Untimely tabs reloading

[spoirier]

Hello. In the last years as I worked with Windows, I found a big advantage of Firefox over Chrome to be the fact Firefox always kept all page contents in memory while many tabs were open, while Chrome was dropping some of the tabs contents and then reloading them when coming back to them. But now since a couple of months, I work with Linux MX and it appears that Firefox (which is regularly updated) is falling into the same vice which I had experienced with Chrome. My hardware has largely enough RAM and disk space, then I looked into about:config and found that Firefox restricted its uses of memory and disk arbitrarily, so I modified a few parameters to set much bigger cache spaces than default values were. Checking about:cache now confirms that both memory and disk cache have a lot of free space, but the trouble still occurs. I may have about 30 tabs open in both normal window and private window, and I may keep this open for several days. Reload destoys valuable aspects of page contents, such as the exact point where I had stopped watching a video on youtube. This is so annoying. I am not familiar with configuration. I do not know if it is a difference between Windows and Linux versions of Firefox, or because of a recent destructive "update". Which parameter(s) do I need to switch to fix this problem, if possible ? thanks.

[Jon]

Hey @spoirier, 

Thanks for this feedback! For more immediate assistance with any technical/performance related issues, please visit our Support site. That way we can help you find a solution in the quickest manner.

[spoirier]

Thanks for reply but the support site does not seem to contain anything relevant to the issue I described. Or if you think it does, then please share the link to the exact page with such information. I do not think I need personal assistance, because it seems to be an issue everyone may suffer even if they do not pay attention and care to report it. If the issue only occurs on some computers and not all (such as Linux vs Windows), then I see no good reason for such discrepancy, which is then a big bug which developers need to fix. I do not believe the struggle I went through, looking for a fix and not finding, can be considered my personal problem, and I actually have hardly any hope of a possibility to fix it through user configuration; I believe it to be the responsibility of developers to provide a very simple solution, which is visibly not available. I understand there may exist users who are okay with such automatic dropping and reloading of pages, but for this case at least I believe the choice should appear very clearly in Settings page, which it doesn't. If the solution was available to users as it should, I guess you would be able to directly provide the answer instead of passively expecting me to search elsewhere. Otherwise, please ensure that the issue will be fixed in some coming update. Thanks.

[DWB1957]

Windows 7 here. I am having the same problem and feel the same way as spoirier.  I switched from Chrome to Firefox partly because of the persistence of tab content, which failure on Chrome's part was very frustrating, and everything was fine for years.  Now, starting maybe three upgrades ago, an idle tab goes blank after a while, showing a tiny squiggle on the tab header itself to indicate its now blank status, then must reload the tab once it has focus.  This normally doesn't take very long, but it should be happening at all.  It's our problem but it's your fault. Fix it.  Do better.

[DWB1957]

*shouldn't be happening at all

[DrBecks]

Yeah, I agree, same sh.. with Win 10. Why do the firefox programmers always want to copy Chrome?! And why do they steadily create new inconviniences with almost every update? And why don't we get help here in this thread? Mozilla support page? No, thanks, always the wrong infos and no possibility to contact Mozilla... I'm so fed up with Mozilla, I don't update anymore...

[mylostone]

I concur. There should be an option to disable any and all types of automatic reloads on all platforms, including mobile.

State and user input (ie page content and form data) should be considered sacrosanct and never be allowed to be discarded based on automatically initiated page refresh.

Thank you.