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Same. Recently I tried Brave because of all the praise but turns out the browser can only display around 80 tabs on the tab bar and every further tab simply nev

Same. Recently I tried Brave because of all the praise but turns out the browser can only display around 80 tabs on the tab bar and every further tab simply never shows up even if it's in the foreground. I've seen mobile browsers handle many tabs better. I'm staying with Firefox, though I think Brave is probably still a good recommendation for users that don't want to go through the effort of installing an ad blocker. Edit: so I just looked and it turns out you can enable tab bar scrolling on chrome://flags/#scrollable-tabstrip. Why is that even disabled by default?

andybak 3y ago
> I've seen mobile browsers handle many tabs better. It's my understanding that on mobile, tabs are unloaded from memory nearly instantly. You lose state but they use almost no resources. (I wish this was an option out of the box on Desktop. I've had extensions that do this and it's a godsend)
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- NavinF 3y ago
  Chrome already does that by default: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/02/chrome-110-will-automatically-discard-background-tabs-heres-how-to-stop-it/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/02/chrome-110-will-auto...
  - seba_dos1 3y ago
    Firefox did for about two years now: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/unload-inactive-tabs-save-system-memory-firefox https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/unload-inactive-tabs-sa...
  - andybak 3y ago
    That seems like a good way to lose work if you're not careful. Although I would also argue that any well-designed web app should be able to handle this gracefully so maybe it will lead to better web apps. Infinite scroll is an especially bad offender here. If I'm 50 screens down on an infinite scroll that is work and a page refresh losing my place should be treated as a data-loss bug. (an even better idea is not to use infinite scroll at all)
    - NavinF 3y ago
      I've never lost any unfinished messages due to this. I'm pretty sure Chrome prioritizes tabs where you've typed in text. Link in that other comment suggests that Firefox does something similar: "This is a smart process that avoids unloading tabs that are playing media, using Picture-in-Picture, or WebRTC. For more technical information, see this blog post" And yeah fuck infinite scroll. I usually interact with such sites via their API or data export. Eg searching my YouTube Likes playlist is impossible on the web because I'd have to spend an hour scrolling before I can Ctrl+F
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  Huh. And I actually had to play around in Android settings to exempt Firefox from regular memory management, so it stops unloading tabs so aggressively. Not only this was a huge annoyance when browsing[0][1], it actually prevented me from using the one PWA I cared about[2] - it would literally blank out every time I switched away from and back to it, while having as much as a single trivial other app open, forcing me to kill and relaunch it. It's not that my phone was memory-constrained, we're talking a recent Samsung Galaxy flagship[3] - it's purely overly aggressive memory management on part of Firefox. -- [0] - Have 5 tabs open, all something trivial like HN, put away phone, grab it 5 minutes later, switch to other HN tab, ... wait half a minute for it to reload on a spotty connection at my in-laws' countryside home. [1] - Talking with others about how we experience technology, I'm starting to feel that I'm abnormally annoyed by large or unpredictable UI latency. [2] - TypingMind. [3] - I learned to save up and only buy high-end, thanks to the experience with my first smartphone, that turned out to be underspecced for its own functionality. It's probably a case of [1], but one time I deviated from this rule and got my wife a mid-range phone, we both started to regret it in a few months, so it's not only me who has low tolerance for jank.
backendanon 3y ago
I'm old and I code for a living, I have maybe at most a dozen tabs open on any day. I can't imagine needing 80 but now I see why chrome has that new search tabs drop down.
- alpaca128 3y ago
  On my main Firefox profile I'm rarely below 1000 tabs. I also use them as bookmarks and backlog, and every couple of months I scroll through the entire tab bar and close everything unimportant. The address bar also searches all open tabs and lets me jump to matches.
  - coldpie 3y ago
    FWIW the Firefox address bar also searches your history and bookmarks, so you can still retrieve those sites by searching for them without keeping a tab open for each one. Feel free to do what you like, obviously, but if having a zillion tabs open is causing you problems, know that there are other solutions :)
    - seba_dos1 3y ago
      Firefox already allows for proper tab UIs, so no need to search for other solutions there :)
      - coldpie 3y ago
        Just curious, what does that UI look like with 1,000 tabs open? Isn't it just like, one pixel per tab, or a scrollbar 50 times wider than your monitor? Is that actually useful?
        twic 3y ago
        That may be a reference to this classic Firefox extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
dom96 3y ago
> though I think Brave is probably still a good recommendation for users that don't want to go through the effort of installing an ad blocker Is that really the only reason to install Brave? Starting to wonder if I should just set up a Firefox that bundles uBlock Origin by default with a brand new name.
- djbusby 3y ago
  Work with libreFox? https://github.com/intika/Librefox https://github.com/intika/Librefox Or LibreWolf? https://librewolf.net/ https://librewolf.net/
- bashZorina_09 3y ago
  It also has nice privacy centric and QoL features that strip tracking URLs, removes "Open in App" banners and AMP pages + redirects (e.g. old.reddit) for mobile, fingerprint randomisation and of course, will probably be the best Chromium-based browser adblocker post Manifest V3, but yeah you can also spin these features into a bundled Firefox or use one of those Libre* forks which already does most of this afaik.
  - amf12 3y ago
    Brave does some shady shit too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36735777 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36735777
- TechBro8615 3y ago
  Don't forget the "basic attention tokens" (are we still doing crypto?)
  - Given_47 3y ago
    It’s an interesting concept tbf. I immediately disable it tho but I won’t shit on the idea cuz it’s at least a start
    - Barrin92 3y ago
andai 3y ago
Not to do a "you're holding it wrong", but why would you want so many tabs that they go offscreen? More precisely, why 100 tabs in 1 window instead of 10 tabs times 10 windows?
- Digit-Al 3y ago
  It's not something I ever do, but I imagine the answer to your question is that you can easily search for a particular tab when they are all in one window, but it would become a big chore if you had to switch between multiple windows and search each one to find a tab.
  - OkayPhysicist 3y ago
    On Firefox, at least, search will surface tabs in other windows. I often have 2 browser windows open, one for each monitor (one mostly for streaming content while I dick around on the other one).
- tredre3 3y ago
  I don't understand tab hoarding either but Chrome/Brave's tab bar poor design becomes a problem even in what I'd consider pretty mundane scenarios. Imagine you snap your browser to half your screen. Assuming it's not an ultrawide, you'll be able to fit maybe a dozen tabs before they're so tiny to be essentially useless.
- seba_dos1 3y ago
  Because it's easier to handle? You open a new tab with a mindless Ctrl+T, if I wanted to do some organizing I would clean up my desk instead.
- elishah 3y ago
  > More precisely, why 100 tabs in 1 window instead of 10 tabs times 10 windows? I still don't understand why some people believe that the correct answer is anything other than 100 windows. My platform has 40 years of well refined tools for managing windows, all of which work nicely and consistently across all applications. By comparison, all of the tab management systems are crude amatuerish knockoffs trying to reinvent the same tools from first principles, and isolated to a single application that's then inconsistent with everything else.

