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Comment by hackuser | Hacker News Reader

> I stopped using Firefox because my habit of opening dozens of tabs led to stratospheric memory usages that killed even 16G machines

I don't think that's representative of how Firefox works. I used Firefox similarly in 2013 and didn't see those problems; the users supported by my company, mostly on 4GB machines, also didn't see them.

I have a 112 tabs open right now and Firefox has been running for a couple of weeks, which means thousands more have been opened and closed. It's using 4 GB of memory (EDIT: Which is more than usual, but it's fine with me).

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Agree with you here - this is essentially the reason that I don't use Chrome on my desktop (aside from brief testing, or to load up something quickly that requires Flash).

Firefox is still a lot better at RAM and CPU usage when hundreds of tabs are present in the browser. This persists when using e10s.

I see your 112 and raise you a 875. FF worked just fine that too with just a less than 1 GB of RAM. I had to block flash, hand tune some of the cache sizes and have a tab uloader etc. No other browser seemed capable of handling my rather <cough> unique <cough> use case.

If you don't mind me asking, what are you doing that you have 875 tabs open? How are you able to keep track of what you opened, and where etc? I tend to feel anxious and unfocussed when I've got over a dozen or so open - at which point i'll dump some "I'd like to read this" articles into a bookmarks folder which I work through in my down-time, and clean out periodically.

I would like to spend some words saying how good is the tab-unloading thing.

I have an extension that basically unloads a tab (I guess it freezes the state and serializes it to disk) and frees its ram.

It works very well, so well I'd love to use it on my phone too.

Mind sharing the name of the extension? I have a similar usage pattern with hundreds of tabs of open and would find it useful. Thanks.

There are extensions that can search the body of the open but out of view tabs.

I have commented at length why I use so many open tabs. Basically that's my cache-to-do-list. Once I revisit certain tabs enough times they get upgraded to a bookmark. What bookmarks don't do well but tabs do marvelously is preserve the trajectory and context of how I arrived at the page. Very useful to recreate the state when I visit it later.

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