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Comment by crikli | Hacker News Reader

> I have just over 70 tabs open...

I'm really curious about this as once I get to about 10 tabs my brain starts wanting to close them to get back to something it can manage. This is either because I'm dumb (highly likely) or because you have a different usage style than I (also likely).

So if you don't mind elaborating, how do you get to where you have that many tabs open?

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Tree style tabs[1] have changed my life. There are plenty of times I get near 100 tabs. It automatically opens them as subtabs when ctrl or middle clicked. This is great when browsing source trees online via github, google code, etc.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

Vertical tab management is far superior when managing a bunch of tabs. I am not sure how anyone who has more than a handful of tabs can get by horizontally, not sure how people can tell tabs apart when only seeing the favicon & a few characters of the title. What with widescreen displays being the norm now it just makes sense to do vertical tabs.

I use a 1920x1200 monitor rotated 90 degrees. So, while it is technically a widescreen display, it doesn't quite work like one.

I combine "Tree Style Tabs" with the Tab Group[1] feature (added in FF4 I believe) instead of using a separate window for each class of tabs that I'm viewing. Those 2 combined with the "Pin as App Tab" option for Gmail and a couple of my control panels makes for a pretty efficient setup usability wise.

I really would love to see memory efficiency improve. I restarted FF yesterday and I'm already at 2.22 GB. It would be great to be able to set a ceiling on the amount of RAM FF is able to get its greedy little hands on. My iMac has 16GB, and I've seen FF reach half of that before when running a big Flash based web app with a hundred or so other tabs open. My little MacBook Air only has 4GB, so being able to tell FF to grab no more than 1GB or so would be fantastic!

[1] http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/what-are-tab-groups

I've got six virtual desktops with two monitors. When I'm doing web development, I have one window per screen, which usually means one window of tabs connected to my dev server, and one window of tabs for each framework/language I'm working with. For example, I was working on a WordPress plugin with JQuery, so I had a dozen tabs open on the WordPress function reference, and another dozen tabs open with JQuery stuff. Then I've got a virtual desktop with my email on one screen and Hacker News, etc. on the other one.

Finally I have two blank desktops that tend to get eaten up by tabs that I use when people come into my office asking questions that I don't know the precise answer to off the top of my head.

But yes, on a single desktop about 12 tabs is my limit. And when I get over 4 full browser windows I start to get antsy and know that I can't possibly keep focused on everything I'm doing.

> Finally I have two blank desktops that tend to get eaten up by tabs that I use when people come into my office asking questions that I don't know the precise answer to off the top of my head.

Why do you keep the tabs open after you've answered their question?

I'm in a remote area with limited Internet - 364 kbps down 128 kbps up shared among 20-30 office workers and over 100 residents. My computer can handle keeping tabs open in case I didn't properly solve the problem before, or if something similar crops up.

So, I have a lot of reference materials open on my desk, and I keep them open because finding the page I was on takes a long time, and loading that page takes even longer.

I've used Firefox under similar conditions.

Some people might not know that it actually includes a feature specifically for this use case. If you start to type in a URL or page name similar to one already open in a tab, the awesomebar dropdown menu lets you jump to the already-opened tab.

You can also prefix your URL/page title search string with '% ' to exclusively search open tabs :)

eg: % Firefox 7 memory

Happen to know where you can find out shortcuts like those? I had no idea it was there.

http://jonoscript.wordpress.com/2011/07/28/firefox-keyboard-...

That feature is actually broken on Ubuntu 10.10 / standard Gnome with multiple desktops - it tries to switch you to the appropriate tab but can't switch you to the appropriate desktop.

And I'm not sure I really like it anyway - when I re-type a URL I'm usually looking to reload it to grab a fresh copy. I tab-complete the address of my development server and Hacker News very often; anything else I don't usually know the URL off the top of my head, I just remember that I have such and such doc on such and such desktop.

HTTP Proxy?

It's on my to-do list. (After implementing a disaster recovery plan, cleaning up after an intrusion, and a half a dozen more important things.)

Meantime being careful about what I close does a decent job, and I don't have to maintain a proxy server.

Hint: use multiple windows.

One window with few tabs is for programming to-reads, second windows - with sites from searching for some item to buy, third - with stock information, etc. This way accumulating 100+ tabs is really not a big deal and it still remains manageable. Until FF crashes or, worse yet, grinds to a halt that is. "We are sorry, it is so embarrasing" it would say on a restart and then get herniated again trying to open all these tabs AT ONCE. Poor thing.

I am a tab hoarder also but personally i'm quite impressed at the speed and responsiveness of FF when restarting with 100-or-so tabs.

Yeah, I know, I should take my question to Stack Overflow, but does anyone know how to configure FF to not try to reopen tabs after a crash? (Takes a long time on my old machine.)

In about:config, change browser.sessionstore.resume_from_crash.

Well, Superuser, not Stack Overflow.

Go to about:config and set browser.sessionstore.resume_from_crash to false.

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.sessionstore.resume_from_c...

That does what I want. Thanks.

you could also try using the session manager add-on. I find it pretty handy for when FF crashes with 20+ tabs open in the HN tree, another 10 or so in whatever google search tree I have open, and some other miscellaneous tabs.

A while back I remember using an extension that would restore all of your previous tabs on start up, but not actually load them until you clicked on them. It fixed the situation you describe, but sadly it looks like it no longer works with the current version of Firefox.

This is default behavior as of Firefox 4. When you launch a new browser, the (default) home page has a "restore last session" button.

I always have tons of tabs open. I have 25 open at the moment.

Usually, I'll have about half a dozen windows open with about half a dozen tabs each. I group the tabs together so that each window holds similar tabs, so it's not really 30 things I'm keeping track of but more like 5-6. E.g. right now I have one window where I was checking finance related news, stock quotes, etc. One window with a bug report and several tabs open looking at relevant source code and google searches related to investigating the problem. I've got one window that's my mail. I've got one window with a few HN stories open.

as a potentially different use case, I use my tabs as a stack for reading things (where I push a link when I see it), and will then read through them all in a serial fashion, closing things I'm 'done' with. this generally leads to me having reference and 'to read' tabs open, in addition to things I like to have on hand (i.e. emails, workflowy, HN). this generally adds up to 15-20 tabs in my main window on average, going up to as much as 30-40.

I use Pentadactyl (formerly Vimperator), and hide the tab bar entirely. 'Number of tabs' then becomes pretty meaningless, as all tab-switching is based on a history stack and regular expressions (a la Emacs buffers), so one just lets the buffer list grow. I only notice when there's a noticeable slowdown (which on this Core i7 with 3GiB RAM starts around 180 tabs).

I use a firefox treetabs plugin that makes trees of tabs vertically on the left side of the monitor. ive had about 50-60 tabs/window with 3 windows open before, while running firebug. With that many on firefox 3/4 it was crashing if I ran it overnight, but it does seem to be improving now. Hopefully 7 will be a dramatic improvement.

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