Firefox Can Now Open a Ridiculous Number of Tabs in Seconds

Megalith

Megalith

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A tab hoarder at Mozilla decided to document the performance of the latest versions of Firefox and found that the engineers responsible for improving the browser’s responsiveness have actually been doing their jobs: while Firefox 51 took nearly 8 minutes to open a profile comprising 1691 tabs, the same only took Firefox 55 and 56 a couple of seconds. Another bar graph shows that memory usage is significantly reduced in the latter versions.

Graph of startup time with 1691 tabs across Firefox versions 20, 30, 40 and 50 - 56. The Y axis is minutes. Yes, Firefox 51 took almost 8 MINUTES to start up. However, as of Firefox 55 it only takes 15 seconds. For 1691 tabs. Really. I no longer fear restarts. Lately, I just restart Firefox for fun sometimes. It's interesting that Firefox startup time got consistently worse over time until Firefox 51. It'd be interesting to do this test with varying numbers of tabs and find out at what point these types of regressions become noticeable.
 
Jesus fucking Christ 1700 tabs?! How the hell do they keep that shit straight?

Personally if I was insane and needed that many tabs I'd probably spread them out across multiple windows as well.
 
1691 tabs with absolutely fucking nothing on them but content that's already loaded into RAM and then just duplicated across all of them without actually being duplicated across all of them until you click the actual tab to load the content.

Ok, not impressed, even with the speed of creating blank tabs, nope, not impressed at all. Now, let's see him do this test again and have his automated script actually force load the tabs one by one: as soon as the first tab is fully loaded the second one loads, repeat till all 1691 are fully loaded.

Then tell me how much RAM usage went through the stratosphere and how the machine crawled to a screeching halt (yes, even a MacBook with some fast Flash-RAM device, either NVMe or straight SSD or whatever).

Now that would impress me if it's done super fast, sure, but 1691 blank tabs, nope, not impressed at all. :D
 
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i admit to having all browsers installed due to the fact im a Cisco UC engineer and well.. I hate IE, chrome does not work WELL with cisco, and firefox is commonly my true go to for work related stuff.

but really. 1691 tabs? last time i had that many open was a saturday of pure masterbation (before marriage... yeah). Honestly if my browser quit with that many tabs open.. i would just give up. I honestly cant see the need for that many tabs.
 
Orddie said:
but really. 1691 tabs? last time i had that many open was a saturday of pure masterbation (before marriage... yeah). Honestly if my browser quit with that many tabs open.. i would just give up. I honestly cant see the need for that many tabs.
Click to expand...

You had time to masterbate while handling that many tabs?
 
Yeah, tabs don't actually load after launching the browser until you click on them. There's a big difference.
 
There's no doubting the performance of Firefox has improved dramatically in the last update, the difference is like night and day. Makes Firefox far more usable.
 
Wow crazy to see so many Firefox haters these days. Kill that loaded in the background bs Chrome does and see how well your start page addon works and how quick it is comparatively with or without loading tabs at start. Firefox is running much better lately and while not as fast in page loading as Chromium based browsers (Opera, Chrome and Vivaldi. Left to right in speed order I observed, right is fastest.), it much faster than one is going to care about. The program's speed itself was always the drawback, been a non issue since recent updates, I flop between this and Vivaldi, both great.
 
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Tiberian said:
1691 tabs with absolutely fucking nothing on them but content that's already loaded into RAM and then just duplicated across all of them without actually being duplicated across all of them until you click the actual tab to load the content.

Ok, not impressed, even with the speed of creating blank tabs, nope, not impressed at all. Now, let's see him do this test again and have his automated script actually force load the tabs one by one: as soon as the first tab is fully loaded the second one loads, repeat till all 1691 are fully loaded.

Then tell me how much RAM usage went through the stratosphere and how the machine crawled to a screeching halt (yes, even a MacBook with some fast Flash-RAM device, either NVMe or straight SSD or whatever).

Now that would impress me if it's done super fast, sure, but 1691 blank tabs, nope, not impressed at all. :D
Click to expand...

Well, considering that every version of FF he tested failed this same test miserably except for 55+, I'd say they've got a huge improvement on their hands.

It's almost baffling how poorly designed it used to be that it took minutes to load that many blank tabs and still consumed that much memory. Simply emulating iOS Safari would have gave them the dynamic, as you click, allocation idea 10 years ago.
 
Megalith said:
A tab hoarder at Mozilla decided to document the performance of the latest versions of Firefox and found that the engineers responsible for improving the browser’s responsiveness have actually been doing their jobs: while Firefox 51 took nearly 8 minutes to open a profile comprising 1691 tabs, the same only took Firefox 55 and 56 a couple of seconds. Another bar graph shows that memory usage is significantly reduced in the latter versions.

Graph of startup time with 1691 tabs across Firefox versions 20, 30, 40 and 50 - 56. The Y axis is minutes. Yes, Firefox 51 took almost 8 MINUTES to start up. However, as of Firefox 55 it only takes 15 seconds. For 1691 tabs. Really. I no longer fear restarts. Lately, I just restart Firefox for fun sometimes. It's interesting that Firefox startup time got consistently worse over time until Firefox 51. It'd be interesting to do this test with varying numbers of tabs and find out at what point these types of regressions become noticeable.
Click to expand...

