11 ms·

Zero regrets: Firefox power user kept 7,500 tabs open for two years

162 points by zdw 2y ago

andrewstuart 2y ago
Why so few? Likely they are not a programmer.
yumraj 2y ago
Looks like the user, Hazel, is not using LinkedIn, which for me is the number one culprit when it comes to CPU and memory usage. If my fan starts running fast, every time it is due to one or more LinkedIn tab running at 100% CPU, on Mac. There may be other sites that are worse and I’m just not using them.
- wging 2y ago
  Firefox has a decent task manager view that I use to identify rogue tabs like that. Shift+Esc -> sort tabs by CPU usage (it lives at the URL about:processes and can be found under 'More tools' -> 'Task manager' too). I imagine that's how you discovered it was LinkedIn? Though if you're not a tab hoarder it might be fairly easy to discover just by trial and error...
  - yumraj 2y ago
    I kill LinkedIn tabs via task manager all the time. Yes, that is how I had figured out that it’s the culprit in almost 100% of the cases. In fact just killing the tab and refreshing/reloading it helps, when I need that tab.
  - lordnacho 2y ago
    Exactly right, I also noticed LinkedIn eats resources this way. Gotta wonder why that is.
- prmoustache 2y ago
  I can't think of a single reason to maintain a linkedin tab open.
  - yibers 2y ago
    Testing browser performance
gnabgib 2y ago
Discussions (61 points, 3 months ago, 95 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40250672 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40250672 (29 points, 3 months ago, 33 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40263948 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40263948
- dredmorbius 2y ago
  Which would make this a dupe by HN's standards: "significant attention in the last year or so". <https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html>
clumsysmurf 2y ago
That's nothing. I have 10000 tabs in 24 windows (according to winger). Its an amazing technical feat to handle that ... But a total UI failure because this isn't what I wanted. In comparison, my Safari session is well managed in several tab groups. Interestingly, the 'Close Duplicate Tabs' things made the situation worse, because it takes ~5 seconds for the overflow menu to show. I guess they are doing some work on the UI thread.
- snypher 2y ago
  For what reason do you have all of these tabs?
  - clumsysmurf 2y ago
    It seems to be a cycle. Begin a project, and try to keep the Window dedicated to tabs for that project. Tabs are open for electronic part datasheets, API documentation, etc. Then somehow i pop over to HN and open an unrelated link. Next thing, the window is polluted with project tabs and HN (reddit, etc) tabs. Rinse, repeat. I would say 90% tabs are unimportant, but I am afraid to nuke the session from orbit because there are some hard to find links / important ones in there.
    - g15jv2dp 2y ago
      > I would say 90% tabs are unimportant, but I am afraid to nuke the session from orbit because there are some hard to find links / important ones in there. Are they easy to find in the list of 4400 tabs?
      - clumsysmurf 2y ago
        No. Its become enough of a crisis I am writing a browser extension to help me visualize what is what.
        prmoustache 2y ago
mgnn 2y ago
> Currently, Firefox users can create different user profiles to segregate workflows and open tab sets, but more granular tab organization is on the way. Mozilla says it will roll out an improved profiles system and new tab management capabilities later in 2024. Panorama was there. It was beautiful. Simple Tab Groups works OK.
- deepspace 2y ago
  > Simple Tab Groups works OK Works perfectly for me. I have a tab group for every possible activity on my computer - Banking, take-out food, one for each research topic, one for each software or hardware project I am working on, and so on. Altogether thousands of tabs, and STG manages them without a hitch.
  - gorbachev 2y ago
    I do the same. I think I have about 50 different tab groups using Simple Tab Groups. I wouldn't call it working without a hitch. It's not crashing often, but it does occasionally, usually associated with a Firefox update. There's something wrong with the way either that addon, or Firefox itself, manages updates that have been recently applied. I've started making sure I make a backup of my tabs before Firefox does any updates, because it's almost certainty something goes wrong. Usually I just need to restart Firefox and nothing else, but sometimes Simple Tab Groups has also lost the containers I'm using. That is a real pain in the ass to recover from.
    - deepspace 2y ago
      Mine is set to back up automatically every day, but I never had to restore, touch wood. Occasionally the icons go wonky until the next restart, but that's the only issue I've beer seen.
stzsch 2y ago
I can recommend the winger addon for managing tabs. Allows for naming windows, moving tabs between windows, and saving tabs from a window as a bookmark folder.
ilaksh 2y ago
It seems like many people basically use open browser tabs as history/bookmarks. If they don't close it, they want to remember it forever. I believe browsers have had to adapt to this by basically converting tabs into auto-bookmarks that have advanced caching or something. So they automatically unload and have logic to determine when they are actually supposed to be active. I wonder if eventually tabs, history, bookmarks, and tab groups will be completely merged into one flexible and intelligent feature. On wider screens, a left sidebar might open by default with tabs stacked vertically. Not sure but it seems like people don't use tabs as originally intended. Maybe if they just made history more obvious then that would change the equation.
- magicalhippo 2y ago
  Firefox does this when shutting down and starting back up. Tabs get "frozen" and "thawed" upon activation after startup. This is superior to bookmarks, as the server respose is saved along with scroll position etc. I've long wished I could actively trigger this similar to making a bookmark. Bonus if they saved some embeddings too so I could search the contents of the saved pages.
  - Justsignedup 2y ago
    It also shows that people want transient bookmarks. They bookmark a few things they care about, but the rest is bookmarks for the next week or month, then they don't need it anymore.
  - SilasX 2y ago
    lol what? Every Firefox tab I’ve ever switched to after restarting has done a full, across-the-wire reload.
    - DaoVeles 2y ago
      Same here. This is only on one laptop that I use for rubbish but the full reload takes a few minutes.
rsync 2y ago
about:tabs ... which brings up a simple text listing, one URL per line, of all tabs you have open. This would allow you to quickly, easily, checkpoint (or, bookmark) your open tabs. I, personally, and rsync.net as a firm have offered bounties for this simple feature for over ten years now. I think we offered up to $2k at one point ? This doesn't need to be a plugin - it is so dead simple and so necessary that it should just be built in.
- fregante 2y ago
  I know you’d rather see it native but if you’re open to sponsor its development, I could make a custom addon for that.
konfusinomicon 2y ago
not sure if still relevant because I now practice responsible tabbing, but in the not so distant past the more tabs that were open in chrome for android on a phone, the faster your battery would die.
boopmaster 2y ago
meanwhile, some overworked analyst is freaking out deciphering event logs where a single users idling tab is refreshing into a dead link or a dead session.
- withinboredom 2y ago
