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Comment by tannhaeuser | Hacker News Reader

I don't have that many tabs open right now or usually, but I'm wondering what Firefox users in the habit of messing with > 100 tabs are doing. Sooner rather than later Firefox won't allow you to open new tabs ("one thing to do") and forces a restart after updating in the background. I don't know if you can open another FF window/process in that situation but I think that behavior is very annoying and kindof needs fixing if FF wants to be a browser for power users.

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I'm not quite sure what you're talking about. Firefox allows thousands of tabs without stopping new tabs being created. I currently have 3109 open (with only a dozen or so loaded though) which has survived abrupt power loss, freezing and force quitting, and updates across several years worth of versions both in the background and manually triggered. It's using 1571MB RAM at the moment and rarely goes over 10Gb, even after having viewed hundreds of tabs recently. In that case it's easy enough to unload everything by restarting the browser or selecting a bunch of tabs then unloading them with Sidebery.

FF telling me it needs to restart, refusing to open a new tab, happens all the time for me, at mostly annoying times such as in the middle of a session while logged in. Doesn't have anything to do with the number of open tabs, but is due to FF having downloaded updates. Maybe it's a config option? Anyway, I'm wondering why FF needs restarting, and in combination with the frequency this happens (at least once a month), I'm questioning the architecture behind this - after all I don't want my browser to update more often and consume more download bytes than the content I'm after, and I'm not looking forward to a web/web browser that needs constant updates after 30 years sorry.

This matches my experience to the word.

This is actually something I almost touch on in the article. Sideberry have a feature to store snapshots. So if I restart the browser, I just restore from there. I also have it set to save every 2 hours so that I can always recover from crashes.

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