Firefox 4 to Include Optimized Session Restore

By | September 22, 2010 | 21 Comments

Firefox 4 to Include Optimized Session RestoreRecently, Firefox 4 nightly builds has received a yet another feature that is “cascaded sessions restore”.

From now on, when you restart Firefox, all your opened tabs won’t be opened at once. Instead, three most important pages (number can be changed, see .sessionstore.max_concurrent_tabs) will load firstly.

For example: if you switch to a different tab, Firefox will start loading it immediately, even if it didn’t before. Result? More usable web browser during launch.

As authors say, idea is based on Firefox BarTab extension.


About (Author Profile)


Vygantas is a former web designer whose projects are used by companies such as AMD, NVIDIA and departed Westood Studios. Being passionate about software, Vygantas began his journalism carrier back in 2007 when he founded FavBrowser.com. Having said that, he is also an adrenaline junkie who enjoys good books, fitness activities and Forex trading.

  • max1c

    lold @ this.

  • Ichan

    Firefox is so slow that it can only manager to load 3 tabs per session.

  • Rasmus

    Where Firefox 4 Final will come out? About?

  • RamaSubbu SK

    I like this features!

  • nobody

    i like this feature, in fact all browsers would benefit from this kind of speculative loading, not only FF.
     
    opening a sesion of 100 tabs in ANY browser will lead them to load rather slowly and in random order. and in opera, youll be struck with NSL (Never Stop Loading) issue, that makes restoring opera sessions a nightmare.
     
    on the other hand, id really like to know if Panorama is in its final version, or there will be some updates, because now, it is a great idea, but implementation SUCKS big time, and performance is.. well.. civ5 runs faster than it

    • stve

      @nobody its pathetic that you manage to disparage Opera with every post you make on this site.
      I use Opera & have had no problems with Sessions opening many tabs.

    • Toxigene

      @nobody: You’re a moron who repeatedly keeps bashing Opera on baseless grounds. In my experience, Firefox sucks the most with session restoring. Its crash recovery is garbage and always keeps wiping caches. It takes forever and a half to load even 15 tabs. Chrome always reloads pages even the ones which should be in cache. Opera is the only one where I repeatedly keep more than a hundred tabs open and it restores them greatly and the fastest each time. Firefox really needed some work on its session manager and it’s good to see that they’re doing it now.

      • nobody

        bla bla bla
         
        opera restores pages from cache – sure, great. problem is, that if you want to read their new content, you are going to f5 anyway, because what good is yesterday news? what is the use of loading pages ‘fast’ that you will reload anyway because their content is old?
         
        btw. opera STILL doesnt have a ctrl+f5 FORCE reload of a page (that all other browsers have), so if opera decides that old it is what you see, clearing the cache is the only option to see the ‘new’.
         
        btw2. denying existence of NSL bug while opera itself admits is existence (and tries to fix it for the n-th time) is rather pathetic

        • Dante

          Read something about History Navigation Mode in Opera.

          • nobody

            or maybe you can be less cryptic and tell me what this has to do with anything?

          • Dante

            Is about page loading (cache or server): http://bit.ly/ddUvWp

          • nobody

            ok, read it and tried it.
             
            it still doesnt solve a problem – with anything else than setting ‘always download’ (3 or 1, dont remember) there is no option to manualy force download of a page. ctrl+f5 from all other browsers is missing
             
            also ‘always download’ is not ‘always’ – ie it respects caching rules set by originating server, that is a pain when developing anything. only way is to disable cache altogether for entire application.
             
            default setting makes opera do what all other browsers do when opening 100 tabs – crawl OR reload from cache, requiring you to f5 manualy. there is no magic involved

          • Dante

            Ok, but this isn`t clear true:
            “opera restores pages from cache – sure, great. problem is, that if you want to read their new content, you are going to f5 anyway…”

          • nobody

            what isnt clear nor true? what i see/saw using opera is:
             
            if opera is set to ‘always download’ then it will CRAWL (like all other browsers) opening session with 100 pages.
             
            if it is set to ‘use cache’ then it will quickly load pages from cache, but many of these will be OLD. if you use stuff like news pages or whatever, youll see pages from few days ago. so if you want to use this page (see current content) you have to refresh it anyway (pressing F5 key)
             
            if opera is set to ‘inteligently’ handle this case, it will almost always fallback to first scenario when restoring the sessions. there is no settings that will make sure that you see recent pages AND use cache to speed up the process of restoring the session.
             
            this new FF optimized thingy is trying to solve this problem, and i really would like it to succeed, and then be copied by other browsers.

          • Dante

            What? Opera is in default Automatic setting (Opera decides whether to load the page from cache or retrieve it from the server anew) that mean part of sites are load from server and part from cache. In my session Opera download data from server for forum and news site and use right cache for static page.
            In some of tabs I want really fresh data  and they use automatic refresh every 1 hour.

          • mabdul

            @Dante why are you using bit.ly or other shortner services in this blog? This is not SMS or twitter where every character counts! please: don’t do this.

            @Vygantas can you add a extension that automaticly replace whose links with the correct url?

    • http://opera.com daddylo

      Dude seriously upgrade your Internet deal to faster Internet or GTFO :P.

  • http://opera.com daddylo

    I met people that said FF session restore is bad , and doesn’t work sometimes. Hope tey fixed these issues. At the end of the day Opera is the best at it , they developed it in the first place, that’s why I prefer original stuff.
    I really hope FF 4 will be good, if they released FF 4 and within 1 week if they released a stability or security fix we know that beta testers need some training lmao.
     
    daddylo.

    • nobody

      just like opera 9.50, 10.0 and 10.50 releases that were patched immediately (2-6 weeks) after release and were a disasters bug-wise?

      • http://opera.com daddylo

        Dude, read again, I said within first week not 2 to 6 weeks and also nobody can make a perfect software if you are not aware of it yet.
        I didn’t say Opera perfect, Opera snapshot doesn’t crash on me, neither Chromium builds.
        But FF can be crashed just installing an add-on, that’s why I do not like add-on based browsers. They need cheap spare parts to run it, great softwares comes built in. If I am right just to make change the tab width I need to install an add-on. How cheap is that ……..
        I will not be surprised if in a future releases they remove maximum connection to server from config and put that to add-on lol.
        Enough  said.
        daddylo

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