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Comment by ericol | Hacker News Reader

One thing I observe in the latest OS update (Ventura) is that they made HUGE improvements in memory management (MacBook M1, 8 GB).

Before, Firefox would bring the laptop to a crawl with ~200 tabs (Yeah, I know). Having PHPStorm open at the same time was a sure machine killer.

Just today I found myself casually with close to 350 tabs, while at the same time working in PHPStorm with no issues.

In my experience (My previous box was a Thinkpad T430 with 16 GB of RAM running Debian) linux is far from this good handling memory.

Also, the state management in MacOS is equal to no one. I have a Lenovo Thinkbook 15 (I7), and having to wait for it to restart when I open the lid is excruciating. I should put a "This is my pos laptop" on it.

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That might also be related to Firefox improvements: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2022/10/improving-firefox-responsi...

Was not aware of that, cheers.

I see no issue with Linux memory management. I'm currently using an older Dell laptop (I guess 2 to 3 years old. Inspiron, or something like that. It's very shitty. Got it for free. Would not buy anything form Dell. The hardware falls apart after so short time! It's a wonder it still works).

But: I have currently on this Debian Testing box under KDE Unity, Rider, Sublime Merge (with a few hundred changed files), half a dozen Yakuake tabs, Kate as note pad, and around 30 Firefox windows (with maybe 5 to 6 thousand tabs)¹ open.

According to htop it uses only around 15 GB RAM.

(Hmm, actually something seems not OK when I look at it as there is still unused RAM, but htop says almost 9 days of uptime? And it still didn't fill all unused RAM with FS cache? Strange. Did something change in Linux 6.0? Maybe something really broke in Linux memory management? But I actually didn't notice anything unusual after the latest Kernel update.)

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¹ Before someone asks: Yes, thousands of tabs. But don't ask further…

Firefox handles this just fine with the help of tree tabs and tab auto discard. Only "booting" Firefox in such a state takes some time (I guess over 1 min.); but when it runs it runs just fine. No issues.

You truly live on the edge, my friend.

As a side note, what I truly like about random comments like this is the app naming. Never ever had heard of Yakuake, but that looks seriously interesting (Tough luck I'm on MacOS now).

Fetching Kate as we speak.

> You truly live on the edge, my friend.

I have an issue sorting tabs. I don't want to throw away research, and than never find some interesting things again. Actually having so much windows is already a good sign as it means I've sorted parts of the mess. But would still need to bookmark (and tag) stuff and this could take some time.

So I just "never" close tabs… (I close them after reading, and bookmarking and tagging the more interesting things; but I open new tabs faster than I could sort old ones… That's the problem.)

I think I had once even over 10k tabs open. But back than FF was much more unstable and it crashed in the end.

> Never ever had heard of Yakuake […]

It's one of the oldest KDE apps. I thing I was already there in version KDE 1. It's an drop-down console wrapper around `konsole-part`, the std. console "widget" in KDE. So it can do everything that Konsole (the default terminal in KDE) can do. But the window management is simpler with the drop-down approach.

Kate is the "dumb" desktop editor in KDE (besides KWrite, which I think nobody uses). But for a "dumb" editor it's quite powerful by now. And it's fast!

I don't do anything funky with it though. You can build half an IDE with it I think. But I never tried to get some LSP servers working with it. It's just my default "dumb" text editor.

I didn't know that there's a version for other OSes! Does it really work under macOS (or Windows)? I'm baffled to be honest. Also the webpage looks like Kate has much more features than I've seen. Even I use it for years. Interesting.

Didn’t Firefox just ship a big RAM improvement update (105)?

I was not aware of that, may be it IS related to that. But then, using a certain set of tools together (Firefox, PHPStorm, DataGrip) that historically have all been memory hungry was not possible before Ventura.

This is not criticism, more like wonderment and curiosity. At 200-300 tabs, isn't it just faster to do a web search or organized bookmarks? Or do you just Ctrl-Tab at light speed through them when you need to find something?

