Show HN: If you have over 99 tabs in Firefox mobile, you will get an infinity | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: If you have over 99 tabs in Firefox mobile, you will get an infinity

22 pointsaio263 comments

I just wanted to show you all it. Thoughts?

At the end of the day, users just want to remember the sites they have visited without actively bookmarking and categorizing them because it’s too tedious. So why not just have a database of visited sites, grouped by most visited or by day. Yes, there’s the history of visited sites, but I don’t know many users who use this, so this could be redesigned to be more dynamic, more prominent (keep x tabs open, sorted by most visited or most recent), more intuitive and accessible.

Maybe find a metric to try to maximise the chance that you reopen an old tab ? Taking into account frequency to open this url, distribution in time, bookmarked, bookmarked and tagged... and put those in tab opened, tabs listed but not opened, or put in "history" .

It's not just a question of revisiting the same sites; some of us are using tabs as (poor) todo entries.

So it is sort of a bookmark without bookmarking. Either it’s project related (you do some research), or you want to read it later. Are there more categories?

I think that covers it. Backlogged tabs are like bookmarks, but more immediate and less work (no question of what folder they go in).

Simple Tab Groups (firefox) makes it easy to get them out of your way and organize into separate groups which you can switch to. As a side feature it has automatic saves that can resurrect your entire session from backups.

I don't see that as 1 of the whole 22 add-ons Mozilla has decided in its infinite benevolence to let us use in Firefox on Android.

Sorry this is on the desktop. It would probably not be very ergonomic on a tiny screen anyway.

As someone else said, Chrome does a smiley face. I just always assumed this was because of a UI limitation of space and the UI not working if it had 3 characters. I personally don't mind it. It's not like the tabs go away, if you go to the tab view, they are all still there. It doesn't limit you or anything.

Even better: If you have 99+ incognito tabs, you get a ";)"

I knew the :D when reaching 100 normal tabs, but this is interestingasfuck

Doesn't really bother me. Somehow I create tabs without realizing it and it just balloons to that point all the time. But on mobile I don't specifically care about keeping open tabs since I only use my phone browser for just looking up something, not so much keeping a running state of anything. Even if I did, I'm not sure I'd care how many tabs I have open.

I am the same way. I use the feature to automatically close tabs after a day as a form of garbage collection. But I almost never go back to a tab after putting the phone down, I'll just open a new one.

However people are definitely different. My partner uses tab groups and has quite the organization system.

Also firefox auto closes the old tabs for you if haven't touch them for maybe a month. You dont really need to actively close them

I find it quite annoying and would rather it provide an accurate number. With no indicator, I’ve found I close less tabs. The icon also looks a lot like the Privacy icon on the tab browser.

You can't fit any number in such a little place. And precision is not relevant facing such a big number Finally, I think it hurts performance, so it may be a good design choice to annoy enough on order to incite people to close them :)

> You can't fit any number in such a little place.

I thought that but then I recently ran Kiwi and Ice Weasel to over 100 tabs and got a 3 digit count. (note: it might have been just one of those but pretty sure it was both).

Just put the count on a hover tooltip - everyones happy, no size limitation, still serves as a deterrent (dubious as it may be to try incite suchlike on users who may have shelled out enough for a machine that can handle hundreds of tabs).

You simply shouldn't have 99 tabs. That's not what tabs are for.

Other tools exist that are much more appropriate for the job you're trying to emulate with a clusterfuck of active tabs.

Just because the tab exists doesn't mean it's active. I regularly have 100+ tabs in Firefox, manageable with TreeStyleTabs so usually just ~10 root tabs and the rest are child tabs within that, and Firefox sleeps the tabs anyone so doesn't really use much memory or CPU. Probably the same on mobile as well.

What are tabs for if not to have multiple websites open at the same time? Where goes the limit for "what tabs are for" for you? 10 is fine but 100 is not?

Classic "the user is using it wrong"

You're abusing the concept of a tab. Other, superior tools exist for this task.

And, no, the end user is not always right, especially given that a user with 99+ tabs is already highly aberrant.

> a user with 99+ tabs is already highly aberrant

I have 999+ tabs semi-regularly, what does that make me? :D

Why not? If it works for this user that is great. It may not be the way that you or me use the tool but that doesn't make it wrong.

You shouldn't, but it happens. The UI makes it much easier to open a new tab than to close older tabs (unless you close all of them at once). You even inadvertently open new tabs when you click on links and they open on a new tab rather than on the current tab. Unless you consciously choose browse in a way that avoids the proliferation of new tabs, you'll get flooded by them, as that's what the design leads to. Exceptions are browsers that don't save tabs between sessions, or that automatically close tabs after a specific number.

This is exactly the problem on Firefox on Android (don't know about iOs).

