under firefox I normally had 120 tabs open all the time, and it's fine. with chrome, I dare not to exceed 60 tabs. chrome triggers heavy swap all the time still, which renders the system very sluggish.
Nowadays I do a "killall chrome; sleep 2; killall chrome" whenever it starts to trash the disk and giving me the bad vibe.
Copy-on-write means this needn't be a large overhead. Only pages that change after forking are duplicated.
Unless you set your vm.overcommit_memory sysctl variable to 1 (= never refuse malloc), duplicated writable pages are going to subtract from available memory, even if all copies are currently the same.
Both Chrome and Firefox have multi-process sandboxes now, Firefox is a little behind and plans to enable multiple content processes next year.
While Chrome's is more granular, it does share processes between web pages from the same domain so won't start a new one for quite every tab.
Firefox is more than just a little bit behind when it comes to sandboxing though... there's a LOT more to sandboxing than splitting up processes. That doesn't result in any meaningful isolation without a lot of further work, and improving sandboxing is a major undertaking that Chrome has been working on for years.
Chrome Extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabist/hdjegjggiog...
Firefox Extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabist/
source code: https://github.com/fiveNinePlusR/tabist
Let me know if you find it useful or have any suggestions. (patches are awesome too)
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspende...
It freezes your tab after a set amount of time, freeing up the memory for each tab.
Such things would have an entry on the tab bar like a normal tab, but wouldn't actually have anything loaded until you clicked. Firefox already supports this sort of thing internally, it looks like, since when you reload a session that had a bunch of open tabs, it doesn't seem to load each tab's contents until you click on it.
(Open such a thing with a particular shortcut, or by transforming an existing tab into a dormant one - obviously equivalent in terms of JS callbacks and so on to closing the window.)
Other possibilities could include multiple types of tabs, and/or alternative UIs for lists of pages you like/pages you want to look at sometime soon.
Like using Photoshop to abort a system shutdown if you forgot to commit.[0]
0.https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-greatest-software-misuses...
Tabs, by virtue of being there bugging you, are bookmarks, to-do lists, and task reminders all in one.
So it ends up being counterproductive.
When researching a thing I'll open up some high level page about it, then do breadth-first searches of tab contents, opening up new tabs whenever I see something that looks interesting, has wider implications, or possibly has some weaker relationship to a thing with one or both of those properties and I think I might be able to traverse the concept graph this way to find it / them.
So I end up with a sort of flat tree where it corresponds almost directly to my earlier thought graph which produced them. I can work with maybe 200 this way... But not more. Unless I open them in different windows - sometimes different browsers, actually, to help further differentiate/compartmentalise them (eg. I'll use this strategy for largely disparate topics). Then, well, I'm not sure where I top out, all I can say is I once crashed my box from out of memory (not running swap), and it's a 32GB box soooo... I dunno.
There are likely many others that work this way. Perhaps it's not common, but I also feel that it's very unlikely unique!
i try to split different fields of interest into separate windows. Then i save that window as a suitably titled session and close the window. If i need to add a new tab to a session, i use the "append to session" feature. That way i dont clutter up my bookmarks or my primary firefox session.
All I am saying is that there are situations when a lot of tabs is the best option given the circumstances, e.g. lots of data entry work.