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Firefox Power User Keeps 7,400 Browser Tabs Open for 2 Years

pcmag.com

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Re: Firefox Power User Keeps 7,400 Browser Tabs Open for 2 Years

#71

Post by shock »

samatman wrote: post #52

Something 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 be…

The easiest way I've found to move a bunch of tabs between windows is with Sidebery. It also lets you organize tabs into panels.

Re: Firefox Power User Keeps 7,400 Browser Tabs Open for 2 Years

#72

Post by xboxnolifes »

jerlam wrote: post #27
lxgr wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you remember which pages you still need to/want to get back to?

Saving 100s of tabs isn't going to work either, unless you can remember the name of the window and then tediously look through the list of open tabs. In that case, just search through your history instead of having the tabs.

Sure It can. For example, If I'm looking for a certain stackoverflow post about a project I'm working on, I know it's be on the window with the other resources for that project, and I can remember that it's roughly on the middle right portion of that group of tabs. That narrows it down to If I use my browser history, I'm going to have to re-filter out all of the webpages I deemed inadequate. If the tab was left open, I know it was at least somewhat useful.

Re: Firefox Power User Keeps 7,400 Browser Tabs Open for 2 Years

#73

Post by ranger_danger »

shock wrote: post #33
gpvos wrote: post #29

I'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.).

You can do that with Sidebery, at least partially.

I 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.

Re: Firefox Power User Keeps 7,400 Browser Tabs Open for 2 Years

#74

Post by ranger_danger »

shock wrote: post #59
ranger_danger wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My 100+ tabs consuming 12GB of RAM says otherwise...

That'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.

> 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.

Re: Firefox Power User Keeps 7,400 Browser Tabs Open for 2 Years

#75

Post by ranger_danger »

josefresco wrote: post #20
adam_arthur wrote: post #17

Why 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.

I don't understand "tab hoarders" but I also don't understand why Mac users pollute their desktop with a thousand icons either. I guess some people like clean workspaces, and some don't mind clutter.

Windows users have had screens full of icons since at least the 3.x days... and you can easily search google images for tons of Windows 98/XP screenshots from the early 2000s of desktops completely filled to the brim with shortcuts and such.

Re: Firefox Power User Keeps 7,400 Browser Tabs Open for 2 Years

#76

Post by sublinear »

adam_arthur wrote: post #17

Why 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.

My work machine usually has 5 to 7 workspaces open at a time each with 2 or 3 browser windows that each have anywhere from 3 to a dozen tabs open.

I visit every single tab multiple times a day and closing them out makes no sense. I need multiple windows for Jira, dev environment, testing, production, misc corporate intranet sites, servicenow, etc.

All of them have information updating live continuously. Why would I close them?

It's not even 100 tabs, but it's definitely a lot.

Re: Firefox Power User Keeps 7,400 Browser Tabs Open for 2 Years

#77

Post by shock »

ranger_danger wrote: post #73
shock wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can do that with Sidebery, at least partially.

I 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.

Look into the Panels feature, it has auto-move by URL regex.

Re: Firefox Power User Keeps 7,400 Browser Tabs Open for 2 Years

#78

Post by marbletiles »

adam_arthur wrote: post #17

Why 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.

Because often you can’t easily get back “in less than a second” as a tab is the culmination of a large stack of combined thought+browsing.

I keep it open because I can more conveniently context-switch back to it when I need to, rather than attempt to retract my steps from a search query all over again.

An open tab is state in suspension - it’s sleep mode. A bookmark is hibernation.

Re: Firefox Power User Keeps 7,400 Browser Tabs Open for 2 Years

#79

Post by techjamie »

ranger_danger wrote: post #74
shock wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That'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.

> 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.

There 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.

Re: Firefox Power User Keeps 7,400 Browser Tabs Open for 2 Years

#80

Post by Glyptodon »

adam_arthur wrote: post #17

Why 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.

To me tabs are like a queue of things I plan to review or consume. Does a link look interesting? Open it in a new tab, then I'll look at after I finish with the current one.
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