(I get away with that abuse, which it a bit higher right now because I'm in the process of buying a house, by killing all tabs after launching, and only enabling the ones I want, one by one, using the essential to me Session Buddy.)
How do you get back to some of those tabs? Wouldn't it be easier to just google it again when you need it instead of having it lingering around and wasting your HW resources?
Then the problem is it would take a couple of days to go through all the waiting tabs and shut them down, and you don't have a couple of days to spare.
Eventually you just save them all out as a session and start again, and hope you will learn from your mistakes ;-)
I've switched from FF/Chrome to FF/Vivaldi because it has much better ways to handle tabs and bookmarks than Chrome does. Vivaldi does tab stacking, for example.
My real desk is messy. I mostly know where stuff is buried because I put it there and nobody messes with my desk. I clean it about once a year, usually when a big project is fully done forever. I want the same functionality from my browser.
Extensions tend to break with browser updates. Extensions tend to cause slowness. Nobody wants your bug report if you are running an extension.
First, echoing some other comments, this is a test of these web browsers. My Pale Moon instance (a Firefox fork), which I use much less "actively" and with NoScript running on it, has 42 windows with 2119 tabs, but Firefox is smart about only loading tabs on demand. On the other hand, I have to restart Palemoon regularly, to prevent it from getting unhappy I do so on every even numbered day. I also run a Firefox instance with 12 windows and 62 tabs.
The workflow is roughly:
Windows cover one or a related set of subjects. I know by position which are were, and hit specific tabs at regular schedules. Any site I hit multiple times a day has its window on that tab.
Additional tabs are of course things to get back to. Maybe to digest at a later time, maybe only if an issue is still relevant. I do regularly archive whole windows or most of them using Session Buddy or Session Manager for Firefox/Palemoon.
For me, this sort of spacial navigation works a lot better than any bookmark system or the like that i've seen. I have very very good 3D spacial ability (organic chemistry was easy), so I'm sure that's a major factor in why this is right for me and wouldn't be right for many others.
And at this very moment those hardware resources are for the wasting, at some point after I buy my house, move into it, and my life is 1/10 as crazy as it is now I hope to e.g. be running serious and hungry proof assistants and other stuff, circumstances right now have me using it for little more than a media machine, with the web most certainly being a media. Heck, at this moment, I have one almost as capable machine with 16 GiB only hosting a LTO-4 tape drive.
ADDED: this is on a stationary workstation, so all the problems that might crop up with limited mobile connectivity or screens less than 1080p with a 24 inch diagonal. NEC still makes some fine monitors with very long warranties.
This is the second time I've read this today....for me, when FF restarts, the tabs appear to be empty (they are blank, and reload when activated), but all of the memory is consumed almost as if it is somehow pre-allocated even though the page hasn't loaded. Do you not see this behavior?
I tend to use Firefox, with its default behaviour of only loading tabs that are active (a huge memory saver) and easy use of NoScript. I also use Great Suspender for Chrome to try control its excessive memory use - works well.
BTW. If you have a lot of HN tabs open and you try to reload a session after a restart, you get IP blocked for a short time - another good reason to use Firefox if you like keeping a few HN news tabs open, as it only loads 1 tab and keeps background tabs suspended.
I have tried active session managers but after several problems with corruption of sessions I reverted back to multiple windows and tabs.
Indeed; frequently I'll just disconnect my computer from the net for the startup period; crude, but it avoids this problem for sites like HN or others with with throttling.
Not that it happens very often to begin with, Chrome is quite stable, mostly I spaz with the keyboard and hit Ctl-Shift-Q when I meant Ctl-Q, something Chrome doesn't allow you to turn off.
Desktops likely map to projects. Windows likely map to web sites. Tabs likely map to web pages within the same site.
A slight variation is that each window represents a Google search, with the first tab being that search. The results get opened in tabs. I often do this, then switch to the other variation by pulling loose a tab that is for a web site with many interesting pages.
The firefox restart dialog, offering to kill individual tabs and/or whole windows as desired, is great. I wish Chromium had it. I wish it were available at all times. I wish it were offered when the browser complains about an unresponsive tab. Chromium's offer to kill a rendering process is pretty useless, since the offer includes one guilty tab and numerous innocent precious tabs.
I have a branching factor > 1.0 which means for every tab I open, upon reading that tab, I find at least one more interesting link, and up another tab comes.
It would converge to infinity if my computer didn't crash in a manner causing chrome to be unable to reload, or I didn't periodically hit chrome bugs in the O(1000)'s tab range.
As I tire of one project I switch desktop to another that's more aligned to my frame of mind.
I don't tend to kill old browser windows because they serve as a refresher to remind me where I'd got to with a certain problem, or a particular research issue. Only when I've reached some sort of resolution do I kill tabs or even whole browser windows.
Those tabs sure mount up.
Occasionally I try a different workflow but I gravitate to this habit. It seems to work for me.
One anecdote - 5 years ago FF was the clear winner for coping with tab abuse. Stable and coped with hundreds of tabs happily, Chrome started crashing pages beyond 50 or so.
Now it's the perfect reverse, FF hates a lot of tabs open and Chrome is stable with apparently limitless numbers.
Chrome is definitely the RAM greedy one (and so many processes!), and always has been.
Where Firefox falls over is with really heavy pages, such as infinite-scrolling image/gif sites. It's much better than it used to be, but it's still vulnerable.
With Chrome, pages fail to load (giving a blank page) and the Flash plug-in crashes. The browser does stay up, but the effect is the same: you have to restart it.
You can put hundreds of those tabs into just one that becomes a list, and then save it with the name 'house prosepcts'
Incidentally, recent builds of the Chromium-based Vivaldi browser had this suspend feature before Chrome did. As did some Chrome extensions, of course.
[0]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabs-outliner/eggk...