andybak 3y ago

> I've seen mobile browsers handle many tabs better. It's my understanding that on mobile, tabs are unloaded from memory nearly instantly. You lose state but they use almost no resources. (I wish this was an option out of the box on Desktop. I've had extensions that do this and it's a godsend)

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
NavinF 3y ago
Chrome already does that by default: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/02/chrome-110-will-automatically-discard-background-tabs-heres-how-to-stop-it/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/02/chrome-110-will-auto...
- seba_dos1 3y ago
  Firefox did for about two years now: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/unload-inactive-tabs-save-system-memory-firefox https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/unload-inactive-tabs-sa...
- andybak 3y ago
  That seems like a good way to lose work if you're not careful. Although I would also argue that any well-designed web app should be able to handle this gracefully so maybe it will lead to better web apps. Infinite scroll is an especially bad offender here. If I'm 50 screens down on an infinite scroll that is work and a page refresh losing my place should be treated as a data-loss bug. (an even better idea is not to use infinite scroll at all)
  - NavinF 3y ago
    I've never lost any unfinished messages due to this. I'm pretty sure Chrome prioritizes tabs where you've typed in text. Link in that other comment suggests that Firefox does something similar: "This is a smart process that avoids unloading tabs that are playing media, using Picture-in-Picture, or WebRTC. For more technical information, see this blog post" And yeah fuck infinite scroll. I usually interact with such sites via their API or data export. Eg searching my YouTube Likes playlist is impossible on the web because I'd have to spend an hour scrolling before I can Ctrl+F
TeMPOraL 3y ago
Huh. And I actually had to play around in Android settings to exempt Firefox from regular memory management, so it stops unloading tabs so aggressively. Not only this was a huge annoyance when browsing[0][1], it actually prevented me from using the one PWA I cared about[2] - it would literally blank out every time I switched away from and back to it, while having as much as a single trivial other app open, forcing me to kill and relaunch it. It's not that my phone was memory-constrained, we're talking a recent Samsung Galaxy flagship[3] - it's purely overly aggressive memory management on part of Firefox. -- [0] - Have 5 tabs open, all something trivial like HN, put away phone, grab it 5 minutes later, switch to other HN tab, ... wait half a minute for it to reload on a spotty connection at my in-laws' countryside home. [1] - Talking with others about how we experience technology, I'm starting to feel that I'm abnormally annoyed by large or unpredictable UI latency. [2] - TypingMind. [3] - I learned to save up and only buy high-end, thanks to the experience with my first smartphone, that turned out to be underspecced for its own functionality. It's probably a case of [1], but one time I deviated from this rule and got my wife a mid-range phone, we both started to regret it in a few months, so it's not only me who has low tolerance for jank.

