The latest versions of Firefox can handle up to 1,691 tabs at once, according to tests conducted by Mozilla developer Dietrich Ayala. The tests showed that newer versions of Firefox, such as versions 55 and 56, bring significant improvements in speed and memory usage, with significant benefits for users who open multiple tabs at once.
In June, Nick Nguyen, vice president of Firefox, announced the release of Firefox 54. It was considered one of the best versions, due to the “multi-processing” feature introduced in the browser. This multi-processing feature was called Electrolysis or E10S. Firefox E10S helped increase efficiency, while handling up to four processes.
Now, new tests conducted on Firefox 55 and 56 show that the new versions of the browser can handle more than 1500 tabs. Users who work with multiple tabs at once should consider these Firefox builds if they haven't already.
Ayala opened exactly 1691 Firefox tabs to analyze the speed and memory of various versions of the browser, from Firefox 20 to Firefox 56. During testing, it took 8 minutes to open all the tabs in Firefox 51, as opposed to just 15 seconds to open all those tabs in version 55.
This experiment demonstrates not only the speed improvement of the newer versions, but also a striking change in memory usage. As noted, memory usage dropped from 2 gigabytes to half a gigabyte. “There may not have been any actual web pages loaded, but look at this, haters: I now have 1.5 Gb of memory to load web pages, which I didn’t have before,” Ayala wrote.
The more tabs we have running in our browser, the more memory is consumed, which is why browser optimization is required. And this is the optimized Firefox.
Although no one will ever open that many tabs, Firefox assures its users that they will not face any problems in their work, even with multiple processes, if necessary.
You can find more information about the tests conducted here.
