages beyond 50 or so.
Now it's the perfect reverse, FF hates a lot of tabs open and Chrome is stable with apparently limitless numbers.
My only serious problem with firefox is that a single tab can lock up the entire application. Otherwise, the performance _and_ memory usage is fantastic. But that one issue is enough to keep me away from it most of the time.
Why not simply run two FF instances in parallel (e.g., via the profile manager) - one for actual browsing, and another for testing, that can blow up as often as it "needs" to?
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