  True story. During this investigation, we learned that the vast majority of users (at least for our product) refresh/close tabs every two days, but takes 40 days to get 95% of users. Two users have had a version of our page open for over two years at some point in the last 5 years.
dylan604 2y ago
Does this mean that this person was using a browser that was 2 years old with no updates run on it? Can you apply updates without restarting the browser? If not, that doesn't sound very smart at all.
- cwbriscoe 2y ago
  I don't use firefox but when you update chrome, it just restarts and reopens all the windows and tabs you had open.
  - dredmorbius 2y ago
    Firefox does the same.
- selcuka 2y ago
  > Can you apply updates without restarting the browser? Not always, but tabs are preserved after a restart.
- EasyMark 2y ago
  no, browser will keep all those tabs when you close, there is a "keep all session tabs" option in every modern browser (well I guess firefox focus is the exception). just don't ever close them. there are session savers too, to back it up.
trte9343r4 2y ago
> memory impact of running that many Firefox tabs is actually "marginal." The session file containing all 7,470 tabs is only around 70MB in size, and Firefox optimizes things by only loading tabs into memory if they've been opened recently. Tabs were not actually loaded. It is like saying there were 7500 bookmarks. My use case is about 200 tabs, with memory savings disabled (open weekly news at once, no waiting to page load). Firefox was quite unstable with this, until a few years ago.
_trampeltier 2y ago
I had also always a lot of tabs open, but since there is Firefox Focus on mobile, i do the same on the PC by hand. Just open the browser in anonymous mode for everything always. I wished there would be a Firefox Focus version for PC.
- Hnrobert42 2y ago
  You can configure FF desktop to forget everything on application close by adjusting history settings. That's how I use it. If you only open one tab, that's FF Focus.
- EasyMark 2y ago
  Why? You can set firefox to delete literally everything when you exit. I never understood the attraction of firefox focus.
Glyptodon 2y ago
On most of my computers keeping more than ~300 open seems to eventually lead to a crash, usually seemingly related to out of memory or something. I believe that it happens because tabs have code running in the background that wastes memory - I usually need a PC with 32gb of memory to not have Firefox occasionally crash or trigger a whole graphics stack crash (on Mac, Ubuntu family, and Arch family installs). On Android,after about 70 tabs it starts to fail to open the tab navigator at the current tab consistently, often starting at the beginning tab, necessitating closing and reopening the tab navigator until it decides to open next to the current tab.
- timbit42 2y ago
  Try 'Auto Tab Discard'. It unloads tabs to save memory.
bearcollision 2y ago
The lack of tab groups on Firefox is a major lapse in their product planning. It's an essential feature and the reason I use chromium-based browsers at my job rather than Firefox. I've tried the add-ons that attempt to workaround this fundamental lack of tab management issue (Sidebery, Tree Style Tab, OneTab, etc.), and none of them function like tab groups in chromium. Also, the incessant Firefox crashes on Linux with nvidia drivers when one has hardware acceleration enabled has me often wonder why I bother being ride-or-die with Firefox. (Then again, nvidia drivers f up many a thing on Linux, except chromium apparently)
- squigz 2y ago
  I use TST and group tabs quite heavily. I'm curious what difference there is between this and Chromium's tab groups?
- mozarella 2y ago
  I just organize my tab under windows and sessions : See my comment here : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41158725 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41158725
perryizgr8 2y ago
I like Arc because it auto-closes tabs you haven't touched for 12 hours. I have not missed a single tab because of this behaviour. If I didn't need it for 12 hours, I probably don't need it. And if I do want to go back some time later, it's better to restart the discovery process to regain the lost context anyway.
- caseyohara 2y ago
  12 hours is the default. You can also configure it for 24 hours, 7 days, or 30 days. I stick with the default of 12 hours because it pretty much matches my pre-Arc tab pruning habits, just saves me the effort of doing it manually. Arc is great. Even in the middle of heavy research, I will periodically tidy up my unused tabs. I treat them as completely ephemeral. If I need to recall something, I'll bookmark it or find it in my history. I genuinely cannot understand people that have hundreds or thousands of tabs open. It seems bonkers to me; almost pathological, like digital hoarding. I would probably hate to see how they keep their filesystem or their home.
Modified3019 2y ago
The extension “OneTab” is a great solution for this, at least in reducing the technical consequences of so many tabs. It dumps all tabs in a window into a list. You can just as easily send those tabs back into a window, or “export” (copy+paste) the list into a text file. Though what I really need is something that can I can dump a link into from either mobile or desktop (or consume lists of links) and produce a self-hosted searchable archive on my NAS. For example there are many HN threads I’d love to have something to archive both whatever the link was, and the associated thread with all of the comments, with increasingly rare checks for changes, saving the differences in case of censorship. Finally, being able to add both automatic and manual tags for the listing, and a way to search either the tags or text content so I can find that cool project I want to get back to, or they insightful comment. Actually that’s another thing I’d love is the ability to highlight specific comments or sections of pages and give them their own set of tags for searching. Such a thing would clear up my “need” for so many bookmarks/link lists, because it would actually complete the task I want to accomplish.
- atomicnumber3 2y ago
  OneTab is my solution to tab hoarding as well. Its "send all to onetab" button is like flushing the toilet of my ADHD brain, and if I ever need a tab back, it's searchable!! (I've been using onetab for almost 3 years and never gone back and actually re-opened a tab I sent to onetab. But it's kept my open tabs very clean that whole time!)
  - Modified3019 2y ago
    I’ve actually gone back successfully several times, just enough to convince my lizard brain that “yes it was all absolutely necessary and worth it”. Unfortunately many times this isn’t successful, and I would absolutely get more use out of it if I could just type “VFIO” or “Linux security” and pare down the search space to find that cool project, documentation or gotcha in a comment that I wanted to refer back to that’s now just a fuzzy blur in my mind. But I do agree, the vast bulk of it is just coping mechanism to try to soothe the panic of potential loss resulting from the fire hose of novel information falling through my colander brain.
ryandrake 2y ago
This (and some of the comments here) is so wild! Sometimes I think I’m the only person who closes his browser completely at the end of the day, and doesn’t have -any- long-lived tabs. Everyone browses in their own way, I guess!
senectus1 2y ago
I'm a shocker for this... periodically i get the shits with it and use an extention to save them all into one HTML (oneTab), then almost never refer to that onetab list... I'm my own worse enemy sometimes.
scriptsmith 2y ago
