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Why do you have a profile w/ 1600 tabs in it. If whatever it is is so important, aren't you afraid to lose it? I'd be terrified that one time Firefox just would

Why do you have a profile w/ 1600 tabs in it. If whatever it is is so important, aren't you afraid to lose it? I'd be terrified that one time Firefox just wouldn't shut down clean.

canuckistani 9y ago
This isn't his main profile ( well I hope not any way ), it's a profile used to test extreme startup performance issues.
- ehsankia 9y ago
  You'd be surprised. And if not that many, I know many many people with 100+ tabs. I never really understood the workflow myself. Every time I have more than 20 tabs, I generally can get to the page I'm looking for faster by googling it than having to find it in my tabs. But I guess to each their own.
  - dijit 9y ago
    Sometimes after searching for some time I'll come to something quite arcane that I want to hold on to. (I know this is what bookmarks are for but the UI is so poor here) Other times I'll find something and think; I'll read that later. Or. Less often, I'll be recurring into different things looking for solutions to a problem I have. Eventually I'll find something relevant and close the tab that was last opened, I forget the others and they become orphaned in my like of tabs I'll likely never get back to, until my browser crashes hard and I lose everything. After the mild panic a wave of relief washes over me, and I go about my business hoarding tabs once again.
    - ehsankia 9y ago
      The first example, it seems like we need a better UI for bookmarks. Something that allows you to organize and quickly search them (url, title and even maybe page content). For the second, we all do that, but again, the optimal thing there would be to have some extension or tool that keeps track of your "to read" list. As for tabs stacking when you're looking for a solution, that's generally what my comment referred to. I know somewhere in those 20 tabs, there's one for the documentations to the function I'm trying to use, but it's honestly faster to search for it again than look at those 20 tabs for it.
  - reeboo 9y ago
    For me its a linear view of how I got somewhere when I'm doing exploratory research. Usually a tree of tabs (I use side tabs) will start with a google search, then go to a site, then another site, then another. When I find something interesting and think "how did I get here again?" and I can just glance at my open tabs. This context is useful if I get sidetracked/distracted by a coworker, so I can retrace why I was looking at a certain page.
    - nwjtkjn 9y ago
      Is there an extension that can display tab history as an actual tree?
  - bzbarsky 9y ago
    Typing some part of the tab title or url in the URL bar and then selecting the "switch to tab" option in the dropdown is faster than googling. Prefix with "% " if you want to search _only_ the tabs and not your history or bookmarks. Of course not all browsers have that feature, but Firefox does. So finding the tab you want is pretty easy.
adrianmonk 9y ago
I feel like preserving open tabs across a crash is not that hard from a technical point of view. The thing I'd be afraid of is more that something would decide (for me) that I don't want to preserve tabs.
- aboodman 9y ago
  Right. I guess as an engineer, I would be afraid to use something for data storage that is intended more as ephemeral state. But I suppose if you back it up you can always go back.
  - bzbarsky 9y ago
    The Firefox session is not intended as ephemeral state, fwiw. Certainly the session-restore code doesn't treat it that way.
mkl 9y ago
That's why you save the tabs periodically. Session Buddy works well for Chrome (and it's really needed there). Firefox is much more reliable IME, and I haven't needed a backup in many years, but I still use SendTabURLs, as it makes finding and bulk closing tabs easier. There may be better options for Firefox, but I haven't needed one so haven't gone looking (used TabMixPlus years ago though). Tabs are just much more convenient bookmarks.
huntie 9y ago
You can backup all of your tabs by copying the .mozilla folder. If you were really concerned you could just setup a cron job to do this once a day.
bzbarsky 9y ago
> I'd be terrified that one time Firefox just wouldn't shut down clean. This is why Firefox stores a sessionstore file. _And_ a backup of that sessionstore file. And a previous version of that sessionstore file. And a backup of the file as of the last several times you did a browser update. The idea is to never lose the session in an irrecoverable way.
- toast0 9y ago
  From my experience (max tab count of maybe 30, usual close to 4 or 5), when I tried to restore, I would always get the 'we tried hard, but couldn't do it' type of message, so I don't even bother trying anymore. My guess is that all the people relying on session storage are losing a bunch of data, but they just don't know it because how do you know when you lost one of 1000 tabs. At one of my jobs, they instituted weekly scheduled reboots of desktops; after several times of getting my sessions killed by that, I started making an effort to close everything at the end of the day; I don't always close all my tabs, but often, and I never leave more than two or three. Whatever was interesting, but I couldn't read, I don't worry about -- if it's important, it'll probably come up again; I just leave a couple things open if there's work I need to do on them when I get back.

