Re:The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs
by newscracker on Saturday July 22, 2017 @05:13AM
(#14826168)
I'm a Firefox fan and a strong evangelist of it (in my circles). For a long time, I have been using Firefox with several open windows and a few hundred (not just 100) tabs. Why do I do that? Firstly, I research many topics (being in tech and also having some specific focused interests in other areas that require more reading and learning) and need a way to capture information that I have to look at - scan, skim, read completely, etc. Secondly, there is currently no good interface available, at least for me, that keeps things visible as well as quickly accessible (preserving history would be a bonus).
All the bookmarks I have ever saved in my life on any browser remain without being touched because it's just another bunch of stuff hidden away with no context or relationships. So I stopped using bookmarks a long time ago (for frequently accessed sites, the Awesome Bar fulfills the needs). I have the same attitude with all the bookmarking and "read later" services. For me, if something is out of sight, it soon gets out of mind. This is where tabs help me focus on different subjects/areas much better than bookmarks (or even a page that has all tabs listed). I can easily find what I had put in a group of tabs and decide when to get to them. It's not perfect. Sometimes I find that some tabs are no longer interesting or that I don't have time for them, and so close them after several days or weeks.
I've seen some experimental stuff from Mozilla on improving bookmarking and addressing the issues with "save for later". One such effort was Dropzilla [1] in 2012, which I was impressed with. But it seemed like that was abandoned soon or not carried forward (if anyone has updates on this that I may have missed, please let me know).
Firefox has also been, in my experience (not meaning to start a browser war here), much better at memory management. In comparison, I consider Chrome as a toy that's useful as long as you don't want too many tabs (otherwise it just brings the system to a crawl). Stability wise too, I find Firefox extensions to be of much better quality. To date, I can't get session restore working well or undoing tab close working well in Chrome. Same goes for switching proxies quickly and other things too.
So, what I need is a browser that can handle hundreds of tabs well. For me that has always been Firefox, ahead by far.
All the bookmarks I have ever saved in my life on any browser remain without being touched because it's just another bunch of stuff hidden away with no context or relationships. So I stopped using bookmarks a long time ago (for frequently accessed sites, the Awesome Bar fulfills the needs). I have the same attitude with all the bookmarking and "read later" services. For me, if something is out of sight, it soon gets out of mind. This is where tabs help me focus on different subjects/areas much better than bookmarks (or even a page that has all tabs listed). I can easily find what I had put in a group of tabs and decide when to get to them. It's not perfect. Sometimes I find that some tabs are no longer interesting or that I don't have time for them, and so close them after several days or weeks.
I've seen some experimental stuff from Mozilla on improving bookmarking and addressing the issues with "save for later". One such effort was Dropzilla [1] in 2012, which I was impressed with. But it seemed like that was abandoned soon or not carried forward (if anyone has updates on this that I may have missed, please let me know).
Firefox has also been, in my experience (not meaning to start a browser war here), much better at memory management. In comparison, I consider Chrome as a toy that's useful as long as you don't want too many tabs (otherwise it just brings the system to a crawl). Stability wise too, I find Firefox extensions to be of much better quality. To date, I can't get session restore working well or undoing tab close working well in Chrome. Same goes for switching proxies quickly and other things too.
So, what I need is a browser that can handle hundreds of tabs well. For me that has always been Firefox, ahead by far.
[1]: https://blog.mozilla.org/ux/2012/10/save-for-later/