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

posted by martyb on Saturday July 29 2017, @05:02AM   Printer-friendly
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/

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 29 2017, @08:26AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 29 2017, @08:26AM (#546188)

    It sounds like something the OS should be capable of resolving. Is there not a general purpose memory defrag that can automatically run during idle?

  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 29 2017, @09:30AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 29 2017, @09:30AM (#546198)

    The OS can only do so much when someone is aggressively allocating and freeing a lot of memory. But hey, what tools the OS offers they didn't even bother to use (at least on windows --- where despite its existence they don't enable the low-fragmentation heap, never checked this in *nix but the situation is likely the same if such tools exist there).