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The New Firefox (Version 56) and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

posted by martyb on Saturday July 29 2017, @05:02AM   
from the sounds-like-a-fairy-tale dept.

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Dietrich Ayala is a developer relationist working for internet freedom at Mozilla, the non-profit makers of Firefox.

[...] I've got a Firefox profile with 1691 tabs.

[...] As you would expect, Firefox handled this profile quite poorly for a long time. I got used to multi-minute startup time, waiting 15-30 seconds for tabs from external apps to show up, and all manner of non-responsive behavio(u)r.

And then, quite recently, everything changed.

The author then describes his testing platform and admittedly simple-minded test scenario: a Macbook, time to load all 1691 tabs in HIS profile, and using Firefox versions 20, 30, 40, and 50 through 56.

The upshot? Startup time dropped from over 7 minutes to under 15 seconds. Memory usage dropped from over 2 GB to under 0.5 GB.

Source: https://metafluff.com/2017/07/21/i-am-a-tab-hoarder/

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Original Submission

• Re:No wi Fi? (Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 29 2017, @05:45AM

  by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 29 2017, @05:45AM (#546155)

  The point is to test the speed of tab loading code, not internet connection speed or page rendering speed. There are various aspects of a browser, and sometimes you want to test one of them in (more-or-less) isolation. In the same venue, you wouldn't test page rendering on a profile with 1700 tabs, you'd open a single tab.

  Parent

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