I hear your concerns, though. The platform and desktop teams are doing tons of great work on improving stability and performance--you might want to give Firefox another try sometime. If you do, maybe try out some Test Pilot experiments while you're at it, and let us know what you think.
Do you alternate between improving these things and worsening them? Could you possibly not worsen them, or at least warn us to not upgrade when that happens?
Regressions are really not OK. People are trying to use this browser. Well, mostly they were trying to use it. I stuck it out longer than most. Having 512 MB of RAM and dozens of tabs is my use case.
Oh god I thought I was alone on this. I've been talking to various Firefox users and nobody was able to relate with me. I usually keep Firefox open 24/7 with around 20-30 tabs open (~6 or so pinned). Every time I am typing (like in a hangout popup window or in a HN comment) Firefox is micro-stuttering and freezing and it eats away some of the words I am typing and it becomes very frustrating. I ended up typing comments in vim and then copypasting because it was faster. It feels like typing in an SSH connection with high-latency.
Also when scrolling long pages (like reddit threads) the "view" takes a while to update so I end up scrolling down to a totally grey page which then updates with content over and over again. And don't make me talk about twitter taking ages and setting my CPU to 100% (one core) with loud as hell fan every time I click on "show 50 new tweets"...
I have 16GB of RAM and a 2-years old top-of-the-line (back then) i7 CPU on a laptop, I shouldn't be having these issues...
Are you exaggerating ? If not, may I suggest an alternative way to browse the web ?
I use multiple virtual desktops. Each desktop logically caters to one task. Each browser window is logically grouped under one activity.
For example my desktop may look like this :
Virtual Desktop 1 ( Communications ):
* Outlook
* Lync
* Flowdock etc
Virtual Desktop 2 ( Development ):
* ConEmu/ Command prompt
* Intellij
* Browser Window with multiple tabs for referring stuff
Virtual Desktop 3 ( Procrastination ):
Browser Window 1:
* Various pages opened from HN
Browser Window 2:
* Various pages concerning World War 2
* Various pages investigating different investment strategies.
The advantage of this approach is that once you are done you can close browser windows and tabs. Done with researching World War 2 ? Close that window, all associated tabs close automatically. If you accidentally close a tab, you can always bring it back with Ctrl + Shift + T. If you want to refer to a previously opened window, you can always do a simple search in browser history.
Keeps your system responsive and makes it easy to find things.
The only issue I have with massive number of tabs, is the start-up time of the browser, which increase dramatically with the number of tabs (it's at least quadratic).
That's how it's supposed to work, but for me the tabs seem to consume memory even when they're not loaded (after a restart). I completely can't understand how this is a difficult thing to implement properly.
8 or 16 gigabytes of RAM (got an upgrade)
8 virtual desktops, about 5 occupied with browser windows
1 to 20 windows per desktop
1 to 20 tabs per window
That is likely 100 to 300 tabs total. No, I really don't want to close them. I want more open, but performance is a problem. I like to keep going back to tabs that have been open for months. It hurts to close tabs because then I lose track of what I am working on; the scroll bar position matters and the page might even be gone from the web. Sometimes I write a comment on a web site like this one, then let it sit for days if I am unsure I want to post it.
Even if I didn't lose my state, reloading a bookmark is slow.
With bookmarks, deletion is a pain.
How would I even know when to bookmark something? I might open 10 links from a news site or search engine, each in a different tab. Do you propose that I bookmark them immediately, even though they are probably tabs that I will soon close and never wish to see again? If I see the page and think I want to consider it for a few hours maybe (or longer; how should I know?) do I bookmark it? Perhaps I should wait the few hours or days...? Why should I even have to make this decision?
Personal Take: Completely agree. I am opening up Firefox with Panarama Mode missing, Pocket, Hello.
And BTW, e10s hasn't shipped yet, and at the current timeline, even if it ship in Firefox 49/50 it will still not be any good for power / heavy tab users, which incidentaly is the only group left using Firefox, most have moved on to Chrome.