To keep on-top of tabs in Firefox, I use 'Auto Tab Discard' [1] to discard tabs after a certain amount of inactivity. Then when I need to clean up my list of tabs, I click on any discarded tabs I want to keep, and then use my extension 'Close Discarded Tabs' [2] to clear the rest. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-discard/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc... [2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/close-discarded-tabs/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/close-discard...
- EasyMark 2y ago
  Firefox does a "good enough" job of flushing tab memory on it's on. You don't really need these extensions.
podiki 2y ago
Wow, that is a lot of tabs. I always thought it was funny when people would say they have "a lot" and it was dozens or hundreds at most, while I was in the 1500 range. I did close them all: https://www.vice.com/en/article/88adya/death-by-1000-tabs-confessions-of-a-tab-hoarder https://www.vice.com/en/article/88adya/death-by-1000-tabs-co... (but alas, the number creeps up again)
wenc 2y ago
Question: do people who open tons of tabs ever middle-click to open a bunch of tabs to follow a rabbit hole? If so, how do you keep track of which tabs you've already seen? Example: When I read a Wiki page, I middle-click on links to open up a bunch of tabs to read in sequence. After I read each tab, I close them so that I remember I've read them. I can't think of a workflow in which I would keep tabs open -- seems like I would lose track of what I've read and what I haven't. How do many-tab people not lose track?
- cwillu 2y ago
  Nobody is literally _never_ closing tabs. I might open a couple dozen tabs, closing them as I finish or otherwise determine that I won't want to refer to them again, and leave open the ones that I haven't finished or which I _do_ want to refer to again.
  - wenc 2y ago
    Just to follow up, what is your method for finding those tabs again? Imagine a scenario where you have 200 tabs open. Unlike bookmarks, they aren’t categorized into folders. I imagine one can keyword search all open tabs, but that’s kinda like googling them again except you have a filter on what you’ve opened. When would you ever want to do that vs just doing a new google search? I can sort of imagine having open tabs as a kind of “saved state” when doing research without the additional hassle of curating bookmarks (adding/deleting/classifying). But just curious if people think of it this way.
    - cwillu 2y ago
      Windows are folders, and they're spread out across monitors and workspaces. My taskbar is a wide strip on the side of one monitor so it can easily list about 20 or so windows. The organization is basically that of a desk with stacks of papers on it: impenetrable to others maybe, but completely logical to me.
- kasabali 2y ago
  I use a 2 step process for this. 1. I installed an extension (can't remember the name) that makes visited links (from history) purple (like the old times) so that I won't reopen a duplicate tab 2. After reading a page I add them to bookmarks in a specific (have read) folder so that they're marked by the star in Firefox URL bar and I can easily check if I've already read them just by looking
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
Misleading, article from May [dupe] Lots of discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40250672 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40250672
ur-whale 2y ago
The OneTab extension is your friend. Lets you, among other things, archive however many tabs you have open and re-open them later. I flush my open tab once a week with it, and whenever I search for something I was looking at a couple of weeks back, I can just grep through the list of URLs Mind you, it won't solve the problem that the website content might have changed in the meantime. For that, archive.is is your friend, but it requires conscious effort to archive a specific site so not ideal either.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
DaoVeles 2y ago
I am kind of in awe of people who have this much trust in their browsers. I guess being raised on tech when just having a single OS session booted for longer than 8 hours was an achievement - it starts to train you to never trust these things. For instance on Windows 95, you would write something out in Word, go to save and then it is like the whole system was just day dreaming into a blue screen. That quick creates a behavior were you do not true the stability of anything. But I guess its not like that nowadays. The other day I checked the uptime on my system and it was 130 days and that is nothing abnormal. I feel like some people only reboot their systems on major OS updates. Like M1 Macbooks that have only been restarted 3 times. We take it for granted now.
- bruce511 2y ago
  Interestingly, since I installed a solar system, and hence got access to real-time electricity consumption, I now shut down my machine every night. To be fair I use it as a terminal to my work PC, which stays on, so it has very little "state" of its own. And it boots in 8 seconds. Both attributes which make this fast and convenient. This is a desktop not a laptop so it's as fast to shutdown as it is to hibernate so nothing failed from hibernation or sleep mode. It doesn't save a -lot- but it's saves enough that I can measure it. (Couple kw/h over 14 hours).
  - compsciphd 2y ago
    that's an expensive desktop power wise (especially if used only as a "thin client"). Even 50w would be a lot for that. (I'd agree still measurable, but measuring in multiple kwh over only half a day, is mid tier gaming pc territory)
    - bruce511 2y ago
      I don't only use it as a thin client, that's just the "work day" case.
    - bravetraveler 2y ago
      Eh, there are Zen+ APUs that'll use that much by themselves. I think you can expect 75W from any given full-size/wired PCIe slot. One can have a desktop that's as efficient as a laptop... but you lose part of the exchange; mobility for power. The consumption/heat is less of a concern, solar aside. Plenty of room for cooling and components :) I had a system that would idle at over 150W, not counting the three displays that cumulatively match that. Transceivers use mildly less power than 10GbE Ethernet... but still consume a bit of your budget.
mozarella 2y ago
I am a broken record on this. "Tab Session Manager" + "OneTab" people!!! - Save all your tabs and windows which come under a single topic (say "Buy car", "Learn OpenCV", "Work") as a named session using Tab Session Manager - You can restore, replace your saved sessions at any point in the future. You can also edit sessions, add/delete tabs, windows from the drop-down menu. - It also backs up your last 10 (can be adjusted in settings) sessions. - Very frictionless and intuitive UX. - Send all the rest of your unclassified tabs (interesting hackernews articles, your readinglist) to OneTab https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-session-manager/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-session-m... https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/onetab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/onetab/
- pacifika 2y ago
  Doesn’t your one tab go nuts for ~30 seconds when opening the sidebar?
  - mozarella 2y ago
    It opens as a pinned tab but yeah maybe about 10 - 30 seconds when opening it for the first time in a new session. I am patient with it since i figure it probably takes a while to load my 5,000 or so tabs.
eth0up 2y ago