I would like to see the specs on his machine as right now FF stil chokes on 98 tabs here at my place. FF yes uses quite a bit less ram but in my instance i do not care about ram usage. My own informal findings as of june are on my site:
https://www.etc-md.com/archives/4873

Here’s the basic results:

Firefox:
Uncached:
Ram usage: 1.6 gigs
Bandwidth Usage: Max: 36 megabits Average: 10 megabits
CPU Usage: max: 75% average 65%
Time to load all 96 pages: 3 minutes 5 seconds

Cached:
Ram usage: 1.8 gigs
Bandwidth Usage: Max: 10 megabits Average: 2 megabits
CPU Usage: max: 100% average 50%
Time to load all 96 pages: 1 minute 58 seconds

Chrome:
Uncached:
Ram usage: 7.3 gigs
Bandwidth Usage: Max: 50 megabits Average: 40 megabits
CPU Usage: max: 100% average 85%
Time to load all 96 pages: 47 seconds

Cached:
Ram usage: 4.3 gigs
Bandwidth Usage: Max: 10 megabits Average: 5 megabits
CPU Usage: max: 100% average 100%
Time to load all 96 pages: 33 seconds

I jsut hit FF again and the results are actually worse. it is noticeable enough I do not have to time it again to notice it is taking Ff longer. I'll run some more timed next when the next version gets released.
 
I have 41 favicons on my bookmarks toolbar as pictured:

BookmarksToolbarFavicons.png


and I can start Firefox ESR 52.2.1 (it's a portable install) and let it sit for 30 seconds idle, then I can open the bookmarks and force load all 41 of those simultaneously (and by force load I mean the tabs are loading the actual webpage content and not just being a placeholder until I click a tab) and from the time I make that selection to the time the last tab is fulled loaded with those 41 website pages it's about 2 minutes and 37 seconds, on an older Sandy Bridge i7-2640m dual core (2 cores/4 threads) CPU with DDR3 1333 RAM using a 5400 rpm hard drive and a 150Mbps Internet connection that I get about 75Mbps from because I'm using 11n WiFi to connect to the router. *phew* :D

So I'm good to go, I suppose, and I only do that occasionally for testing, I'm sure it would be a bit faster on an SSD - there are times when I'll copy the entire Firefox ESR folder to RAMdisk and do it and it's not really that much faster but one might think it should be. :)
 
hescominsoon said:
I would like to see the specs on his machine as right now FF stil chokes on 98 tabs here at my place. FF yes uses quite a bit less ram but in my instance i do not care about ram usage. My own informal findings as of june are on my site:
https://www.etc-md.com/archives/4873

Here’s the basic results:

Firefox:
Uncached:
Ram usage: 1.6 gigs
Bandwidth Usage: Max: 36 megabits Average: 10 megabits
CPU Usage: max: 75% average 65%
Time to load all 96 pages: 3 minutes 5 seconds

Cached:
Ram usage: 1.8 gigs
Bandwidth Usage: Max: 10 megabits Average: 2 megabits
CPU Usage: max: 100% average 50%
Time to load all 96 pages: 1 minute 58 seconds

Chrome:
Uncached:
Ram usage: 7.3 gigs
Bandwidth Usage: Max: 50 megabits Average: 40 megabits
CPU Usage: max: 100% average 85%
Time to load all 96 pages: 47 seconds

Cached:
Ram usage: 4.3 gigs
Bandwidth Usage: Max: 10 megabits Average: 5 megabits
CPU Usage: max: 100% average 100%
Time to load all 96 pages: 33 seconds

I jsut hit FF again and the results are actually worse. it is noticeable enough I do not have to time it again to notice it is taking Ff longer. I'll run some more timed next when the next version gets released.
Click to expand...

What version of FF are you using? 54.0.1 is still the current stable release so unless you're on the beta or nightly then your results are expected.
 
Spidey329 said:
You had time to masterbate while handling that many tabs?
Click to expand...

dude we have all been there.. watching a good vid and see a "we also recommend....". I dont left click... im a rick click first than open in new tab kind of guy..

It really gets out of control quick.
 
Firefox is one of the few browsers that, even in its stock form, will crash websites like ToysRUs or make them nearly unusable....I think its flash related but still, a real pain.
 
jihadjoe said:
Imagine trying to find the tab with an auto-playing audio ad in that mess...
Click to expand...

Actually it's pretty easy to find that in FF these days because if a tab has audio playing there's a speaker icon displayed on the tab, if you click on it the audio gets muted.

Orddie said:
dude we have all been there.. watching a good vid and see a "we also recommend....". I dont left click... im a rick click first than open in new tab kind of guy..

It really gets out of control quick.
Click to expand...

Protip: Middle mouse button opens up a new tab without using the context menu, less clicks = more pron!
 
