Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try

Re:Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try by detaro on Thursday June 21, 2018 @06:51AM (#17363799)

I'm writing this from a 2016 Thinkpad with 508 open tabs in Chrome. works. (wouldn't work if turned off the ad-blocker, but why would I do that...)

Firefox does it at least as well, just having both open is a bit much.

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Re:Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try by logicallee on Thursday June 21, 2018 @06:59AM (#17363854)

(withdrawn)

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Re:Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try by detaro on Thursday June 21, 2018 @07:31AM (#17364067)

Opened up Firefox too and ctrl-tabbed around a bit to cause it to actually load some pages (hundreds of open tabs too, similar uBlock setup), and Windows reports

Chrome 5.3 GB

Firefox 4.2 GB

I couldn't find a tally of where Windows applies its "memory compression" logic, to be honest I don't even know what exactly it does, but let's assume it's some background task and it did more to Chrome than to Firefox since Chrome had been running longer.

So yes, Chrome needs noticeably more memory, and I prefer Firefox overall, but both can handle tons of tabs in my experience. Chrome also appears to be more responsive under pressure, I assume this is because it splits work into lots more processes than Firefox does, which is both probably a memory drain and a security benefit.

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Re:Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try by logicallee on Thursday June 21, 2018 @07:36AM (#17364106)

Can you repeat without ctrl-tabbing? What was Firefox usage then?

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Re:Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try by detaro on Thursday June 21, 2018 @07:44AM (#17364168)

Jumped to 950 MB, settled at ~800 MB. Deferred loading seems to do a lot, so I could imagine that different usage patterns make a big difference, but that would need a detailed look into how Firefox and Chrome manage memory for "stale" tabs. If I remember right Mozilla recently added improvements there, getting rid of their memory more aggressively?

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Re:Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try by logicallee on Thursday June 21, 2018 @07:52AM (#17364227)

So, under actual usage (not ctrl-tabbing around to aggressively force-load things) it is 950 MB vs 5.3 GB. (I imagine for a comparable number of tabs?)

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EDIT in response to your reply:

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?

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Re:Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try by detaro on Thursday June 21, 2018 @07:55AM (#17364253)

I don't think you can count a freshly started browser that has only loaded 7 tabs (one per window) as "actual usage". I'd guess tabbing around triggered <50 tabs, that doesn't seem like a totally unrealistic working set, at least not when I'm actively researching something.

Maybe I should set up logging for this, might be interesting.

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Re:Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try by logicallee on Thursday June 21, 2018 @12:07PM (#17366387)

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?

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Re:Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try by keypress on Thursday June 21, 2018 @07:30AM (#17364048)

I have a Chromium install without an ad blocker. And it takes one bad out of control page with a shitty advert, to down my entire machine. Something like: outlook.com.

(Doesn't matter if I have 2 or 100 tabs if there is one bad apple.)

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