I see light of hope in Servo. But liscenses ( MPL? Why not Apache 2.0 ) are a concern for a few company to join and devote resources into it. ( Apart from Samsung )
Copyleft licences are often the best way to go in this kind of situations: thanks to the GPL, Linux remained one until Google forked it for Android. And 15 years after its beginning, there is no fragmentation in the kernel space. On the other hand, BSD has been forked many times by companies to build their own proprietary OS [1].
The MPL will ensure that Servo is never forked by Google/Apple/Microsoft into a competing proprietary software, but will remain a free software.
[1]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/77/Unix_his...
And, when FF crashes and reloads, restoring all the tabs, it seems like the tabs aren't loaded (the page is blank and does a reload when selected), yet if you look in task manager (Windows 7), all the memory seems to have already been consumed.
Should tabs be able to be unloaded from memory, in theory? If so, is it implemented this way? If not, is there a reason?
I'm not using firefox out of sheer ideology and support for the FOSS community, but it's not the superior product I used to sell to everybody.
Some are just starting to land after literally years of work:
You might be more interested in reading about platform improvements like getting Servo/Rust components into Gecko: https://blog.servo.org/2016/05/09/twis-62/
Or progress in multi-process support (codename e10s): http://arewee10syet.com/
While these are focused on Firefox to improve performance, stability and responsiveness, there are also experiments like the Positron project, which is making Gecko able to host Electron applications: https://github.com/mozilla/positron
I don't doubt that. I just wish more resource was allocated to that, and less on new features. I do use the "share with twitter" feature, "hello" or the gtk3 integration, but I would trade it for better perf in a blink.
On the other hand, FF never saw a very disruptive feature for years. It could have added integrated torrent download or a kick ass JS/CSS IDE in browser. No perf and no disruption make is less appealing.
I'm not just complaining. I register to all the feedback program from Mozilla I encounter. I donate money to Mozilla. I activate the tracking features in my browser so they can use the metrics and crash reports.
I've been using firefox since it's been called phoenix, and it sadden me that I can't now honestly recommand it to others in any other way than "it's more ethical".
> You might be more interested in reading about platform improvements like getting Servo/Rust components into Gecko: https://blog.servo.org/2016/05/09/twis-62/
I'm dying to see servo in action. For those reasons, and also because I follow closely Rust.
While there has been and continues to be significant work in this area, the Web Extensions project has been making great progress and provides a much better means to contain and control extensions, while making the development experience better:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebExtensions/
This is already shipping today and many classic Firefox extensions have already switched over.
Open and close tabs and windows, browsing the modern web without extensions. Keep it up for weeks, having 10 to 30 windows, and an average of 10 tabs (some at 40). You have 5 to 12 gigabytes of RAM to work with, and at least a 1920x1200 screen. (maybe a 4k screen)
That's it.
Expectations for older hardware: run for weeks, 5 to 8 windows, average of 8 tabs (one at 30), 512 megabytes of RAM, and a 1600x1080 screen.
> I don't run any.
You don't have to. The existence of extensions creates constraints on how they evolve the browser's internals.
Extensions themselves can also introduce performance problems of course.
In general, existing bugs (that I am aware of) are either not actionable because of existing architectural issues, or just because the nature of the bug is difficult and requires an expert whose time is constrained.
Opening the dev tools has such a huge performance impact these days (on an i7 with 16GB RAM and an SSD...) that I mostly don't bother to develop with Firefox anymore.
Let alone missing features like user agent spoofing, which still requires an addon, or the bug that messes up file associations with every update.
I hope they do less UI changes, get their shit together and improve the core.
Edit: I'm also in two minds about the plugin systems between the two browsers. The idea of all JavaScript plugins scares me to death, there really are no good download managers for chromium / chrome, on the other hand Firefox plugins I rely on like Evernote web clipper keep breaking and don't even work on dev/nightly when enforcing the new plugin system.