backendanon 3y ago

I'm old and I code for a living, I have maybe at most a dozen tabs open on any day. I can't imagine needing 80 but now I see why chrome has that new search tabs drop down.

alpaca128 3y ago
On my main Firefox profile I'm rarely below 1000 tabs. I also use them as bookmarks and backlog, and every couple of months I scroll through the entire tab bar and close everything unimportant. The address bar also searches all open tabs and lets me jump to matches.
- coldpie 3y ago
  FWIW the Firefox address bar also searches your history and bookmarks, so you can still retrieve those sites by searching for them without keeping a tab open for each one. Feel free to do what you like, obviously, but if having a zillion tabs open is causing you problems, know that there are other solutions :)
  - seba_dos1 3y ago
    Firefox already allows for proper tab UIs, so no need to search for other solutions there :)
    - coldpie 3y ago
      Just curious, what does that UI look like with 1,000 tabs open? Isn't it just like, one pixel per tab, or a scrollbar 50 times wider than your monitor? Is that actually useful?
      - twic 3y ago
        That may be a reference to this classic Firefox extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

dom96 3y ago

> though I think Brave is probably still a good recommendation for users that don't want to go through the effort of installing an ad blocker Is that really the only reason to install Brave? Starting to wonder if I should just set up a Firefox that bundles uBlock Origin by default with a brand new name.

djbusby 3y ago
Work with libreFox? https://github.com/intika/Librefox https://github.com/intika/Librefox Or LibreWolf? https://librewolf.net/ https://librewolf.net/
bashZorina_09 3y ago
It also has nice privacy centric and QoL features that strip tracking URLs, removes "Open in App" banners and AMP pages + redirects (e.g. old.reddit) for mobile, fingerprint randomisation and of course, will probably be the best Chromium-based browser adblocker post Manifest V3, but yeah you can also spin these features into a bundled Firefox or use one of those Libre* forks which already does most of this afaik.
- amf12 3y ago
  Brave does some shady shit too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36735777 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36735777
TechBro8615 3y ago
Don't forget the "basic attention tokens" (are we still doing crypto?)
- Given_47 3y ago
  It’s an interesting concept tbf. I immediately disable it tho but I won’t shit on the idea cuz it’s at least a start
  - Barrin92 3y ago

andai 3y ago

Not to do a "you're holding it wrong", but why would you want so many tabs that they go offscreen? More precisely, why 100 tabs in 1 window instead of 10 tabs times 10 windows?

Digit-Al 3y ago
It's not something I ever do, but I imagine the answer to your question is that you can easily search for a particular tab when they are all in one window, but it would become a big chore if you had to switch between multiple windows and search each one to find a tab.
- OkayPhysicist 3y ago
  On Firefox, at least, search will surface tabs in other windows. I often have 2 browser windows open, one for each monitor (one mostly for streaming content while I dick around on the other one).
tredre3 3y ago
I don't understand tab hoarding either but Chrome/Brave's tab bar poor design becomes a problem even in what I'd consider pretty mundane scenarios. Imagine you snap your browser to half your screen. Assuming it's not an ultrawide, you'll be able to fit maybe a dozen tabs before they're so tiny to be essentially useless.
seba_dos1 3y ago
Because it's easier to handle? You open a new tab with a mindless Ctrl+T, if I wanted to do some organizing I would clean up my desk instead.
elishah 3y ago
> More precisely, why 100 tabs in 1 window instead of 10 tabs times 10 windows? I still don't understand why some people believe that the correct answer is anything other than 100 windows. My platform has 40 years of well refined tools for managing windows, all of which work nicely and consistently across all applications. By comparison, all of the tab management systems are crude amatuerish knockoffs trying to reinvent the same tools from first principles, and isolated to a single application that's then inconsistent with everything else.