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Comment by seba_dos1 | Hacker News Reader

Nothing can beat Chrome in being the fastest to become unusable when opening many tabs ;)

How many? I typically have 2 windows with ~30-50 tabs opened in each of them. No problem at all, never was.

I typically have hundreds, sometimes low thousands of tabs opened in Firefox on 8GB RAM and it works well, while ~30-50 is an upper limit of what Chrome can do without bringing the whole system to swapping hell. Plus, Chrome's tab UI makes more tabs completely unusable, while vanilla Firefox works well and can also offer massive improvements like vertical tabs.

> I typically have hundreds, sometimes low thousands of tabs

They should probably ditch all in-memory stuff, and just use the drive, so they can support those cases when you really want to have a "low millions of tabs open."

Okay. Hands down here. Never could get this kind of use case, never had such an experience either, so may be by the time you have 1000+ tubs Chrome does kill itself.

>Chrome's tab UI makes more tabs completely unusable

True, thankfully we have extensions that deal with this (I've been using Keepin' Tabs for this, until I started using cVim)

Very true. Chrome can never handle my 150+ tabs per window that Firefox can.

What do you do with 150 tabs?

When I have 20 open I already start to get confused about where stuff is...

With Tree Style Tabs plus the Awesome bar it is not a problem to handle and it's easy to get up to this number over the day.

But, so I guess you open links in a new tab and don't bother closing them?

I easily reach a hundred tabs with Tree Style Tabs when researching a topic. The tree structure makes it easy to understand how you've navigated the web and to traceback where you came from. When I found what I've what I was looking for I start closing tabs. The ones that remain is my catch and I save the URLs and/or contents.

Gotcha. Interesting. :-)

Just for completeness:

* Firefox's Awesomebar (the address bar) is much more powerful. Whereas Chromes sends you to google mainly: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/awesome-bar-search-fire...

* Tree Style Tab: https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/

There's also Tab Center Redux, for people who already need a better way to handle tabs, but don't need or want to use trees there: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-center-re...

Thanks to Firefox's userChrome.css, you can pull pretty nice customized UIs even without any additional extensions :) https://github.com/eoger/tabcenter-redux/wiki/Custom-CSS-Twe...

Came here to say that. Tree Style Tabs makes ut possible to navigate an unhealthy amount of tabs.

Not the original poster, but...

I have 9 virtual desktops; I typically have browsers in 6-7 of them for various in-progress tasks. That's somewhere between 6 and 14 browser windows (I can fit two side by side on my screen), with multiple tabs in each.

Finding things is easy. Even ignoring the per-task categorization by desktop, Firefox lets you search all your tab titles/urls: just type "% " in the URL bar followed by your search string. If I'm looking for something specific, this is the simplest way to find it.

There is so much FF PR talk here.

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