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

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.

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.

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.

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-disc...

[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/close-discard...

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.

Discussions

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

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

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!

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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-m... https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/onetab/

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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? :)

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?

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)

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-gr...

[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc...

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

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-co... (but alas, the number creeps up again)

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

I thought my 10 windows of 15 tabs was excessive

Misleading, article from May

[dupe]

Lots of discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40250672

Some things require a plaque.

Why so few?

Likely they are not a programmer.

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

Whats the point? Theres a feature called bookmarks

I struggle to understand ppl who brag about tabs count

Power idiot *

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.