Re:Firefox’s speed with large numbers of tabs leaves Chrome ...
by ssivark on Tuesday July 25, 2017 @02:35PM
(#14850585)
Tab-o-phile reporting!
I currently have ~500 tabs open, unevenly distributed among 20 "tab groups". It's very much like expecting your editor/IDE to open a bunch of files and git status when you switch to a "project".
- I'm pursuing a multi-pronged agenda which requires context switches to get different things done (multiple projects/activities, each with their own group eg: communication, project1 at work, project2 at work, paying my bills, topic FOO that I've been reading about in the evenings, HN content, etc. ). I prefer for my browser to display the state at which I left things, including the possible resources I was consulting -- so that I can continue from exactly where I left off. Also, one might actually want to save the state of the javascript objects on the page or something, rather than just the URL!
- A lot of my browser activity has the flavor of research. A lot of searching, consulting references, trying out things in Jupyter notebooks, etc.
- A large part of it is keeping track of interesting things to look into. Whether you call those "bookmarks" or "open tabs" is just jargon, since Firefox only loads tabs on demand. So, for all practical purposes, it has an amazingly convenient way to save context, without having to click once for each page. And closing a tab feels easier than deleting a bookmark.
I sometimes think that this might be the electronic analogue of some (creative?) people who have messy offices and are able to get along just fine. As an example, refer to the recent discussions about Claude Shannon's style:
I currently have ~500 tabs open, unevenly distributed among 20 "tab groups". It's very much like expecting your editor/IDE to open a bunch of files and git status when you switch to a "project".
- I'm pursuing a multi-pronged agenda which requires context switches to get different things done (multiple projects/activities, each with their own group eg: communication, project1 at work, project2 at work, paying my bills, topic FOO that I've been reading about in the evenings, HN content, etc. ). I prefer for my browser to display the state at which I left things, including the possible resources I was consulting -- so that I can continue from exactly where I left off. Also, one might actually want to save the state of the javascript objects on the page or something, rather than just the URL!
- A lot of my browser activity has the flavor of research. A lot of searching, consulting references, trying out things in Jupyter notebooks, etc.
- A large part of it is keeping track of interesting things to look into. Whether you call those "bookmarks" or "open tabs" is just jargon, since Firefox only loads tabs on demand. So, for all practical purposes, it has an amazingly convenient way to save context, without having to click once for each page. And closing a tab feels easier than deleting a bookmark.
I sometimes think that this might be the electronic analogue of some (creative?) people who have messy offices and are able to get along just fine. As an example, refer to the recent discussions about Claude Shannon's style:
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14819377 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14774163 3. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14776520