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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

#81

Post by timbit42 »

autoexec wrote: post #44

If 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 butt…

Have 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.

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

#82

Post by m463 »

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.

The real answer would be to help address their desire while making it manageable.

I wish I could have virtual desktops or similar, per project. Any application I open for that project would be specific to that desktop.

In other words, my "taxes" tab might have:

- A browser for my bank.

- A browser for my 401k

- email messages regarding taxes

- a notepad for tax notes

- a todo list for tax steps completed and upcoming

This could alleviate the tab problem.

(or it could just explode the problem, I haven't been able to live this dream and it might not be so dreamy)

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

#83

Post by AnonC »

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.

> when you can easily get back to that page in less than a second in most cases?

How? Tabs preserve the navigation history too. Bookmarks don’t. Searching for it doesn’t work when you don’t remember which website it was. Following links from search results and links from those pages (from the search results) to get somewhere that seems like it could help…that’s just one of the ways tabs get accumulated.

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

#85

Post by asadotzler »

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.

Firefox switch to tab, my friend. You open a new tab, start typing the title of the page or the address of the site and it shows up in autocomplete with a switch to tab indicator and when selected it moves you to that tab instead of opening a copy.

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

#86

Post by asadotzler »

r721 wrote: post #2

>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?

They 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.

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

#87

Post by em-bee »

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.

well 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.

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

#88

Post by em-bee »

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.

the primary difference between bookmarks and tabs is that bookmarks are static and tabs are dynamic. the best example is tracking a webcomic. the tab will stay open on the page where i stopped reading. it then allows me to go back and resume reading. when i follow links to the next pages, then the tab will be updated.

if i were to use a bookmark, then every time i'd advance a few pages in the comic, i'd have to delete the old bookmark and create a new one.

it is quite ironic that a browser feature called bookmark does not actually function like a physical bookmark for printed books.

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

#89

Post by Gigachad »

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.

macOS puts screenshots on the desktop and you can’t change it. So it just ends up looking like that no matter what you prefer.
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