I've recently had about 30 tabs open, both in Firefox and Firefox-ESR, on Debian Testing. After over 10 years on Debian, my system has begun to freeze somewhat dependably and predictably when either browser has more than 5 active* tabs. Sometimes, but mostly not, I'm able to Ctrl/Alt/Backspace to kill X and then resume with startx. If I can do this, I'm able to rescue my session without a hard reboot. More often I must hard power down. And when Ctrl/Alt/Backspace does work it's after at least 20 attempts. I tried reducing the priority of FF, but not sure if it'll help. Anyway, as a compulsive tab horder, this is a completely new bug for me. But I will never give up, and if necessary I will fight to the bitter end. *Active as opposed to merely open Edit: maybe if Ubuntu releases Tabular Tyrannosaurus I'll change distros.
- jauntywundrkind 2y ago
  Yeah Firefox has been utterly unusable on my 4GB (with 20GB of compressed swap on sata ssd) daily driver. Just so much locking up & unresponsiveness, input just going missing at points. But I got one of the auto-tab-discarders and it works fine for me now! It could be anything. Personally I'm a bit freaked out by how much effort has been poured into Storage Buckets, into stronger isolation, and have a fear that there's significant overhead to doing so. But this is a reflexive concern; it could be anything, or just lots of everything. But whatever it is, man I worry for FF.
beAbU 2y ago
I keep about ~10 tabs open on a single browser instance. I might run 2 or 3 instances, depending on what I'm doing. I have 2 tabs always open, mail and calendar. The rest are all ephemeral and task specific. At least once a week or so, the browser loses my tabs (this usually happens after a forced update at night). No biggy, the browser will recover them for me. Oonce every couple of months the browser fails to recover my tabs after losing them. Annoying but no biggie, it was only 10 or so tabs. How on earth do people keep thousands of tabs alive for years, and never lose them? I do not understand how this is possible. Or do they lose their tabs regularly, but reinstate them manually from browser history?
- zelphirkalt 2y ago
  What do you mean by "lose them"? They are in the browser, stored for next session. Why would they be lost? Firefox is very capable of managing this many tabs. You can also use things like % in the address bar to quickly jump to any ob those tabs, even, if they are not loaded, which most of them will not be. I ran around with 4k tabs for quite a while. It does slow down startup of the browser a little though, and that is what made me close most of them.
  - mdrzn 2y ago
    > What do you mean by "lose them"? They are in the browser, stored for next session. Why would they be lost? From time to time, usually when Chrome crashes, it restarts without the tabs history saved so you cannot restore them. I also can't remember the last time this happened tho, it's been at least a few years.
    - imtringued 2y ago
      Actually, it probably simply closed the wrong window. Just like you can reopen the last tab, you can also reopen the last closed window. I run into this issue all the time when I open a second window and close the main window first.
- tech2 2y ago
  I don't recall the last time I lost all my tabs. The only big annoyance I've had in recent years is when something caused my tab tree to flatten so all my arranged nesting was gone. I'm more curious how you end up with a system that destroys your session semi frequently?
voidUpdate 2y ago
How do you navigate 7500 tabs? Like I struggle to find the tab I want when I have about 15 open because they don't all fit properly on my monitor. Do they have the widest of ultrawides or something to be able to read all of the tab names?
- tech2 2y ago
  Tree style tabs extension, nesting in a manner that makes sense to them, probably other extensions too. I only have about 600 tabs at the moment and am impressed by someone managing more than an order of magnitude more than I.
- pacifika 2y ago
  % in the address bar searches open tabs
  - kranner 2y ago
    On Chrome: Cmd + Shift + A (Mac) or Alt + Shift + A (Windows)
roshankhan28 2y ago
godd damn the firefox engineers are outdoing themselves. should have had a way to easily restore back her 7k tabs easily.
lnxg33k1 2y ago
Power idiot *
southernplaces7 2y ago
Quick warning to all the folks here praising OneTab. The extension is wonderful for easily, quickly saving, importing and exporting tons of tab links, but for me at least, it has crashed more than once over a couple years of use and completely erased all the links I had saved to it. I learned to periodically export all my OneTab links in the extension's export option and save them to text files named by date range. I'd suggest the same or similar to anyone using OneTab and obsessive about saving tab links.
fdomingues 2y ago
To overcome the hoarding I use Simple Tab Groups[1], that has auto backup, combined with Auto Tab Discard[2], to completely inactivate open, but unused, tabs. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/simple-tab-groups/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/simple-tab-gr... [2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-discard/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc...
high_na_euv 2y ago
Whats the point? Theres a feature called bookmarks I struggle to understand ppl who brag about tabs count
ksec 2y ago
Both latest Chrome and Firefox does really well with lots of Tabs. Spending a lot of time to optimise the Browser for Muti tabs environment all while being responsive and causes less Jank. They will freeze and unload old tabs from memory. A List of Tabs that let's you close them with a single click. And Search for Open Tabs. Compared this to Safari. Not only does opening Tab Overview will reload most of your Tabs, meaning you will either crash your browser due to memory pressure, or you create so much paging Data you write from 100s to 1000GB to your SSD. Quite literally killing your SSD. It also does not freeze old tabs or unload tabs. The only way would be you quit Safari and reopen it often. It is also the slowest browser once you have multiple tabs opened. These issues had been with Safari for at least 5 - 8 years and even in Safari 18 it doesn't seems to be improved.
EasyMark 2y ago
or back down to reality: Firefox power user kept List of 7500 tabs open for two years. Those tabs were never all loaded at any point during this period of time. I use sidebery to manage around as many tabs and it backs up the "sessions" and I've never lost anything
mikewarot 2y ago
This is the same category of bucking the design of a system as people using their deleted items in Microsoft office as just another folder. Why would somebody do that? To me, it's just another consequence of never actually fulfilling Vannevar Bush's vision of the Memex.
j45 2y ago
Some things require a plaque.
tamiral 2y ago
I thought my 10 windows of 15 tabs was excessive
chemmail 2y ago
I have to force kill Firefox once a month when i hit maybe 200tabs even with 64GB of mem.
O1111OOO 2y ago
I reject the use of the term "power user" for someone who keeps 7,500 tabs open. Reminds me more of those newb users who had several dozen toolbars (and stuff...) running on Internet Explorer[0]. Or... current newb mobile users who need help closing the hundreds of tabs they have running: [0] https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/605041-internet-explorer https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/605041-internet-explorer
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago
What about security/privacy? Do they keep their email, bank sessions open all the time for the hackers to use?
soulofmischief 2y ago
7500 tabs? That's it? I at times have more than that on a single Firefox window on just one machine, and each of my machines usually has several windows open at a time. Where's my TechSpot article? :)

