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The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

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Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So even if you only had 100 tabs This is fucking surreal. Why on Earth would anyone want 100 open tabs, besides testing? What's the real life scenario we're looking at here?

I am tab hoarder. It's a serious problem. So many links that I want to read. But I don't feel like doing it right now. And I know for certain that if I put it into a bookmark, I will never ever look at it again. So they sit on my tab bar for months until I get around to it. Looking at my current open tabs, most of them are dense "boring" reading material like scientific papers (or reddit/HN discussions of them.) I fe…

I have found Pocket to be very helpful in this regard. The key is to set it as your default page upon tab creation.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#342

Wow. I've been getting more and more frustrated with how poorly Chrome handles even a moderately large number of tabs (~150), and it sounds like my savior is going to be ... Firefox. Huh. Wouldn't have guessed it, but I'll totally take it. I have a nice extension for Chrome called Quick Tabs that gives me a searchable list of my open tabs and makes it easy to find things I have open... anyone know which of the severa…

Honestly, I find that the built-in behavior is good enough: go to the location bar (ctrl-L), type

    "% "
and it will search through all open tab titles as an autocomplete thing. It doesn't search tab content (probably good since most tabs won't be loaded), but it's good enough for me most of the time.

Great feature, completely undiscoverable.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, this extension, too will soon die when Firefox no longer supports legacy addons. I think there is a new Firefox experiment that behaves somewhat like this: https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/containers

IIRC https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-groups/?s... is a replacement Container tabs is totally different, that's about basically having multiple profiles in one window. E.g you can have the work container logged into your work email and work stuff, and your personal container logged in to your personal email and personal stuff, and they don't know about each other. Like incognito, but persistent and…

That looks really good! I'll have to try it out first, but it makes me more hopeful about Firefox's future.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#344
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just tabs as bookmarks. I can build up a stack of 100 tabs in a day easily.

How??? I've never understood how people can have that many tabs open and it be useful at all. At that point the information overload is too much. I have at most 10 open, and close them as I'm done with them. Helps reduce cognitive load.

I think a lot of people use it like instapaper? A queue of things to read.

If browsers had a sort of tab queue where longer lived stuff then things could be a bit better on this front I think

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#345
post #39

I'm really glad that people at Mozilla use ridiculous numbers of tabs too. Lazy-loading of tabs is the reason I switched to firefox. I'm not sure if it's still this way, but Chrome used to load every tab on startup. So even if you only had 100 tabs, you were looking at 5+ minute startup time. God-forbid that any of them were Youtube, or you'd have to go through and pause them all. I've just updated to Firefox 55 to t…

So even if you only had 100 tabs This is fucking surreal. Why on Earth would anyone want 100 open tabs, besides testing? What's the real life scenario we're looking at here?

I had 37 tabs open in Firefox on my phone yesterday. A stack of pages to read. No slowdowns.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So even if you only had 100 tabs This is fucking surreal. Why on Earth would anyone want 100 open tabs, besides testing? What's the real life scenario we're looking at here?

I wish tabs/windows worked more like persistent "workspaces". For example, say I'm booking a trip. I always open a bunch of sites (Kayak, Booking.com, lots of hotels, Google Maps, places to visit, etc.) in a single window. In pre-computer times it would be like covering a desk with a ton of papers, books and notes. Gradually I will figure out stuff, book the trip, etc. but the tabs can stay for quite a while. I feel…

"Session Buddy" on Chrome has been really useful for me.

It lets you save and group open tas and windows, plus export them as list. (No affiliation)

https://sessionbuddy.com/

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#347
post #295
post #43

There are a lot of people who use tabs as bookmarks. Seems like a good way to keep the RAM industry going strong. Someone once told me (seriously) "I need at least 128 GB of RAM otherwise I can't keep my tabs open." But does everything you were interested in over the last X weeks or months really need to be loaded up? No, and if you use it like that then it can't preload stuff. I think the main lesson is that bookmar…

That's because the bookmarkers sucks. They do not adapt to what you are doing, you need to do a lot of setup and organize a lot to be able to use it well. It should be more organic, grow with the use you make. I still believe that anyone who makes a better bookmark will dominate more than just the browser war.

I'd try a thing for tabs that works like cmd-tab / alt-tab works for apps.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#348
I currently have over 1380 tabs open in firefox 52 ESR (over 4 windows). Oh god, it's terrible. Very slow and unresponsive, CPU usage is typically 60+% when idle. I restart firefox every couple days (which takes many minutes) to keep CPU and memory usage down, by causing all tabs to be unloaded. (As an example, right now at 5.2GB resident, with only a small percentage of tabs loaded). I've been trying to kick the habit. I also have several other profiles and other computers. Probably adds to 5000 tabs all in all.

I use All Tabs Helper to help jump between tabs. Finding tabs is hopeless without it. ATH also has features like mass closing tabs or unloading them. I wish it had a way to bookmark tabs, which I would use to close most of my tabs.

So, I'm very glad to hear this. Time to switch off ESR.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So even if you only had 100 tabs This is fucking surreal. Why on Earth would anyone want 100 open tabs, besides testing? What's the real life scenario we're looking at here?

I wish tabs/windows worked more like persistent "workspaces". For example, say I'm booking a trip. I always open a bunch of sites (Kayak, Booking.com, lots of hotels, Google Maps, places to visit, etc.) in a single window. In pre-computer times it would be like covering a desk with a ton of papers, books and notes. Gradually I will figure out stuff, book the trip, etc. but the tabs can stay for quite a while. I feel…

Along the lines of your analogy, I wouldn't have papers strewn all over the desk, I'd have them in a pile or in a folder. Reversing the analogy I feel this is similar to using bookmarks or saving a list of links.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#350
post #39

I'm really glad that people at Mozilla use ridiculous numbers of tabs too. Lazy-loading of tabs is the reason I switched to firefox. I'm not sure if it's still this way, but Chrome used to load every tab on startup. So even if you only had 100 tabs, you were looking at 5+ minute startup time. God-forbid that any of them were Youtube, or you'd have to go through and pause them all. I've just updated to Firefox 55 to t…

> I'm not sure if it's still this way, but Chrome used to load every tab on startup.

I used to avoid Chrome for the same reasons, but then I found an extension and, uh, extended it, to create:

https://github.com/hrj/sloth/

It forces all tabs into inactive state on startup. Also creates a new tab page (or switches to an existing one) to avoid loading the focussed historical tab.

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