As for the excess memory usage on chrome, "OneTab" might help https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/onetab/chphlpgkkbo... (It's available on Firefox) https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/onetab/

uBlock author has extensive benchmarks about this issue.

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/%C2%B5Block-vs.-ABP:-...

If you want to experiment with more than one tab process, you can tweak the about:config pref "dom.ipc.processCount".

(Admittedly the author is biased towards ABP. My biases: former Adblock user, former ABP user, current Adblock Edge and µblock user.)

I've had too many stalled pages for my liking so I welcome this when it is finally stable and extensions catch up.

(cf: The option to have the tab close button on the right, the status bar, the option to disable javascript, the option to have tabs in a sane place instead of on top...)

Somehow, I doubt disabling multiple processes will be within the scope of an addon.

Firefox is not for lack of options, I'd say it is the *nix of the browser world.

ps. You can also solve all of the tab issues with TabMixPlus and the UI issues with ClassicThemeRestorer - my Firefox 33 looks virtually identical to Firefox 4

Great, buy me another 32GB then please</s>. People shouldn't have to have high end gaming rigs to run a sodding browser.

Mozilla (and google) are deluding themselves in thinking that their particular software is the be all and end all of a computer, and should be introduced to this strange concept called 'multitasking'.

Firefox: 1.5GB

Thunderbird: ~1GB

OS: 1GB (conservative estimate)

Various background programs: 1GB

Suddenly doesn't look so cheap.

What are you using, Windows? I'm running Ubuntu 12.04 and the "OS" (X, window manager, daemons) is certainly not even close to 1GB, more like ~100MB.

Here's a thought for developers: Next time you find yourself saying "RAM is cheap" (or any variation thereof) thwack yourself about the head multiple times with a big stick, then go rinse your mouth out with soap and water.

In any case, the number one evaluation criterion for browsers is not the RAM profile.

If performance matters that much, perhaps you should instead be asking why we are writing applications and UI in an ugly evolution of SGML.

Before you fault the Moz devs, ask yourself why we have CSS for high DPI images and why designers embed videos into website headers. Maybe your needs aren't at all times reflective of the majority. The browser serves the spec. The spec serves every case you care to imagine. Because that's what we evolved a doc format to do.

(Just imagine a parallel universe where it was instead MS Word that evolved into a facebooking client!)

Sure, Firefox, and every other program should use as much RAM as it needs. But we should be mindful of keeping that need as low as possible, at least for any program that falls into the category of "runs in a multi-program environment and probably won't be the only program running from a finite RAM pool".

I mean, sure, it sounds great to say things are sandboxed. But when the actual exploits either a) root the machine, or b) targeted the user directly, it seems that protecting tabs from each other really doesn't do much.

For example, see the Chromium docs: http://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/multi-pr...

And, still, kind of amusing that the entire point of the browser is that it is sandboxed from the whole computer. Seems if we just restricted what the browser was capable of as a whole, we'd be there.

1. The browser as a whole needs to have permission to do quite a few things, including reading from and writing to the filesystem (for uploading and downloading files), talking to your system's graphical environment so it can display windows, and accessing arbitrary hosts on the network so it can access web servers. It's just not possible to meaningfully sandbox something requiring so much access. Individual browser components, on the other hand, can be designed to do very specific tasks and are thus easier to isolate.

2. You want to protect not only your system from a browser exploit but also other parts of the browser. A site that exploits a browser vulnerability shouldn't be able to read your cookies for another site.

These reasons imply that you need to focus on isolating and restricting components inside the browser instead of the browser as a whole.

Otherwise, if you are idling most of those processes, they should be the same as before. Just idle.

Memory, on the other hand, I think will go up. Not sure by how much, though. I would think the rendered content would be the largest consumer of memory. And again, if you have hundreds of tabs open with high memory usage per tab, that should already be a problem. Right?

Chrome: Anywhere from 50MB/tab up.

A much better performance fix would be to suspend javascript execution on tabs that aren't visible.

Suspending JS execution in invisible tabs seems highly unlikely to be web-compatible; you wouldn't want YouTube or Spotify to stop playing just because you focused a different tab. On the other hand, with technologies like requestAnimationFrame, we can make it possible for well designed applications to work well when in the background.

My point for performance, though, was mainly that if you have 200+ tabs that are actively doing something, then you are thrashing even in firefox. It isn't like they just do their work for free depending on the process model.

Also, 200 is not exactly a large N when we are too worried about scheduling, is it? (That is, unless all 200 are cpu bound, in which case, again, firefox would already be thrashing.)

Not sure about the ~5MB/tab figure.... This is FF 32.0.

That is, by going to a "per process" approach, the amount of memory that gets paged in almost certainly went up. No?

I feel like I must not have been clear earlier because I have made just a single point, and both of you are discussing things not related to that point. Let me try one more time: it's all about performance of the current tab.

The only issue would be if most of the memory allocations are under your system's page size (typically 4096 bytes) and distributed randomly, so that a lot of pages have data structures associated with multiple different tabs. But I think that's unlikely, and even if it is true, couldn't it be resolved by making your allocation strategy tab-aware (e.g., by giving each tab its own malloc arena, which would be way simpler than splitting the browser into multiple processes).

Am I missing something here?

Why would you think the current monolithic would page out a tab that was actively being used? Why would this not also happen in the "per process" approach?

That is, how would this specifically help? If you are actively using the memory for the current tab, because it is the current tab, why would it be swapped out under the monolithic case where it would not in the per process case?

I'm perfectly willing to accept there is a scenario I am not considering. I just don't see it, right off.

I'm assuming this has come up a fair bit. Any good links to read up on this?

This is the must-have feature that keeps me using Firefox -- especially when I'm doing research, which has a naturally tree-like pattern. Apparently, from the Chromium bug, it's a dealbreaker for lots of other people as well: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=344870

[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

Another suggestion is to not manage it. I create tabs all the time, and often have many similar tabs. There's no need to manage it, only to clean up once in a while.

(I like many tabs. A few weeks ago I performed some tab-cleaning -- 550 tabs were a bit much, as it made Firefox start slower.)

Personally i just use it for things I would like to read at some point, instead of filling up my bookmarks with 50-10 entries every day.

Disabled that as soon as it was dumped on me. There are an almost infinite list of reasons to have multiple copies of tabs.

Honestly, I cleanup every week or two, and it works fine. Windows are by category of different things I do, and I tend to leave frequent sites open all the time.

I find it essential to manage the mess that is my Chrome tabs.

Panorama is a life-saver if you have to context-switch between projects regularly.

TreeStyle, really, I use more as a means to move screen real-estate to horizontal usage on my laptop's 16:9 screen. Tab organization is a side benefit.