You can search tabs on firefox if you add % to the address bar

TIL! That is slick

Awesome, didn't know this!

I am one of the 200 tab people but it's not all in one browser window. I use a Firefox extension called 'Simple Tab Groups' that let me categorize the tabs to get back to them later. I use it as a mini-knowledge base (I'm not that attached to my tabs if I lose them, I use Yojimbo for my real KB).

But just to say it: I also freak out when I see someone with so many tabs open that it's like a little Joy Division cover on the top of their browser.

But to parent's question, what does having them open allow you to do?

I understand the existential dread of closing a useful-or-interesting-but-unread tab. But isn't this what bookmarks were created to solve?

Tabs are a better way to do bookmarks than regular bookmarks in most cases.

Howso? Honestly curious.

They are easier to create and remove. They advertise their presence, reminding you to come back and read them better. They can load faster since. They save your scroll position. They save the state of the site and input fields.

The other use case for bookmarks is creating a new tab and navigating to some website like a blank google doc, twitter, hacker news, etc. This is better handled by history. The most frequently used sites can show up on the new tab screen and show up in the results when you start typing in the URL bar.

I don't see any advantage to regular bookmarks for 99% of use cases. They seem to be a feature that exists due to limitations of hardware and browsers from the early days of the web. It's similar to YouTube. In the old days you had to subscribe to channels. Now YouTube is advanced enough to not require you to subscribe to anyone for it to give you content that you want.

Do people ever come back and read them though?

It seems like for people with 50+ tabs, rate_of_addition > rate_of_closure.

Saving state is a fair a point, but I can't think of many read pages where that's important to me + I'd trust it to a browser.

Do people ever catch up on their bookmark backlog? I don't think it really matters.

> isn't it just faster to do a web search or organized bookmarks

As someone who has a lot of browser tabs, unfortunately no. It's often near impossible to remember the magic query that yielded a particular site as a result and the problem with bookmarks is the overhead that comes with organizing them — most tabs sit in an uncanny valley between long-term usefulness and disposability which would require frequent clean up passes through bookmarks to keep one's bookmarks in a reasonable state.

And as noted by others, these tabs are typically organized by both windows (e.g. one window for apple platform dev stuff, one for android dev, one for shopping, etc) as well as tab groups within those windows.

Idk, I think I use bookmarks similarly to how you use tabs. I don't organize them but I do eventually delete them, just as you eventually (I assume?) close tabs.

The thing that sucks about bookmarks is that you have to open the bookmark manager, find the bookmark(s) in question, and delete them, which is a process that happens naturally as tabs get taken care of. I don't have to explicitly think about managing tabs the way I would have to manage bookmarks.

I usually just click the filled-in star to un-fill it.

Tab Stash is what I use (having had waay too many tabs open)

The reality is that I'm a tab hoarder, I just forget to close them.

some of them I want to keep for "reasons" so every once in a while I do some cleaning.

Firefox has now that beautiful feature that originated in Chrome where each window has a drop down (To right, a rotated "greater than" - or "smaller than" - symbol pointing down) that lists all the tabs ina window, and I can close them from there.

So, cleaning time just got slimmed down greatly :)

I use Vimium, Shift + t for tab search from long time, web search or organised bookmark is not faster when you are reading lot of obscure stuffs.

I would really like to update to Ventura, but I don't want to have to deal with that horrible System Settings application. That's the only reason I'm delaying the update. Although admittedly I don't spend that much time in System Preferences, so maybe it doesn't really matter for me.

Yeah, that new System Settings change sucks (Probably due to the fact that I was _just_ accustomed to it) but as you say, you don't spend that mach time in it.

Many things in memory management are stuck in the late 90s, where assumptions are made about disk vs memory vs cache that are no longer true.

Memory is still much faster than SSD but it is not as insanely faster as it was compared to spinning rust. And compression is a huge thing now, too.

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