Comments on: Perilous Performance Proportions

By: Shawn Wilsher

Shawn Wilsher — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 16:32:53 +0000

Creating processes isn’t exactly cheap, so I don’t think it’s the performance win that everything thinks it is (for additional other options too). Work is under way on this, but it will not make Firefox 4.0.

By: pd

pd — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 06:57:44 +0000

Would tabs in separate processes make start up a helluva lot faster? Has there been any movement on this feature that Firefox competitors have had production released for a long time now? Are the Electrolysis (?) people on to it?

By: Gen Kanai

Gen Kanai — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 03:44:09 +0000

This is one of the most important issues that needs to be mitigated in our next release, so I’m terribly happy you’re on the case. I too love Bar Tab and wonder how we might integrate the best parts of Bar Tab into a release. I realize that is a little orthogonal to what you’re trying to fix but Bar Tab significantly changes startup time. I think we need to fix the underlying issues too of course.

By: SilverWave

SilverWave — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 10:48:02 +0000

BarTab!

It is very simple but VERY affective.

Quote:
“So you keep open tabs like libraries keep books… Aren’t you afraid Firefox will consume all your memory? Don’t you fear browser restarts because it takes so long to reload all your tabs?

Well, you shouldn’t! Because now you can put all the tabs you don’t need on your bar tab, and only pay for the load when you actually want to visit them.”

>startup time scales linearly with the number of tabs session restore has to restore.

By: jmdesp

jmdesp — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 08:46:42 +0000

Loading time with many tabs should be a *top* priority for Mozilla. That’s a major real life problem. I go with bastiaan’s solution : delay loading of tab, only show the title, load them when the user selects them. People with a problem of large number of tabs actually use them as some kind of alternative to bookmarks.

By: bastiaan

bastiaan — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 21:27:50 +0000

It seems to me there’s no way to eliminate disk access delays, although they can probably be reduced somewhat.

I think a better way to solve this problem would be to delay loading the profile tabbing data until the Firefox window, with one empty tab, is available. Then the previous tabs can be loaded in the background while the UI is available to the user.