Protip: Middle mouse button opens up a new tab without using the context menu, less clicks = more pron!

The two side buttons on my Logitech mouse go forwards and backwards between pages under both Linux and Windows by default. ;)
 
So what, how about we fix the memory leaks that I just experienced. The browser started using over 5GB of ram which just a dozen tabs open.
 
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Why the hell do people have dozens (or hundreds) of tabs open at once? I rarely ever go over a dozen tabs at once, at both work and home. I usually keep it to 6 or fewer tabs. If I am done using a tab, I just close it. No reason to just keep it open, unless it is one of like 4 pages that I use all of the time.
 
For those that don't think this is a big deal remember when everyone was saying 640K was enough? Then we moved to, you don't need more than 2 Gigs of ram, than 4 now 16......

It's never enough!
 
HeadRusch said:
Firefox is one of the few browsers that, even in its stock form, will crash websites like ToysRUs or make them nearly unusable....I think its flash related but still, a real pain.
Click to expand...
You do know the web developer is the responsible party for compatibility with a browser, not the other way around, right?
 
ManofGod said:
So what, how about we fix the memory leaks that I just experienced. The browser started using over 5GB of ram which just a dozen tabs open.
Click to expand...

Apparently you didn't read the article, or even Megalith's post which included a mention of memory usage also being vastly improved.

Here, let me help you out:

memory.png
 
bigdogchris said:
You do know the web developer is the responsible party for compatibility with a browser, not the other way around, right?
Click to expand...

Absolutely, and the TRU website is rubbish, but in this case it's wholly acceptable to shoot the messenger, since I can launch the same website in Chrome or Explorer and not have the pausing and hiccups...so do I stand with the dev's and say 'blame toysrus!". Yeah, symbolically of course....but I'm already impatient for this 2 minute transaction and anything complicating that is going to get the wrath of closest-available-target. It doesn't make sense, but neither do people, so Firefox has to fix this shit. :)
 
I do it all the time because there are systems I'm designing that I need to reference a whole lot of info from many different sources in order to do my job correctly. The internet has a lot of info out there. Having to refind that info takes a lot more time than just leaving the tab open until I'm done with it.

[21CW]killerofall said:
Why the hell do people have dozens (or hundreds) of tabs open at once? I rarely ever go over a dozen tabs at once, at both work and home. I usually keep it to 6 or fewer tabs. If I am done using a tab, I just close it. No reason to just keep it open, unless it is one of like 4 pages that I use all of the time.
Click to expand...
 
Ultima99 said:
Apparently you didn't read the article, or even Megalith's post which included a mention of memory usage also being vastly improved.

Here, let me help you out:

memory.png
Click to expand...

Here, let me tell you the reality, your post is not relevant. I had 12 tabs open and the browser was using over 5GB of ram, does not matter what that image says. Hence, memory leak.
 
HeadRusch said:
Absolutely, and the TRU website is rubbish, but in this case it's wholly acceptable to shoot the messenger, since I can launch the same website in Chrome or Explorer and not have the pausing and hiccups...so do I stand with the dev's and say 'blame toysrus!". Yeah, symbolically of course....but I'm already impatient for this 2 minute transaction and anything complicating that is going to get the wrath of closest-available-target. It doesn't make sense, but neither do people, so Firefox has to fix this shit. :)
Click to expand...
Or that the TRU website developers optimized and debugged the site for Chrome and Explorer and not Firefox? How is that Mozilla's fault?
 
ManofGod said:
Here, let me tell you the reality, your post is not relevant. I had 12 tabs open and the browser was using over 5GB of ram, does not matter what that image says. Hence, memory leak.
Click to expand...

I'd say you have bigger issues than just Firefox. 12 tabs open here, using ~624mb of ram:

TOFmxhVh.png


mdsaduhh.png
 
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I hate Firefeox, its a slow bloated piece of shit. I stopped using it several years ago.

I use chrome, and typical have 49 tabs open and its still fast.
 
Motley said:
I hate Firefeox, its a slow bloated piece of shit. I stopped using it several years ago.

I use chrome, and typical have 49 tabs open and its still fast.
Click to expand...

The latest version of Firefox is nothing like the older versions of Firefox performance wise. I use both Chrome and Firefox and in most cases Firefox is actually more efficient and every bit as fast as Chrome.
 
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Mozilla transplants more code from Google; now Firefox behaves more like Chrome. Film at 11.
 
Motley said:
I hate Firefeox, its a slow bloated piece of shit. I stopped using it several years ago.

I use chrome, and typical have 49 tabs open and its still fast.
Click to expand...

Chrome is a spyware and a piece of shit. How come I never have any problems with FF?
 
ManofGod said:
Here, let me tell you the reality, your post is not relevant. I had 12 tabs open and the browser was using over 5GB of ram, does not matter what that image says. Hence, memory leak.
Click to expand...

Learn how to run your machine properly then. Many of us don't have these issues. Quit getting mad at others over your own inadequacy. Are you even running version 55 or 56 bro? Because yes, my post is indeed relevant because those versions improve memory usage.
 
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