Do you alternate between improving these things and worsening them? Could you possibly not worsen them, or at least warn us to not upgrade when that happens?
Regressions are really not OK. People are trying to use this browser. Well, mostly they were trying to use it. I stuck it out longer than most. Having 512 MB of RAM and dozens of tabs is my use case.
Oh god I thought I was alone on this. I've been talking to various Firefox users and nobody was able to relate with me. I usually keep Firefox open 24/7 with around 20-30 tabs open (~6 or so pinned). Every time I am typing (like in a hangout popup window or in a HN comment) Firefox is micro-stuttering and freezing and it eats away some of the words I am typing and it becomes very frustrating. I ended up typing comments in vim and then copypasting because it was faster. It feels like typing in an SSH connection with high-latency.
Also when scrolling long pages (like reddit threads) the "view" takes a while to update so I end up scrolling down to a totally grey page which then updates with content over and over again. And don't make me talk about twitter taking ages and setting my CPU to 100% (one core) with loud as hell fan every time I click on "show 50 new tweets"...
I have 16GB of RAM and a 2-years old top-of-the-line (back then) i7 CPU on a laptop, I shouldn't be having these issues...
Are you exaggerating ? If not, may I suggest an alternative way to browse the web ?
I use multiple virtual desktops. Each desktop logically caters to one task. Each browser window is logically grouped under one activity.
For example my desktop may look like this :
Virtual Desktop 1 ( Communications ):
* Outlook
* Lync
* Flowdock etc
Virtual Desktop 2 ( Development ):
* ConEmu/ Command prompt
* Intellij
* Browser Window with multiple tabs for referring stuff
Virtual Desktop 3 ( Procrastination ):
Browser Window 1:
* Various pages opened from HN
Browser Window 2:
* Various pages concerning World War 2
* Various pages investigating different investment strategies.
The advantage of this approach is that once you are done you can close browser windows and tabs. Done with researching World War 2 ? Close that window, all associated tabs close automatically. If you accidentally close a tab, you can always bring it back with Ctrl + Shift + T. If you want to refer to a previously opened window, you can always do a simple search in browser history.
Keeps your system responsive and makes it easy to find things.
8 or 16 gigabytes of RAM (got an upgrade)
8 virtual desktops, about 5 occupied with browser windows
1 to 20 windows per desktop
1 to 20 tabs per window
That is likely 100 to 300 tabs total. No, I really don't want to close them. I want more open, but performance is a problem. I like to keep going back to tabs that have been open for months. It hurts to close tabs because then I lose track of what I am working on; the scroll bar position matters and the page might even be gone from the web. Sometimes I write a comment on a web site like this one, then let it sit for days if I am unsure I want to post it.
