Pls.help settle on-going argument w/ my BF. I open multiple tabs; he runs multiple copies of Firefox. Which is more efficient? Is it a big difference?
It seems intuitive to me that opening multiple tabs (w/ one copy of Firefox running) should be more efficient than opening multiple copies of Firefox, but I can't find anything about this when I google it or search your site. Which is better, or does it not matter? If one is better over the other, is there a lot of difference?
f it matters, I usually have 4-6 tabs open, but sometimes 10 or so. He usually has 4-6 copies of Firefox running, w/ 1 or 2 tabs each.
I'm tired of arguing this, so I'd really like to know. Thank you!
Chosen solution
Efficiency has a lot of meanings. Firefox might need a little more memory to use multiple windows, but memory is relatively cheap and abundant on newer PCs. Perhaps more important is each person's working style.
Please note that there is a difference between opening many windows in a single session of Firefox and running multiple sessions of Firefox. In the latter scenario, you would be loading the entire executable multiple times (and to avoid conflicts loading a separate Firefox profile in each), and you would only want to do that for testing or in other special cases.
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It's a matter of personal preference.
Tabs can be organized using the Tab Groups feature, or an extension like Tab Mix Plus.
- Use Tab Groups to organize a lot of tabs
- Tab Mix Plus is incompatible with Firefox 17 - update it to fix the issue
But if you prefer sorting tabs into separate windows, there's no reason to stop.
Chosen Solution
Efficiency has a lot of meanings. Firefox might need a little more memory to use multiple windows, but memory is relatively cheap and abundant on newer PCs. Perhaps more important is each person's working style.
Please note that there is a difference between opening many windows in a single session of Firefox and running multiple sessions of Firefox. In the latter scenario, you would be loading the entire executable multiple times (and to avoid conflicts loading a separate Firefox profile in each), and you would only want to do that for testing or in other special cases.
You can see the Firefox memory usage on the about:memory page and compare the numbers.
You need to refresh that page to reflect changes to open tabs and windows.
There is another reason why running separate windows. Cor-el helped me with this one. If you run with multiple tabs, there is only one copy of Java Console available to the entire environment. In most situations, this is not an issue. However, there are some applets that require exclusive use of the console in order to run properly This cannot be done with a single window. In fact, it cannot be done with multiple windows if they all share the same profile.
However, it is possible to run multiple Firefox processes, each with its own profile/context. For details on the problem and the solution, see