Edit: I want to apologize to eridal. I misread his/her statement and though the browser in question was Chrome, not Firefox.
So, public apolgy: I'm very sorry, eridal. I thought you wrote something you did not. My comment was wrong as a result. I have corrected my mistake, and wish to apologize to you personally for misreading what you wrote.
Original message with the offending part removed, mistakenly assuming eridal was using Chrome (I'm not sure why I read it that way):
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I stopped using Chromium in part because once I passed the 100-150 tab threshold, memory usage skyrockets to 4-6GiB. It's OK with 16GiB RAM, but usability diminishes pretty badly (the stock UI is NOT conducive to more than 80-100 tabs), and if you're stupid enough to visit a site with Flash, the probability of it leaking and eating up another 2+GiB begin to approach 1.
I like Chrome for its speed--if you have 20 tabs or fewer open. But I can certainly correlate my own experiences with that of the GP comment.
I, at least, do typically run with anywhere from 50-200 tabs (or more!) at any given time. Yeah, there's some slowdown if you're running on an 8GB machine (I'm typing this on a Macbook Air with a Firefox session with at least 100 tabs open at the moment (SEE EDIT)), but it's certainly way more than I used to get with Chrome before I switched back to Firefox a couple years back (Tree View Tabs being the motivating factor). Currently using 5.4GB of RAM (OSX is reporting a "Compressed Mem" of 2.96GB), and it's currently pegging one of the cores of the i7 on this thing. This is after about a week of nonstop (i.e. same Firefox process) use, and with Flash present in a lot of places (like the 20+ Github tabs I have open, thanks to Github using Flash for its silly "click here to copy a link to your clipboard" feature; I really need to get those wretched things blocked); a lot of things will clear out pretty well after restarting and restoring the opened tabs (though this is partly because they're not loaded into memory again until they're accessed again).
EDIT: After posting this comment, I closed all my tabs (something which causes one of my extensions - probably Tree Style Tab - to throw a confirmation dialog with the number of tabs). The number was 233, plus another ten or so in another window. I must say, that's pretty damn good, all things considered.
I'm trying out Nightly right now to see if I can push that even further with the new e10s features.
Same here. I'm regularly hitting 200+ tabs on multiple profiles for various reasons (news, documentation, etc.). This is precisely why I use Firefox for all my browsing usage (and have for some time). Chrome/Chromium chokes once you hit about 100-150 tabs, and the tab UI is not usable once open tabs fall off the edge of the window (there's probably an extension to fix this).
Now, I will admit that Firefox misbehaves once you hit about the 500 tab threshold (or higher) to the extent that closing it takes longer. But since tabs aren't loaded on restart until you click them, its memory usage tends to stay much, much lower during regular usage.
I want to like Chrome. It's fast, it's pretty speedy, but for my use case, it's not ideal. It's good for some things, but Firefox is much better behaved!
I don't doubt. Firefox with hundreds of tabs works well with 4GB RAM, and somewhat bearable on 2GB, with occasional restart once per week or so to clean it up.
On the other hand, I wasn't able to use Chrome the same way I use Firefox on PC with 8GB RAM.
> why don't? unused tabs won't consume much, or at least noticeable to me.
Because I COMPLETELY misread your original comment. :( I thought it read that you were using Chrome, not Firefox.
I'm truly very sorry about that, eridal.
My experiences are just like yours, though. Firefox works great for me (relatively low memory usage, up to and including 200+ tabs). Chrome, on the other hand, not so much.
Hopefully you can see why I was surprised, but it was through the entire fault of my own eyes apparently interleaving another comment with yours. I'm an idiot. ;)
I have a 4GB Windows 7 machine with over 500 tabs in Firefox and it still runs Office, IE11 and various other stuff without any problems. Mind you, Firefox only loads tabs when you click on them, so only about 30-50 are actually "live"....
It works, kind of, as long as I don't try to run anything else at the same time.
The article persuaded me that Firefox may be worth a try again.
As for testing - you'd think testing on a range of hardware would be standard.
Testing exclusively on top spec machines is just unprofessional.