1521519 - (super-lazy-load) Implement SUPER lazy tabs: load only URLs and cached icons

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Session Restore, enhancement, P5)

Description

[User Dderss]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:65.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/65.0

Steps to reproduce:

I am starting FireFox with a big session with a lot of tabs.

Actual results:

When I just start FireFox it already allocates a giant amount of memory because even before I click on any other tab than current it required some serious memory for it beforehand. I have all of those settings on:
browser.sessionstore.restore_on_demand -- true
browser.sessionstore.restore_pinned_tabs_on_demand -- true
browser.sessionstore.restore_tabs_lazily -- true

Expected results:

Maybe with the implementation of a new setting like "browser.sessionstore.restore_tabs_on_demand_super_lazily" FireFox will be able to start with only barebone memory footprint and would not require even a single byte excess per (not activated yet) tab -- just URL and a cached icon for the site.

Obviously, this in effect will turn non-active tabs to just horizontal bookmarks in a tab object wrapper, and many of the properties of a honest tab will be empty, many methods will not apply.

Also, of course, the change would make click-on-tab-to-load process slower, and this is why it can not be turned by default and should only stay as an option via "about:config".

And yet it would be amazing to see FireFox tiny.

Comment 1

[Mike de Boer [:mikedeboer]]

Are you saying you would like to work on this feature? This would really need help from the community to get any traction, because we most likely don't have the resources available within Mozilla to work on this, I'm afraid. :(

Comment 2

[User Dderss]

Well, my C++ is rusty and I have never really dug into the giant FF code.

Do you guys have a page about FF/SessionStore internals for newbies? Then at least I could try to assess if I can make anything of use on the matter.

Of course, even without this, I would be eventually able to understand things anyway, but usually, complex projects have many layers of abstraction both in their object and functional part, so it will take forever with the time I have.

Thanks in advance.