162 points by zdw 2y ago

Why so few? Likely they are not a programmer.

Looks like the user, Hazel, is not using LinkedIn, which for me is the number one culprit when it comes to CPU and memory usage. If my fan starts running fast, every time it is due to one or more LinkedIn tab running at 100% CPU, on Mac. There may be other sites that are worse and I’m just not using them.

wging 2y ago
Firefox has a decent task manager view that I use to identify rogue tabs like that. Shift+Esc -> sort tabs by CPU usage (it lives at the URL about:processes and can be found under 'More tools' -> 'Task manager' too). I imagine that's how you discovered it was LinkedIn? Though if you're not a tab hoarder it might be fairly easy to discover just by trial and error...
- yumraj 2y ago
  I kill LinkedIn tabs via task manager all the time. Yes, that is how I had figured out that it’s the culprit in almost 100% of the cases. In fact just killing the tab and refreshing/reloading it helps, when I need that tab.
- lordnacho 2y ago
  Exactly right, I also noticed LinkedIn eats resources this way. Gotta wonder why that is.
prmoustache 2y ago
I can't think of a single reason to maintain a linkedin tab open.
- yibers 2y ago
  Testing browser performance

gnabgib 2y ago

Discussions (61 points, 3 months ago, 95 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40250672 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40250672 (29 points, 3 months ago, 33 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40263948 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40263948

dredmorbius 2y ago
Which would make this a dupe by HN's standards: "significant attention in the last year or so". <https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html>

clumsysmurf 2y ago

That's nothing. I have 10000 tabs in 24 windows (according to winger). Its an amazing technical feat to handle that ... But a total UI failure because this isn't what I wanted. In comparison, my Safari session is well managed in several tab groups. Interestingly, the 'Close Duplicate Tabs' things made the situation worse, because it takes ~5 seconds for the overflow menu to show. I guess they are doing some work on the UI thread.

snypher 2y ago
For what reason do you have all of these tabs?
- clumsysmurf 2y ago
  It seems to be a cycle. Begin a project, and try to keep the Window dedicated to tabs for that project. Tabs are open for electronic part datasheets, API documentation, etc. Then somehow i pop over to HN and open an unrelated link. Next thing, the window is polluted with project tabs and HN (reddit, etc) tabs. Rinse, repeat. I would say 90% tabs are unimportant, but I am afraid to nuke the session from orbit because there are some hard to find links / important ones in there.
  - g15jv2dp 2y ago
    > I would say 90% tabs are unimportant, but I am afraid to nuke the session from orbit because there are some hard to find links / important ones in there. Are they easy to find in the list of 4400 tabs?
    - clumsysmurf 2y ago
      No. Its become enough of a crisis I am writing a browser extension to help me visualize what is what.
      - prmoustache 2y ago

mgnn 2y ago

> Currently, Firefox users can create different user profiles to segregate workflows and open tab sets, but more granular tab organization is on the way. Mozilla says it will roll out an improved profiles system and new tab management capabilities later in 2024. Panorama was there. It was beautiful. Simple Tab Groups works OK.

deepspace 2y ago
> Simple Tab Groups works OK Works perfectly for me. I have a tab group for every possible activity on my computer - Banking, take-out food, one for each research topic, one for each software or hardware project I am working on, and so on. Altogether thousands of tabs, and STG manages them without a hitch.
- gorbachev 2y ago
  I do the same. I think I have about 50 different tab groups using Simple Tab Groups. I wouldn't call it working without a hitch. It's not crashing often, but it does occasionally, usually associated with a Firefox update. There's something wrong with the way either that addon, or Firefox itself, manages updates that have been recently applied. I've started making sure I make a backup of my tabs before Firefox does any updates, because it's almost certainty something goes wrong. Usually I just need to restart Firefox and nothing else, but sometimes Simple Tab Groups has also lost the containers I'm using. That is a real pain in the ass to recover from.
  - deepspace 2y ago
    Mine is set to back up automatically every day, but I never had to restore, touch wood. Occasionally the icons go wonky until the next restart, but that's the only issue I've beer seen.

stzsch 2y ago

I can recommend the winger addon for managing tabs. Allows for naming windows, moving tabs between windows, and saving tabs from a window as a bookmark folder.

ilaksh 2y ago

It seems like many people basically use open browser tabs as history/bookmarks. If they don't close it, they want to remember it forever. I believe browsers have had to adapt to this by basically converting tabs into auto-bookmarks that have advanced caching or something. So they automatically unload and have logic to determine when they are actually supposed to be active. I wonder if eventually tabs, history, bookmarks, and tab groups will be completely merged into one flexible and intelligent feature. On wider screens, a left sidebar might open by default with tabs stacked vertically. Not sure but it seems like people don't use tabs as originally intended. Maybe if they just made history more obvious then that would change the equation.

magicalhippo 2y ago
Firefox does this when shutting down and starting back up. Tabs get "frozen" and "thawed" upon activation after startup. This is superior to bookmarks, as the server respose is saved along with scroll position etc. I've long wished I could actively trigger this similar to making a bookmark. Bonus if they saved some embeddings too so I could search the contents of the saved pages.
- Justsignedup 2y ago
  It also shows that people want transient bookmarks. They bookmark a few things they care about, but the rest is bookmarks for the next week or month, then they don't need it anymore.
- SilasX 2y ago
  lol what? Every Firefox tab I’ve ever switched to after restarting has done a full, across-the-wire reload.
  - DaoVeles 2y ago
    Same here. This is only on one laptop that I use for rubbish but the full reload takes a few minutes.

rsync 2y ago

about:tabs ... which brings up a simple text listing, one URL per line, of all tabs you have open. This would allow you to quickly, easily, checkpoint (or, bookmark) your open tabs. I, personally, and rsync.net as a firm have offered bounties for this simple feature for over ten years now. I think we offered up to $2k at one point ? This doesn't need to be a plugin - it is so dead simple and so necessary that it should just be built in.

fregante 2y ago
I know you’d rather see it native but if you’re open to sponsor its development, I could make a custom addon for that.

konfusinomicon 2y ago

not sure if still relevant because I now practice responsible tabbing, but in the not so distant past the more tabs that were open in chrome for android on a phone, the faster your battery would die.

