It’s a well-known fact that the two most widely used browsers in the world are Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. And while users used to choose one or the other for various reasons, recent information reveals that Mozilla plans to hit Google Chrome in its Achilles’ heel: tab number to speed ratio. We know that Google Chrome is a nightmare if you have too many tabs open due to it running individual processes for each tab. This means that it eats up more memory than a browser that functions on a different system.
Thousands of Tabs Open
Still, it’s true that Chrome improved over the years in this respect. And until now, Mozilla Firefox wasn’t exactly speedy when it had too many tabs open. But that’s about to change soon. While Firefox 54, the current version of the browser, starts lagging behind when too many tabs are open, this issue is no longer present in Firefox 55 beta, according to a very telling test ran by Mozilla developer Dietrich Ayala.
Ayala conducted quite the test on the browser in order to find out how much it can endure and how far it can go. He tested Firefox 54 against Firefox 55 with a grand total of 1,691 tabs open. Yes, you read that right: the two versions of the browser were tested out by having well over a thousand tabs open at the same time. And the results? Well, while Firefox 54 was undoubtedly sluggish in this situation, Firefox 55 had little to no issues to load all these tabs. And when we get to Firefox 56 (which is still unavailable on all fronts), the progress is more than obvious.
It seems that Google Chrome is starting to lose some ground to Mozilla Firefox, which is a very surprising turn of events. Let’s just wait and see what happens next.