Why do you have a profile w/ 1600 tabs in it. If whatever it is is so important, aren't you afraid to lose it? I'd be terrified that one time Firefox just wouldn't shut down clean.

canuckistani 9y ago

This isn't his main profile ( well I hope not any way ), it's a profile used to test extreme startup performance issues.

ehsankia 9y ago
You'd be surprised. And if not that many, I know many many people with 100+ tabs. I never really understood the workflow myself. Every time I have more than 20 tabs, I generally can get to the page I'm looking for faster by googling it than having to find it in my tabs. But I guess to each their own.
- dijit 9y ago
  Sometimes after searching for some time I'll come to something quite arcane that I want to hold on to. (I know this is what bookmarks are for but the UI is so poor here) Other times I'll find something and think; I'll read that later. Or. Less often, I'll be recurring into different things looking for solutions to a problem I have. Eventually I'll find something relevant and close the tab that was last opened, I forget the others and they become orphaned in my like of tabs I'll likely never get back to, until my browser crashes hard and I lose everything. After the mild panic a wave of relief washes over me, and I go about my business hoarding tabs once again.
  - ehsankia 9y ago
    The first example, it seems like we need a better UI for bookmarks. Something that allows you to organize and quickly search them (url, title and even maybe page content). For the second, we all do that, but again, the optimal thing there would be to have some extension or tool that keeps track of your "to read" list. As for tabs stacking when you're looking for a solution, that's generally what my comment referred to. I know somewhere in those 20 tabs, there's one for the documentations to the function I'm trying to use, but it's honestly faster to search for it again than look at those 20 tabs for it.
- reeboo 9y ago
  For me its a linear view of how I got somewhere when I'm doing exploratory research. Usually a tree of tabs (I use side tabs) will start with a google search, then go to a site, then another site, then another. When I find something interesting and think "how did I get here again?" and I can just glance at my open tabs. This context is useful if I get sidetracked/distracted by a coworker, so I can retrace why I was looking at a certain page.
  - nwjtkjn 9y ago
    Is there an extension that can display tab history as an actual tree?
- bzbarsky 9y ago
  Typing some part of the tab title or url in the URL bar and then selecting the "switch to tab" option in the dropdown is faster than googling. Prefix with "% " if you want to search _only_ the tabs and not your history or bookmarks. Of course not all browsers have that feature, but Firefox does. So finding the tab you want is pretty easy.

adrianmonk 9y ago

I feel like preserving open tabs across a crash is not that hard from a technical point of view. The thing I'd be afraid of is more that something would decide (for me) that I don't want to preserve tabs.

aboodman 9y ago
Right. I guess as an engineer, I would be afraid to use something for data storage that is intended more as ephemeral state. But I suppose if you back it up you can always go back.
- bzbarsky 9y ago
  The Firefox session is not intended as ephemeral state, fwiw. Certainly the session-restore code doesn't treat it that way.

mkl 9y ago

That's why you save the tabs periodically. Session Buddy works well for Chrome (and it's really needed there). Firefox is much more reliable IME, and I haven't needed a backup in many years, but I still use SendTabURLs, as it makes finding and bulk closing tabs easier. There may be better options for Firefox, but I haven't needed one so haven't gone looking (used TabMixPlus years ago though). Tabs are just much more convenient bookmarks.

huntie 9y ago

You can backup all of your tabs by copying the .mozilla folder. If you were really concerned you could just setup a cron job to do this once a day.

bzbarsky 9y ago

> I'd be terrified that one time Firefox just wouldn't shut down clean. This is why Firefox stores a sessionstore file. _And_ a backup of that sessionstore file. And a previous version of that sessionstore file. And a backup of the file as of the last several times you did a browser update. The idea is to never lose the session in an irrecoverable way.

toast0 9y ago
From my experience (max tab count of maybe 30, usual close to 4 or 5), when I tried to restore, I would always get the 'we tried hard, but couldn't do it' type of message, so I don't even bother trying anymore. My guess is that all the people relying on session storage are losing a bunch of data, but they just don't know it because how do you know when you lost one of 1000 tabs. At one of my jobs, they instituted weekly scheduled reboots of desktops; after several times of getting my sessions killed by that, I started making an effort to close everything at the end of the day; I don't always close all my tabs, but often, and I never leave more than two or three. Whatever was interesting, but I couldn't read, I don't worry about -- if it's important, it'll probably come up again; I just leave a couple things open if there's work I need to do on them when I get back.