Comment by srean | Hacker News Reader

Comment by srean | Hacker News Reader

This is great news and may finally push me into upgrading FF on my depleted box. Despite all the grumblings about FF's memory issues, it is the (only) full featured browser that works for me, not Chrome.

There are a few reasons for that. (1) There's no tab abuser worse than me. I have hundreds of them around (I have commented before, why I have it that way) (2) I do all my browsing from a (battery less) laptop with 512 MB of RAM. (3) I do not close my browser for months on end. On top of that I expect that I should be able to do my usual editing etc while I have the browser open.

For this very corner'est of corner cases, if I use Chrome, my box goes into a fetal position and dies. However, and kudos to FF 3.6, (yeah 3.6!) my laptop works great, no problem at all. I have flashblock, no script, bar-tab, memory fox, bunch of greasemonkey scripts (to fix google's layout, and give github and bitbucket a dark theme) and have tweaked FF's cache settings.

On a more performant box I am on FF-11, but have never upgraded on the other, fearing that the new FF assumes (not unreasonably) the box to have more memory.

I would love to go back to Firefox as my full-time browser, but I have handful of showstoppers that I haven't found a good way around:

- Inability to run a private browsing window at the same time as my regular browsing. - No desktop notifications. (There appears to be an outdated and/or unmaintained add-on for this?) - No working equivalent of a few app-specific extensions (Google Voice button, Google+ +1 button, Google Reader inline previews)

If you create a second profile, you can start a private browsing session in it without it interfering with the main profile (not as good as Chrome's approach but to me it's just another launcher in the panel).

No idea about the other ones though.

How bad of a tab abuser are you? I can easily reach over 450 tabs. It helps that since Firefox 4, there is an option that doesn't load all tabs when you start Firefox up, but instead only loads the tabs as you switch to them. Tabs that haven't been loaded don't seem to have much footprint at all, so I tend to build up rather a lot of them.

How do you guys manage your tabs? I have ~100 and I sometimes feel like I'm drowning. That option you mentioned really helps.

I basically use tabs as temporary bookmarks. I don't try to look through them very often. If I want to go to website, I just open a new tab and type the name/URL into the address bar rather to look through the tabs I have open to see if it's already open somewhere. When Firefox opens a switch to an open tab, I do take the option.

I browse through the tabs I have open at leisure, finishing the business I have with them as convenient. I can easily end up closing 200 tabs during a period like that, since afterwards they're not useful to me anymore. When I am done with a website (say, opened all the interesting articles and comment pages from the hacker news frontpage) I do close the tab, instead of leaving it open and looking for it later.

Have you used the tab grouping feature?

I use Tree Style Tabs. I think it's better than tab grouping.

Unfortunately, that works only if you're frequently closing and reopening Firefox.

I tend to leave it running all the time.

For me, I went with an Add-On named "TooManyTabs": https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/toomanytabs-s...

"To SPEED UP your Firefox, when a tab is added to TMT, it is unloaded from browser and its tab state & history are stored in TMT. When you click on a tab, the tab is opened again from disk cache, with tab state & history restored if available; (Please note that the memory freed varies and is subjected to different websites.)"

When I come back to the browser, if I haven't used it in a while, I send all the currently open tabs to a new row which unloads them from browser memory. Then, when I get a chance, I go back to the various rows and clean out the tabs I don't want to keep and the condense them down to the "real gold".

Once I have what I want to keep, I restore the tabs and then use another Add-On named "CopyAllUrls": http://www.plasser.net/copyallurls/

This one lets you generate, to the clipboard, any number of markup formats (including HTML) containing the details of all the tabs you have open (with configurable options for details).

I tend to paste this comment into Gmail with a special tag (myaddress+selfnote@gmail.com) which triggers a "mark as read" filter. I do this because all I need is web access, regardless of the browser, and I can get access to all my bookmarked content with the power of Google Search. In addition, on my desktop and mobile phone devices, the mail is automatically sync'd to it for me to carry around for instant access.

I do leave Firefox open for days at a time (usually start it up when I boot into Linux, and close it when I reboot for a kernel update). The Firefox team seems to have fixed most of the leaking that was occuring back in the 3.6 days. As things are right now, there is no way Firefox can use enough RAM to have any impact on my system. Using something like TMT would probably end up slowing down Firefox for me, since stuff would have to be read into RAM from a magnetic HDD instead of being in RAM already. I don't think that Linux has used more than 1MB of the swap partition since I installed it on this laptop. I guess TMT would be useful for those people who have less than 768MB of RAM (what my old laptop had), which doesn't tend to be many people nowadays.

The second add-on you have linked is interesting due to the many possibilities it opens up. I am certain that some people who read Hacker News will find it useful for their purposes.

Yes I am as bad as you are with tabs, possibly worse cause I have hit 800s once in a while.

Just like you said, for me tabs are my "volatile" bookmarks and a TODO list. The upside is that it automatically records the history of the browsing session a call/cc if you will. It is also in my face, reminding me about it. It has a tiny cost associated with keeping it open forcing me to not procrastinate on it for ever. Many a open tab graduate into being genuine bookmarks.

I have tried FF4 and without add-ons it does not do everything that I do with 3.6 with add-ons. The critical part is unloading the content of the tabs when it has not been viewed in a while. The other feature I like is the ability to search through the content of the tabs.

With the add-on set that I have, I leave my FF open for months on a 512Mb box with no issues. So I assume all the leaks have been iron out of 3.6 by now or the memory fox add-on does a good job of garbage collection.

Is this an about:config setting? Can you please share?

It used to be only an about:config setting, but now you'll find it in Preferences, General, Don't load tabs until selected.

Why not spend a few dollars and double or quadruple your memory?

I can send you my routing number if you have a few to spare :)

But a larger point is that I disagree with the trend of using more hardware for doing less but taking the same quantum of running time , especially so when there are easy non-onerous alternatives. Much that anyone may want to manage my expenses, doing it this way frees up money that I can spend elsewhere, where I am more keen.

This box of mine is not worth spending more money over, but useful enough that its a loss if I junk it.

Get a real computer or quit your bitching.

In the post, the author addresses this:

...what if the user has a high-end machine with 16GB of RAM? Then paging isn’t an issue. But this improvement will still be a big deal on such a machine. This is because garbage collection and cycle collection cause pauses, and the length of the pauses are roughly proportional to the amount of live heap memory. (Incremental garbage collection will soon be enabled, which will result in smaller garbage collection pauses, but there are no plans for incremental cycle collection and so cycle collection pauses will still be relevant.) So even on high-end machines with lots of RAM, leaks can greatly hurt browser performance.

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