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Firefox Power User Keeps 7,400 Browser Tabs Open for 2 Years
- 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.
- 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
- 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.
- 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?
- iamthirsty 2y agoBookmarks. Reading lists. Notes.
- lxgr 2y agoWay too much overhead for many of the things I use tabs for. Frequently, the time it takes me to action whatever I have a tab open for takes as long as adding it to, reloading it from, and marking it off of a to-do list.
- 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.
- 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...
- 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".
- _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."