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Comment by srean | Hacker News Reader

Well, 800 tabs open is business as usual for me, wonder what it will do in this case.

Edit: I get downvoted to oblivion whenever I mention this usecase on HN. Its no different this time but so be it (given the negative karma I have ratched up, I wonder why the thread is even visible. Perhaps because many have commented on it. A new HN UI feature, I suppose).

FF is the only browser that has worked well with this rather unusual usage pattern, so am ever so thankful to Mozilla folks. I do a lot of reading and it seriously helps. For those who are feeling exceptionally trigger happy, its not that unusual an usage pattern if you ask around.

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Not 800, but I've had e10s enabled for quite a while and it made the difference between "freezes up regularly" and "completely fine" with hundreds of tabs for me.

I assume you did not open these tabs in a single browsing session. For quite a while, Firefox will not load and render all tabs on session restore, but that happens once you switch to such a tab. Therefore I would guess that these 800 "inactive" tabs will not add that much overhead no matter whether e10s is enabled.

Indeed. No, they accumulate over months. The count fluctuates of course, ~800 is approximately the steady state.

> For quite a while, Firefox will not load and render all tabs on session restore

Absolutely, and this behavior is just fantastic for my use. Not that it crashes often, sometime I deliberately kill it if I need the memory for some analysis I am running.

I abuse tab groups as a sort of generational garbage collector. From time to time I open a new group as my main group. After a while of using it I move all tabs I still require from my old groups over and close them. That way the time required to clean up only scales with tabs I am still interested in.

Although starting a new tab group before going down some rabbit hole is helpful as well. Makes it way easier to close ~30 pages of documentation or whatever.

Thanks for the metaphor, I indeed use tabs as a generational collector.

Just out of curiosity, why would you want to have 800 open tabs? What is your workflow? Do you use tabs as bookmarks? How do you find open tabs?

Yeah they are like a volatile bookmarks with a traversable history and a 'this is very interesting but have to save the reading for later' todo list.

Once you bookmark a link the history-browsing-trajectory is lost. However once I visit a tab often it becomes a bookmark.

There are extensions to organize and search bookmarks.

you may be a fan of tree-style tabs - used to do me well when i used to be on FF - you get a sense of how you got somewhere.

I use vivaldi now - and while i have tabs on the left - i do miss tree-style features.

How do you navigate between your tabs?

Firefox searches through open tabs by default when you type in the address bar.

You just use omnibus to find it, for me it is a temporary bookmark, once when I did cleanup I had 1000 tabs.

If you type something in the Firefox url bar starting with a "% " (percent, then space) the rest of the string will be treated as a search across the titles and urls of your open tabs. This is what I typically use for navigation.

I'm in much the same boat as srean, I do online research on some subject (new subject every week) and open tabs are my way of remembering what I still need to read and keep notes from. 100's of tabs open is really no exception, especially not for subjects with a large online footprint.

I use the tree-style tabs plug in and scrapbook to keep my sanity.

Firefox has a configurable upper limit through setting dom.ipc.processCount in about:config. Firefox 55 might expose this in its preferences.

Tab hoarder myself (got 559 on Firefox 54.0 right now). Its just laziness/skatter-braineded-ness. Cutting it down becomes a chore kinda like cleaning out your inbox.

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