In mid-June, we announced the official entry of Firefox into the multiprocess club. Its operation differs somewhat from Google Chrome's mechanism, but Mozilla's browser has gained much ground in stability. However, when looking at loading times and overall memory consumption, Firefox tends to disappoint. Still, adjustments to version 55 are moving at a good pace, and developer Dietrich Ayala decided to put that build to the test by opening 1,691 tabs at once. The browser took 15 seconds.
My relationship with Mozilla Firefox continues under a "love-hate" banner. Version 54 has given me a very stable environment for work and browsing, but on more than one occasion I caught it devouring a gigabyte of RAM for two tabs. Regardless of how much memory your computer has, wasting is not using, and that's a detail all modern browsers seem to have forgotten. Fortunately, Mozilla has picked up the gauntlet and continues its optimization efforts, a task that began with the formal introduction of Quantum. Firefox 55 is currently in beta and, if my calculations don't fail, should hit "release" on August 8. What can we expect? Well... how does 1,691 tabs in 15 seconds sound?
The 1,691-tab stress test
That's the profile of Mozilla developer Dietrich Ayala. If the browser doesn't hang mid-way, a startup with 1,691 tabs would normally take several minutes. However, Ayala found that things have improved with Firefox 55... and by a lot. After tweaking the test conditions (the goal is to assess Firefox's response, not page and web app loading times) and reproducing the process with earlier browser builds, the developer confirmed that Firefox 55 can open 1,691 tabs in 15 seconds—a blink compared to the almost eight minutes of Firefox 51.
Memory usage: a surprising improvement
If we move to memory consumption, the numbers are surprising depending on how you look at them. Firefox 54 claims just over two gigabytes of RAM with those 1,691 tabs, but builds 55 and 56 sit below half a gigabyte. While no pages were rendered, this highlights the cumulative overhead of tabs in Firefox and the solid work of another developer, Kevin Jones, in reducing it. Of course, benchmarks don't tell the whole story for browsers, and we'll have to wait for the final version to see how well it actually performs.
