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Firefox Power User Keeps 7,400 Browser Tabs Open for 2 Years
- r721 2y ago>A Mozilla rep confirms to PCMag that having tons of Firefox tabs open consumes "practically no memory whatsoever." So they are not that different from bookmarks then?
- alecsm 2y agoThe tabs are open but not loaded so yeah, it's like a bookmark. Once you click the tab it loads the content.
- ranger_danger 2y agoI thought you needed an extension to unload tabs?
- ranger_danger 2y agoMy 100+ tabs consuming 12GB of RAM says otherwise...
- ThrowawayTestr 2y agoI upgraded from 16gb to 32gb of RAM expressly because of firefox.
- neglesaks 2y agoAnd the saying used to be that Chrome was the chief RAM gobbler of most users' PCs. :)
- kimixa 2y agoA fully rendered modern webpage is BIG - no matter what engine rendered it. IIRC both current big engines drop the rendered state in the background under memory pressure, as it's pretty much the only way of dealing with it.
- lxgr 2y agoChrome is actually pretty good at dehydrating and rehydrating tabs on demand these days, at least in my experience.
- lxgr 2y agoSame here. What are the chances of that Mozilla rep actually using Chrome (which actually does auto-unload tabs these days)?
- shock 2y agoThat's because of the Javascript running on them. If I have a dozen youtube tabs that are not suspended my FF becomes very janky and if I look in FF task manager, sure enough, they're consuming lots of CPU. I suspend them and FF becomes snappier again.
- ranger_danger 2y ago> suspend Right, but the article says nothing about suspending and seems to strongly suggest that tabs take "no ram at all" by default, which is just plain false, unless I'm misunderstanding something. I don't even see a way to suspend tabs without a separate extension.
- techjamie 2y agoThere is also an unfair comparison made in the article. > A quick PCMag test shows that 10 Chrome tabs on a Windows 11 PC with 32GB of RAM and 2TB of NVMe SSD storage take up over 2,000MB, or 12.5% of PC memory, so there's still room for improvement (Hazel's massive Firefox session file is just 70MB). Taking up nearly 2GB of RAM for 10 tabs sucks, but they seem to be comparing the size of the session on disk to the resident size of the loaded browser in memory, of course the memory footprint is going to blow it away.
- em-bee 2y agowell i have 4600 tabs, 13 windows, 18 tab groups and 130 firefox processes. htop shows me that while each browser process has about 3GB of virtual memory, all of them barely register any real memory use. so as far as i can tell, tabs do not use any memory.
- ranger_danger 2y agoOk but those tabs would have to be suspended for them to not use "any" memory.
- em-bee 2y ago
- canadiantim 2y agoThen why does my firefox freeze my comp if I have too many tabs open?
- gpvos 2y agoYou can have thousands of unloaded tabs, but loaded tabs can gobble up memory and your computer may start swapping. It will usually recover from that but it can take a minute or two. If you get that often, you can open about:processes , sort on memory use and kill a few of the largest processes, which will unload their tabs.
- asadotzler 2y agoThey consume more than bookmarks because they have the current page content and context and the navigation history. Firefox does a good job minimizing the memory this takes, but it's non-zero. For that reason I rarely go above about 400 tabs in a session. My wife, on the other hand, is OK with swap to a fast SSD that I'm not OK with and has several thousand tabs loaded at any given time.
- alecsm 2y ago> Mozilla says it plans to roll out a new profiles feature and a new tab organization feature later this year; Finally. I hope we get tab groups that work with multi containers.
- exe34 2y agoMy ex- once commented that had half the internet bookmarked. He suggested it might be faster to Google for things than to hunt for the bookmark.
- neocritter 2y ago“average person has 7400 tabs” factoid actually just statistical error. average person uses bookmarks. Tabs Hazel is an outlier and should not have been counted
- Beijinger 2y agoI think we may have a fat tail distribution here.
- gpvos 2y agoYou sure? From what I've seen over the years, bookmarks are not a very heavily used browser feature. I think most people don't have more than a few dozen, if they use them at all.
- neocritter 2y agoContext: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiders_Georg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiders_Georg
- croes 2y agoBookmark management of browsers is bad.
- tennisflyi 2y agoI can't imagine not having them - wild
- wtcactus 2y agoI don’t need 7400, but I do have about 50-100 open in different spaces (personal/work/hobbies). What Firefox lacks for me, is the ability to sync these open tabs to different devices seamlessly. The only browsers that do this well right now are Edge and Arc browser, and this is the reason I abandoned Firefox about 1 year ago.
- butz 2y agoWhat is it in particular, that Firefox Sync lacks?
- rawzone 2y agoWho needs bookmarks anyways... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- adam_arthur 2y agoWhy do people open 100s of tabs when you can easily get back to that page in less than a second in most cases? Seems the clutter and organizational requirement is more of a productivity loss than gain. Never understood this.
- lxgr 2y agoHow do you remember which pages you still need to/want to get back to?
- mr_mitm 2y agoIsn't that a good use case for the bookmark function? To answer the actual question: I don't. Either I read it immediately or will never get back to it. There is always enough fresh content. I don't need another backlog. And let's be honest, if you have a backlog of 7400 pages, neither do you.