You tap on the address bar and are presented with a set of icons of your most-visited sites. Hitting any icon will open the site in a new tab. But it's not obvious, and it's easy for your tabs to balloon.

To prevent that you actually have to start typing the site name in the address bar, even if the shortcut icon is right in front of you.

In Chrome if you tap on the address bar you also get a set of icons, but clicking on one opens the link in the same tab, as you'd expect.

Where? I've consistently had 300+ tabs open and have never "gotten an infinity" or whatever you mean by this.

+1. I just opened 100+ tabs in a new window. Where do we see this infinity?

Also OP, please show something in a ShowHN haha

New window? I suppose you didn't even read the headline. This is for Firefox mobile. It works this way in Android for me at least. As soon as you close tab 100 you get back the numbers.

> This is for Firefox mobile. It works this way in Android for me at least.

Same. I don't see my final count until I do a close-all. Top count was over 600 tabs.

Sorry, still new to this 'Show HN' thing

At the top of the screen, to the right of the URL. An example from Wikipedia and one open tab: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Firefox_for_Android_scree...

I almost never close tabs. Maybe once or twice a year I close them all at once, but until then, the number just keeps growing and growing. Currently there are 2700 tabs open in my Firefox on Android. It still works relatively well. The only problem I notice is when I type in an address, it doesn't show the list of matching open tabs and history items. Inconvenient, but not critical. I should change my habits, yes.

I still marvel at people who accumulate lots of tabs. As someone who rarely has more than two tabs going at a time(1), I am fascinated by that workflow and what the benefit is.

(1)Although I often have multiple instances of the browser going if I'm doing research. I find it convenient to organize pages with multiple instances, so I can select which group I want to see by using the task bar.

It's cause I want to keep tabs (like a bookmark) but am too lazy to find the bookmark folder

I do this then forget, my “solution” is to use the “turn active tabs into bookmarks” feature on Brave Mobile so I can save everything with the promise to sort it later. That was easily 10,000 bookmarks ago.

The infinity symbol doesn't bother me; what I don't like is that the information about the number of open tabs isn't available anywhere else. As a result, I have to run a script on the browser console on my desktop.

Also, I'm not sure if it's just my old iPhone X, but I've noticed that when I have 100+ tabs open, the app crashes more frequently.

For anyone using Samsung Internet, be aware that if you try to go over 99 tabs, it will close your oldest tab.

Does anyone actually use Samsung Internet?

Yeah probably 3 people

In all seriousness, yes, unfortunately, I know at least one person who daily-drives the Samsung browser. Why, I can't imagine. I mean, even Chrome is better than Samsung Internet, and that's saying a lot, since Chrome is essentially Google spyware IMO.

About the same number of people as use Firefox according to this site: https://gs.statcounter.com/ Which is the source used by caniuse.com: https://caniuse.com/usage-table

I found that it's only useful to browse sites that don't have dark mode (built-in conversion without any extensions) since they actually put some effort into making it work.

I tried it for a while. It's a pretty good browser which at the time had features others didn't. (I want to say extensions but I don't remember). In the end I am never comfortable using a closed source browser so I switched to Firefox.

If you have over 99 tabs open in Chrome mobile the tab count will display ":D".

In Kiwi Browser, it just shows the numbers like it's nothing :)

In case you actually want to see what it looks like: https://i.imgur.com/H2YT5QV.jpg

My bad, still new to this 'Show HN' thing. Forgot to show an image.

There is an auto-close setting. There is no point in having them kept "open", because they are not kept in memory anyway, unlike on desktop.

By contrast, on desktop all tabs will be kept in your computer's memory, but your brain's working memory will still be too small.

(I've never understood tab hoarders.)

I use tree style tab with a plugin that unloads the tabs, so that they are effectively short-term bookmarks, but with a hierarchy to help me organize.

Since I've been using Grasshopper I lost my tab clutter problem.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/grasshopper-u...

I use it as a sidebar. And have been hoarding tabs more because it's not a problem.

OP is talking about android.

Firefox/iOS has the same I think.

It's been like that since forever. I guess that 3 digits don't fit nicely in that small space.

I take it as a reminder that I parked too many pages in my tabs but it doesn't seem to affect performances, so I don't care. I try to stay below 40, possibly 30 parked tabs now.

I closed and Pinboarded probably 300 tabs yesterday. How many it actually was I will never know because of that ∞. I don't like the infinity character.

Check your parents' phone, pretty sure all of them have the same infinity tab

Chrome mobile does the same thing, with a smiley face for >99 tabs.

I simply set tabs to auto-close after one week.

DuckDuckGo Browser gives you a "~".

I got 99 problems but a tab ain't one.

Who doesn't have over 99 tabs open at any given time?!? :)

Exactly!

Why is this a problem? if you need 100 tabs open...you have process improvements to make.

It's not a problem, just wanted to let people know lol

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