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Comment by jraph | Hacker News Reader

8 years ago, Firefox 25 was released. I don't know your needs but a lot as changed underneath. Notably, Firefox is now using multiple processes, the Javascript engine is probably a lot faster, the web engine too. I don't like every change, especially the latest revamp of the UI, but it is still the best browser for me.

You could try, and them move if conclusive? If you consider switching anyway.

Moving everything before being sure seems expensive.

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As I said, I was bitten twice. It's hard to even try now. Back then I try for a few week before committing, but when I move my session (of 200+ tabs) onto Firefox, it's dead.

And back then I was told the exact same thing I was told this time, too.

I sure reached 200 tabs on Firefox at times and it's probably a lot better at handling this kind of things than a decade ago. But I hear you.

200 tabs is nothing for Firefox.

I have thousands of open tabs, managed with the Tree Style Tabs (TST) plug-in.

FWIW, I have 3668 tabs open in Firefox right now. Looks like it's using about 1.6GB of RAM. (Notes: most of those thousands of tabs are unloaded, I block JavaScript rather aggressively, and yes I do recognize the absurdity but I confess my sins here to illustrate my point!)

I have no experience migrating from Chrome to Firefox, but FF can certainly handle lots of tabs. Vertical tab layouts are very helpful for navigating them.

My limited experience using Chrome says that Firefox requires vastly less RAM to handle multiple tabs (anything more than a dozen!).

Re: Conspicuous tab consumption: If I pared down, I'd be more like 50-100 active tabs. I appreciate that Firefox remains completely usable even when I do not pare down. Chrome fails for me at about 20 tabs due to lack of usable vertical tabs layout, even before RAM becomes an issue on this machine.

Your use case is covered by Firefox, its called Bookmarks.

If only it were so. Unfortunately, bookmarks serve a very different use case. I have 55821 of them.

If you do ever want to try to make the switch again, you might try the 'Auto Tab Discard' extension. It lets you customize how tab unloading works. I had 2755 tabs open without breaking a sweat (down to 1093, woo!). Starting the browser will only load the last active tab and, as you continue to work, your older tabs (depending on your setting) will start to get unloaded.

I want to say this is a feature of the browser itself, but the extension (add-on, whatever we call them now) gives you a lot more control.

As for session migration, maybe an extension like 'Tab Session Manager' will help? It supports several different formats, so surely one of those formats is something that Chrome can export. That would let you move everything in one fell swoop, at least.

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