boopmaster 2y ago

meanwhile, some overworked analyst is freaking out deciphering event logs where a single users idling tab is refreshing into a dead link or a dead session.

withinboredom 2y ago
True story. During this investigation, we learned that the vast majority of users (at least for our product) refresh/close tabs every two days, but takes 40 days to get 95% of users. Two users have had a version of our page open for over two years at some point in the last 5 years.

dylan604 2y ago

Does this mean that this person was using a browser that was 2 years old with no updates run on it? Can you apply updates without restarting the browser? If not, that doesn't sound very smart at all.

cwbriscoe 2y ago
I don't use firefox but when you update chrome, it just restarts and reopens all the windows and tabs you had open.
- dredmorbius 2y ago
  Firefox does the same.
selcuka 2y ago
> Can you apply updates without restarting the browser? Not always, but tabs are preserved after a restart.
EasyMark 2y ago
no, browser will keep all those tabs when you close, there is a "keep all session tabs" option in every modern browser (well I guess firefox focus is the exception). just don't ever close them. there are session savers too, to back it up.

trte9343r4 2y ago

> memory impact of running that many Firefox tabs is actually "marginal." The session file containing all 7,470 tabs is only around 70MB in size, and Firefox optimizes things by only loading tabs into memory if they've been opened recently. Tabs were not actually loaded. It is like saying there were 7500 bookmarks. My use case is about 200 tabs, with memory savings disabled (open weekly news at once, no waiting to page load). Firefox was quite unstable with this, until a few years ago.

_trampeltier 2y ago

I had also always a lot of tabs open, but since there is Firefox Focus on mobile, i do the same on the PC by hand. Just open the browser in anonymous mode for everything always. I wished there would be a Firefox Focus version for PC.

Hnrobert42 2y ago
You can configure FF desktop to forget everything on application close by adjusting history settings. That's how I use it. If you only open one tab, that's FF Focus.
EasyMark 2y ago
Why? You can set firefox to delete literally everything when you exit. I never understood the attraction of firefox focus.

Glyptodon 2y ago

On most of my computers keeping more than ~300 open seems to eventually lead to a crash, usually seemingly related to out of memory or something. I believe that it happens because tabs have code running in the background that wastes memory - I usually need a PC with 32gb of memory to not have Firefox occasionally crash or trigger a whole graphics stack crash (on Mac, Ubuntu family, and Arch family installs). On Android,after about 70 tabs it starts to fail to open the tab navigator at the current tab consistently, often starting at the beginning tab, necessitating closing and reopening the tab navigator until it decides to open next to the current tab.

timbit42 2y ago
Try 'Auto Tab Discard'. It unloads tabs to save memory.

bearcollision 2y ago

The lack of tab groups on Firefox is a major lapse in their product planning. It's an essential feature and the reason I use chromium-based browsers at my job rather than Firefox. I've tried the add-ons that attempt to workaround this fundamental lack of tab management issue (Sidebery, Tree Style Tab, OneTab, etc.), and none of them function like tab groups in chromium. Also, the incessant Firefox crashes on Linux with nvidia drivers when one has hardware acceleration enabled has me often wonder why I bother being ride-or-die with Firefox. (Then again, nvidia drivers f up many a thing on Linux, except chromium apparently)

squigz 2y ago
I use TST and group tabs quite heavily. I'm curious what difference there is between this and Chromium's tab groups?
mozarella 2y ago
I just organize my tab under windows and sessions : See my comment here : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41158725 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41158725

perryizgr8 2y ago

I like Arc because it auto-closes tabs you haven't touched for 12 hours. I have not missed a single tab because of this behaviour. If I didn't need it for 12 hours, I probably don't need it. And if I do want to go back some time later, it's better to restart the discovery process to regain the lost context anyway.

caseyohara 2y ago
12 hours is the default. You can also configure it for 24 hours, 7 days, or 30 days. I stick with the default of 12 hours because it pretty much matches my pre-Arc tab pruning habits, just saves me the effort of doing it manually. Arc is great. Even in the middle of heavy research, I will periodically tidy up my unused tabs. I treat them as completely ephemeral. If I need to recall something, I'll bookmark it or find it in my history. I genuinely cannot understand people that have hundreds or thousands of tabs open. It seems bonkers to me; almost pathological, like digital hoarding. I would probably hate to see how they keep their filesystem or their home.

Modified3019 2y ago

The extension “OneTab” is a great solution for this, at least in reducing the technical consequences of so many tabs. It dumps all tabs in a window into a list. You can just as easily send those tabs back into a window, or “export” (copy+paste) the list into a text file. Though what I really need is something that can I can dump a link into from either mobile or desktop (or consume lists of links) and produce a self-hosted searchable archive on my NAS. For example there are many HN threads I’d love to have something to archive both whatever the link was, and the associated thread with all of the comments, with increasingly rare checks for changes, saving the differences in case of censorship. Finally, being able to add both automatic and manual tags for the listing, and a way to search either the tags or text content so I can find that cool project I want to get back to, or they insightful comment. Actually that’s another thing I’d love is the ability to highlight specific comments or sections of pages and give them their own set of tags for searching. Such a thing would clear up my “need” for so many bookmarks/link lists, because it would actually complete the task I want to accomplish.

atomicnumber3 2y ago
OneTab is my solution to tab hoarding as well. Its "send all to onetab" button is like flushing the toilet of my ADHD brain, and if I ever need a tab back, it's searchable!! (I've been using onetab for almost 3 years and never gone back and actually re-opened a tab I sent to onetab. But it's kept my open tabs very clean that whole time!)
- Modified3019 2y ago
  I’ve actually gone back successfully several times, just enough to convince my lizard brain that “yes it was all absolutely necessary and worth it”. Unfortunately many times this isn’t successful, and I would absolutely get more use out of it if I could just type “VFIO” or “Linux security” and pare down the search space to find that cool project, documentation or gotcha in a comment that I wanted to refer back to that’s now just a fuzzy blur in my mind. But I do agree, the vast bulk of it is just coping mechanism to try to soothe the panic of potential loss resulting from the fire hose of novel information falling through my colander brain.

ryandrake 2y ago

This (and some of the comments here) is so wild! Sometimes I think I’m the only person who closes his browser completely at the end of the day, and doesn’t have -any- long-lived tabs. Everyone browses in their own way, I guess!

senectus1 2y ago

I'm a shocker for this... periodically i get the shits with it and use an extention to save them all into one HTML (oneTab), then almost never refer to that onetab list... I'm my own worse enemy sometimes.

scriptsmith 2y ago

To keep on-top of tabs in Firefox, I use 'Auto Tab Discard' [1] to discard tabs after a certain amount of inactivity. Then when I need to clean up my list of tabs, I click on any discarded tabs I want to keep, and then use my extension 'Close Discarded Tabs' [2] to clear the rest. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-discard/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc... [2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/close-discarded-tabs/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/close-discard...

