Oh well, I've been using Firefox since it's pheonix, firebird days!
I've never evangalised so hard about a piece of software, and every Linux and Apple user owe it a debt of gratitude, in as much that it was a good cross platform browser.
Performance wise, some upgrades have been for the better some for the worst. But don't get too sentimental about past incarnations. I remember there being memory issues in the 2.x line. I saw the browser eating over a half gig of ram once - and I nearly fell off my chair.
Those that have dozens of tabs open - I do think you need to ask yourself why? It just slows your computer down. I think we use them as replacement for bookmarks, which says something about the browser UI.
I've only recently left 3.6 to try out TenFourFox on my power pc - which at first felt a million times better, but after my initial excitement, I noticed it's a bit of a cpu hog. Idling with Gmail open, it seems to be quite greedy. Which suggests to me that there is an inherent problem with the browser - imagine if I had a handful of web apps open.
To say Firefox is broken is a bit strong. It would be better to say it has it's faults and could be faster. If it's DB is a bottleneck - could it be swapped for something else?
I do however think the browser UI is in serious need of some love, and could do with some innovation. It's barely changed. For example tab management is dire.
> Those that have dozens of tabs open - I do think you need to ask yourself why?
Spatial memory. If my tabs are not exactly where I left them last week, I utterly forget what I was doing. (I'm one of those people whose room looks like a mess but I can tell you where anything is -- so long as no-one's moved it.)
If tabs are slowing things down, then the browser should "background" tabs that haven't been used in a while. (I'd say swap them to disk but the OS does this already!) Pause Javascript, Flash, etc.
Don't get me wrong, I have got a bit of a bad tab habit that I'm trying to break. It's all too easy to open loads of them, never to read the content. In the meantime they just use resources.
I think having lots of tabs open isn't good for focus, but that's another topic.
What I was getting at, is that I believe we use tabs as bookmark replacements. Which is stupid because bookmarks are cheap. This shows a flaw in the browser.
To me it's the browser UI that let's you down. If bookmark management were better, you might not use the tabs.
Back to the spatial memory, I have a better grasp of tabs when they bunch - ala Opera and Chrome than when they scroll. I get lost in Firefox pretty quickly, the newer tab management features just don't work for me.
I don't see why you can't have a mix of live tabs, and frozen tabs.
After using Gmail for years - I'm going back to a desktop client rather reluctantly, just because it doesn't use much in the way of system resources while idling.
I was a fan of tabs initially, but in some ways I've gone off them. I'd like the window manager to look after multiple windows better, rather than use tabs.
I'd love to see some radical development in the browser UI.
"If tabs are slowing things down, then the browser should "background" tabs that haven't been used in a while. (I'd say swap them to disk but the OS does this already!) Pause Javascript, Flash, etc."
This would massively break the web. Even throttling setTimeout() calls for tabs in the background caused breakage.
I've never evangalised so hard about a piece of software, and every Linux and Apple user owe it a debt of gratitude, in as much that it was a good cross platform browser.
Performance wise, some upgrades have been for the better some for the worst. But don't get too sentimental about past incarnations. I remember there being memory issues in the 2.x line. I saw the browser eating over a half gig of ram once - and I nearly fell off my chair.
Those that have dozens of tabs open - I do think you need to ask yourself why? It just slows your computer down. I think we use them as replacement for bookmarks, which says something about the browser UI.
I've only recently left 3.6 to try out TenFourFox on my power pc - which at first felt a million times better, but after my initial excitement, I noticed it's a bit of a cpu hog. Idling with Gmail open, it seems to be quite greedy. Which suggests to me that there is an inherent problem with the browser - imagine if I had a handful of web apps open.
To say Firefox is broken is a bit strong. It would be better to say it has it's faults and could be faster. If it's DB is a bottleneck - could it be swapped for something else?
I do however think the browser UI is in serious need of some love, and could do with some innovation. It's barely changed. For example tab management is dire.