5 ms·

I don't know why but I have a different experience. My daily driver is a 13 year old Thinkpad with 16Gb memory, I use Firefox all the time, I routinely have 50+

by glaucon 15d ago

I don't know why but I have a different experience. My daily driver is a 13 year old Thinkpad with 16Gb memory, I use Firefox all the time, I routinely have 50+ tabs open, I really have no complaints. I also use Firefox on Android, I have less experience of using other browsers on mobile but what I've got is fine for me. I'm not questioning your experience but I would like others, who might be considering using Firefox, to know that different people have different experiences.

tentacleuno 15d ago
> I routinely have 50+ tabs open For what it's worth, I've been known to have 300+ tabs open all in separate windows (I just forget about them and they tend to accumulate), and for the most part it handled it just fine (it did use quite a lot of RAM, of course.) That was on an i7 7700k with 32GB of RAM. I remember being quite impressed indeed.
- encrypted_bird 15d ago
  Genuine thought: maybe it's the separate windows?
  - tentacleuno 14d ago
    Maybe, yeah. It did seem a bit slower around the 400 mark, though -- there are definitely limitations.
theamk 14d ago
I think it's the specific pages - some Javascript is much more memory hungry that others. A few hundred HN or Wikipedia tabs work absolutely fine, I've tested. But there are much heavier sites, and only a few of those can cause the machine to start swapping until OOM, especially when left to work in the background. (And unlike Chrome, Firefox does not seem to throttle/unload background tabs automatically... or if it does, it does it much less aggressively)
- gitaarik 13d ago
  Yeah, that's it probably, I also notice that when I have certain pages open in tabs on the background, my Framework laptop fans start spinning faster, probably because of JS running on those sites. I don't know whether that wouldn't happen with Chrome, but yeah, if that's the case, then Chrome would have to reload / restore those pages and on Firefox they're still in memory. I rather just close those resource heavy pages, fortunately they're usally not the kinds of pages I need to use too often.

by glaucon 15d ago

tentacleuno 15d ago

> I routinely have 50+ tabs open For what it's worth, I've been known to have 300+ tabs open all in separate windows (I just forget about them and they tend to accumulate), and for the most part it handled it just fine (it did use quite a lot of RAM, of course.) That was on an i7 7700k with 32GB of RAM. I remember being quite impressed indeed.

encrypted_bird 15d ago
Genuine thought: maybe it's the separate windows?
- tentacleuno 14d ago
  Maybe, yeah. It did seem a bit slower around the 400 mark, though -- there are definitely limitations.

theamk 14d ago

I think it's the specific pages - some Javascript is much more memory hungry that others. A few hundred HN or Wikipedia tabs work absolutely fine, I've tested. But there are much heavier sites, and only a few of those can cause the machine to start swapping until OOM, especially when left to work in the background. (And unlike Chrome, Firefox does not seem to throttle/unload background tabs automatically... or if it does, it does it much less aggressively)

gitaarik 13d ago
Yeah, that's it probably, I also notice that when I have certain pages open in tabs on the background, my Framework laptop fans start spinning faster, probably because of JS running on those sites. I don't know whether that wouldn't happen with Chrome, but yeah, if that's the case, then Chrome would have to reload / restore those pages and on Firefox they're still in memory. I rather just close those resource heavy pages, fortunately they're usally not the kinds of pages I need to use too often.