- fragmede 2y agoAt 7400, that backlog of articles is clearly aspirational, but there's some place where I do want to read about a topic, but only when I'm in the right mood, and I'm not in the mood to read about that topic right now, usually at the start of the day I'm in a more productive mood and by the end I'm not, and so there are different topics to read about at different times of day.
- lxgr 2y agoIt's not, to me. My bookmark list is huge and basically acts as (part of) a knowledge base. Conversely, open tabs are something of a hybrid between a "read this later" and to-do list. I'm sure there are many other styles of organizing tasks/knowledge, and I would be a bit careful about discrediting what apparently works for other people. There's borderline cases of working against UI paradigms like using the trash as a folder to store important documents, but I'd argue that this one isn't one of them.
- iamthirsty 2y ago
- neglesaks 2y agoOkay, I thought I was pushing it with 300 open tabs, but I know now that I'm a lightweight.
- ortusdux 2y agoI like Session Buddy for Chrome. It saves all of your tabs & windows as dated collections. You can also manually save and label sets. When researching, I will often have 100+ tabs open sorted into different windows, and it's nice to be able to save the session for later. https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/session-buddy/edacconmaakjimmfgnblocblbcdcpbko?pli=1 https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/session-buddy/edacc...
- agumonkey 2y agoWow, I never crossed the 2000 line, 7400 is quite a feat. Also Firefox doesn't suffer visibly until 800~ on my old laptop, and it starts to show above 1500. Thanks for supporting hoarders like us.
- gpvos 2y agoI've had 7000 tabs open as well (currently 3700, I backup the session file and start again every half year or so). What I think would be handy would be if tabs would be auto-grouped by domain name, and that I could define domain groups (like work, newspapers, computing sites, youtube, etc.).
- shock 2y agoYou can do that with Sidebery, at least partially.
- ranger_danger 2y agoI see manually managed groups in Sidebery but nothing automatic... it doesn't look like you can move more than one tab into a group at a time, or even move a single tab into a specific group without manually dragging through a huge scrolling list to find it.
- shock 2y agoLook into the Panels feature, it has auto-move by URL regex.
- ranger_danger 2y agoI'm not seeing anything like what you describe... can you tell me exactly where that feature is located?
- shock 2y agoRight-click on the panel, choose "Configure panel", in the resulting overlay there's a "Move tabs to this panel", click "Manage rules".
- shock 2y agoLol, I have 15000+ tabs across 13 windows.
- ratg13 2y agoThere are lots of browser extensions like onetab that allow you to keep as many tabs as you want without having to navigate a mess.
- shock 2y agoI don't want to keep any tabs open, but I haven't found a better way for my workflow and I've tried quite a few. My tabs fall into the following categories: - unfinished/long running projects/topics/research: for these I use a version of the Tabs Aside! extension that I've modified, which converts them to bookmarks. - tabs I will want to look at someday and further categorize and/or take action: for these I implemented a babashka script that when I click on an URL it fetches the page, extracts the title and displays it and asks me if I want to open it now, or save it for later in an org-file. This doesn't work, unfortunately, for URLs that I open from another FF page. For these, my long term plan involves archiving the text and doing RAG on them, as they relate to my long term interests/projects/curiosities. - tabs I need for the actively running projects/tasks
- _Microft 2y ago"Firefox View", accessible via a pinned-tab-like button at the beginning of the tab strip gives a good way already to manage lots of tabs. It allows to search tab titles from all Firefox windows and gives access to tabs on connected devices and the browsing history.
- autoexec 2y agoIf I really wanted to keep a record of all the sites I've been to for historic reasons like this person there are far easier/better ways to do that. I'd even set it up to download a local copy of the sites I visit so that they'd be there even if the sites went offline. I have 298 tabs across 8 windows open right now and I can already tell firefox is about to crash at any moment. I go to about:memory and mash the buttons in the "free memory" box to buy some extra time, but eventually firefox goes down in flames and I lose all my open tabs. When it does finally crash Firefox can never restore my tabs, but I blame myself/my settings for that. When things get to this point where I know firefox will die soon I end up bookmarking them all or even copying each URL into a text document with dreams that I'll go back to them after my browser has been closed and re-opened, but I almost never manage it. At least I have the option I guess and I know that if I ever do I'll find things that are of interest to me. There's just no shortage of other things that are of interest to me online so the newest stuff tends to win out.
- _Microft 2y agoAs long as you don't have private browsing windows open (these won't be restored), you should be able to close Firefox and have it restore all tabs after a restart. It will unload all tabs, i.e. they won't use memory until you focus them again.
- timbit42 2y agoHave you tried Auto Tab Discard to reduce memory usage? I have Firefox set to reopen tabs when it starts and, on the very rare occasion it does crash or the power goes out, the tabs are back when I reopen Firefox.
- samatman 2y agoSomething I'm still looking for is a way to manage "browser stuff" which would fit my workflow. Basically I want to be able to turn a window full of tabs into some kind of document, where I can add metadata about the window and tabs, organized into sections, and which creates an archive of each page while maintaining the option of reloading the latest version if it still happens to exist. This would also involve a better way to select a bunch of tabs at once and move them to the window they belong on. If anyone knows of something which works this way, I'd love to hear about it.
- shock 2y agoThe easiest way I've found to move a bunch of tabs between windows is with Sidebery. It also lets you organize tabs into panels.
- thr0waway001 2y agoThat person is my soulmate.
- realfeel78 2y ago"Power user."