EasyMark 2y ago
Firefox does a "good enough" job of flushing tab memory on it's on. You don't really need these extensions.

podiki 2y ago

Wow, that is a lot of tabs. I always thought it was funny when people would say they have "a lot" and it was dozens or hundreds at most, while I was in the 1500 range. I did close them all: https://www.vice.com/en/article/88adya/death-by-1000-tabs-confessions-of-a-tab-hoarder https://www.vice.com/en/article/88adya/death-by-1000-tabs-co... (but alas, the number creeps up again)

wenc 2y ago

Question: do people who open tons of tabs ever middle-click to open a bunch of tabs to follow a rabbit hole? If so, how do you keep track of which tabs you've already seen? Example: When I read a Wiki page, I middle-click on links to open up a bunch of tabs to read in sequence. After I read each tab, I close them so that I remember I've read them. I can't think of a workflow in which I would keep tabs open -- seems like I would lose track of what I've read and what I haven't. How do many-tab people not lose track?

cwillu 2y ago
Nobody is literally _never_ closing tabs. I might open a couple dozen tabs, closing them as I finish or otherwise determine that I won't want to refer to them again, and leave open the ones that I haven't finished or which I _do_ want to refer to again.
- wenc 2y ago
  Just to follow up, what is your method for finding those tabs again? Imagine a scenario where you have 200 tabs open. Unlike bookmarks, they aren’t categorized into folders. I imagine one can keyword search all open tabs, but that’s kinda like googling them again except you have a filter on what you’ve opened. When would you ever want to do that vs just doing a new google search? I can sort of imagine having open tabs as a kind of “saved state” when doing research without the additional hassle of curating bookmarks (adding/deleting/classifying). But just curious if people think of it this way.
  - cwillu 2y ago
    Windows are folders, and they're spread out across monitors and workspaces. My taskbar is a wide strip on the side of one monitor so it can easily list about 20 or so windows. The organization is basically that of a desk with stacks of papers on it: impenetrable to others maybe, but completely logical to me.
kasabali 2y ago
I use a 2 step process for this. 1. I installed an extension (can't remember the name) that makes visited links (from history) purple (like the old times) so that I won't reopen a duplicate tab 2. After reading a page I add them to bookmarks in a specific (have read) folder so that they're marked by the star in Firefox URL bar and I can easily check if I've already read them just by looking

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

Misleading, article from May [dupe] Lots of discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40250672 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40250672

ur-whale 2y ago

The OneTab extension is your friend. Lets you, among other things, archive however many tabs you have open and re-open them later. I flush my open tab once a week with it, and whenever I search for something I was looking at a couple of weeks back, I can just grep through the list of URLs Mind you, it won't solve the problem that the website content might have changed in the meantime. For that, archive.is is your friend, but it requires conscious effort to archive a specific site so not ideal either.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

DaoVeles 2y ago

I am kind of in awe of people who have this much trust in their browsers. I guess being raised on tech when just having a single OS session booted for longer than 8 hours was an achievement - it starts to train you to never trust these things. For instance on Windows 95, you would write something out in Word, go to save and then it is like the whole system was just day dreaming into a blue screen. That quick creates a behavior were you do not true the stability of anything. But I guess its not like that nowadays. The other day I checked the uptime on my system and it was 130 days and that is nothing abnormal. I feel like some people only reboot their systems on major OS updates. Like M1 Macbooks that have only been restarted 3 times. We take it for granted now.

bruce511 2y ago
Interestingly, since I installed a solar system, and hence got access to real-time electricity consumption, I now shut down my machine every night. To be fair I use it as a terminal to my work PC, which stays on, so it has very little "state" of its own. And it boots in 8 seconds. Both attributes which make this fast and convenient. This is a desktop not a laptop so it's as fast to shutdown as it is to hibernate so nothing failed from hibernation or sleep mode. It doesn't save a -lot- but it's saves enough that I can measure it. (Couple kw/h over 14 hours).
- compsciphd 2y ago
  that's an expensive desktop power wise (especially if used only as a "thin client"). Even 50w would be a lot for that. (I'd agree still measurable, but measuring in multiple kwh over only half a day, is mid tier gaming pc territory)
  - bruce511 2y ago
    I don't only use it as a thin client, that's just the "work day" case.
  - bravetraveler 2y ago
    Eh, there are Zen+ APUs that'll use that much by themselves. I think you can expect 75W from any given full-size/wired PCIe slot. One can have a desktop that's as efficient as a laptop... but you lose part of the exchange; mobility for power. The consumption/heat is less of a concern, solar aside. Plenty of room for cooling and components :) I had a system that would idle at over 150W, not counting the three displays that cumulatively match that. Transceivers use mildly less power than 10GbE Ethernet... but still consume a bit of your budget.

mozarella 2y ago

I am a broken record on this. "Tab Session Manager" + "OneTab" people!!! - Save all your tabs and windows which come under a single topic (say "Buy car", "Learn OpenCV", "Work") as a named session using Tab Session Manager - You can restore, replace your saved sessions at any point in the future. You can also edit sessions, add/delete tabs, windows from the drop-down menu. - It also backs up your last 10 (can be adjusted in settings) sessions. - Very frictionless and intuitive UX. - Send all the rest of your unclassified tabs (interesting hackernews articles, your readinglist) to OneTab https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-session-manager/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-session-m... https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/onetab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/onetab/

pacifika 2y ago
Doesn’t your one tab go nuts for ~30 seconds when opening the sidebar?
- mozarella 2y ago
  It opens as a pinned tab but yeah maybe about 10 - 30 seconds when opening it for the first time in a new session. I am patient with it since i figure it probably takes a while to load my 5,000 or so tabs.

eth0up 2y ago

I've recently had about 30 tabs open, both in Firefox and Firefox-ESR, on Debian Testing. After over 10 years on Debian, my system has begun to freeze somewhat dependably and predictably when either browser has more than 5 active* tabs. Sometimes, but mostly not, I'm able to Ctrl/Alt/Backspace to kill X and then resume with startx. If I can do this, I'm able to rescue my session without a hard reboot. More often I must hard power down. And when Ctrl/Alt/Backspace does work it's after at least 20 attempts. I tried reducing the priority of FF, but not sure if it'll help. Anyway, as a compulsive tab horder, this is a completely new bug for me. But I will never give up, and if necessary I will fight to the bitter end. *Active as opposed to merely open Edit: maybe if Ubuntu releases Tabular Tyrannosaurus I'll change distros.

jauntywundrkind 2y ago
Yeah Firefox has been utterly unusable on my 4GB (with 20GB of compressed swap on sata ssd) daily driver. Just so much locking up & unresponsiveness, input just going missing at points. But I got one of the auto-tab-discarders and it works fine for me now! It could be anything. Personally I'm a bit freaked out by how much effort has been poured into Storage Buckets, into stronger isolation, and have a fear that there's significant overhead to doing so. But this is a reflexive concern; it could be anything, or just lots of everything. But whatever it is, man I worry for FF.

beAbU 2y ago

I keep about ~10 tabs open on a single browser instance. I might run 2 or 3 instances, depending on what I'm doing. I have 2 tabs always open, mail and calendar. The rest are all ephemeral and task specific. At least once a week or so, the browser loses my tabs (this usually happens after a forced update at night). No biggy, the browser will recover them for me. Oonce every couple of months the browser fails to recover my tabs after losing them. Annoying but no biggie, it was only 10 or so tabs. How on earth do people keep thousands of tabs alive for years, and never lose them? I do not understand how this is possible. Or do they lose their tabs regularly, but reinstate them manually from browser history?

zelphirkalt 2y ago
What do you mean by "lose them"? They are in the browser, stored for next session. Why would they be lost? Firefox is very capable of managing this many tabs. You can also use things like % in the address bar to quickly jump to any ob those tabs, even, if they are not loaded, which most of them will not be. I ran around with 4k tabs for quite a while. It does slow down startup of the browser a little though, and that is what made me close most of them.
- mdrzn 2y ago
  > What do you mean by "lose them"? They are in the browser, stored for next session. Why would they be lost? From time to time, usually when Chrome crashes, it restarts without the tabs history saved so you cannot restore them. I also can't remember the last time this happened tho, it's been at least a few years.
  - imtringued 2y ago
    Actually, it probably simply closed the wrong window. Just like you can reopen the last tab, you can also reopen the last closed window. I run into this issue all the time when I open a second window and close the main window first.
tech2 2y ago
I don't recall the last time I lost all my tabs. The only big annoyance I've had in recent years is when something caused my tab tree to flatten so all my arranged nesting was gone. I'm more curious how you end up with a system that destroys your session semi frequently?

voidUpdate 2y ago

How do you navigate 7500 tabs? Like I struggle to find the tab I want when I have about 15 open because they don't all fit properly on my monitor. Do they have the widest of ultrawides or something to be able to read all of the tab names?

tech2 2y ago
Tree style tabs extension, nesting in a manner that makes sense to them, probably other extensions too. I only have about 600 tabs at the moment and am impressed by someone managing more than an order of magnitude more than I.
pacifika 2y ago
% in the address bar searches open tabs
- kranner 2y ago
  On Chrome: Cmd + Shift + A (Mac) or Alt + Shift + A (Windows)

roshankhan28 2y ago

godd damn the firefox engineers are outdoing themselves. should have had a way to easily restore back her 7k tabs easily.

lnxg33k1 2y ago

Power idiot *

southernplaces7 2y ago

Quick warning to all the folks here praising OneTab. The extension is wonderful for easily, quickly saving, importing and exporting tons of tab links, but for me at least, it has crashed more than once over a couple years of use and completely erased all the links I had saved to it. I learned to periodically export all my OneTab links in the extension's export option and save them to text files named by date range. I'd suggest the same or similar to anyone using OneTab and obsessive about saving tab links.

fdomingues 2y ago

To overcome the hoarding I use Simple Tab Groups[1], that has auto backup, combined with Auto Tab Discard[2], to completely inactivate open, but unused, tabs. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/simple-tab-groups/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/simple-tab-gr... [2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-discard/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc...

high_na_euv 2y ago

Whats the point? Theres a feature called bookmarks I struggle to understand ppl who brag about tabs count

ksec 2y ago

Both latest Chrome and Firefox does really well with lots of Tabs. Spending a lot of time to optimise the Browser for Muti tabs environment all while being responsive and causes less Jank. They will freeze and unload old tabs from memory. A List of Tabs that let's you close them with a single click. And Search for Open Tabs. Compared this to Safari. Not only does opening Tab Overview will reload most of your Tabs, meaning you will either crash your browser due to memory pressure, or you create so much paging Data you write from 100s to 1000GB to your SSD. Quite literally killing your SSD. It also does not freeze old tabs or unload tabs. The only way would be you quit Safari and reopen it often. It is also the slowest browser once you have multiple tabs opened. These issues had been with Safari for at least 5 - 8 years and even in Safari 18 it doesn't seems to be improved.

EasyMark 2y ago

or back down to reality: Firefox power user kept List of 7500 tabs open for two years. Those tabs were never all loaded at any point during this period of time. I use sidebery to manage around as many tabs and it backs up the "sessions" and I've never lost anything

mikewarot 2y ago

This is the same category of bucking the design of a system as people using their deleted items in Microsoft office as just another folder. Why would somebody do that? To me, it's just another consequence of never actually fulfilling Vannevar Bush's vision of the Memex.

j45 2y ago

Some things require a plaque.

tamiral 2y ago

I thought my 10 windows of 15 tabs was excessive

chemmail 2y ago

I have to force kill Firefox once a month when i hit maybe 200tabs even with 64GB of mem.

O1111OOO 2y ago

I reject the use of the term "power user" for someone who keeps 7,500 tabs open. Reminds me more of those newb users who had several dozen toolbars (and stuff...) running on Internet Explorer[0]. Or... current newb mobile users who need help closing the hundreds of tabs they have running: [0] https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/605041-internet-explorer https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/605041-internet-explorer

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago

What about security/privacy? Do they keep their email, bank sessions open all the time for the hackers to use?

soulofmischief 2y ago

7500 tabs? That's it? I at times have more than that on a single Firefox window on just one machine, and each of my machines usually has several windows open at a time. Where's my TechSpot article? :)