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Comment by samstave | Hacker News Reader

I am constantly dumbfounded with the fact that the majority consumer of memory on my machine is a FN web browser! (that said, I *do* have basically like 30 tabs open at any given time...

(It would be cool if dormant tabs can just hold the URL, and kill all memory requirements when dormant after N period of time..)

But heck, even when I am running a high-end game on my machine, the memory consumption is less than when I have a bunch of tabs open displaying mostly text ...

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I have a hundred tabs open in my Firefox. They are structured by Tree Style Tab, and most of them are offloaded by Auto Tab Discard.

This gives me a way to instantly switch between contexts (with a small delay if a tab has to be reinstated from cache). This is how bookmarks should really work.

This us why Firefox is not the biggest memory hog on my system. Most of the RAM is consumed by language servers and Emacs.

I wish Android Firefox was as well behaved, beyond a certain amount of tabs new ones don't really load until I shut some, it's been like that for years, on different phoned and different android versions. The amount I can keep open seems to increase as phones get better.

Indeed, tab-based navigation has less friction, no need to recreate some other order in another UI, and offloading should deal with resource use (workspaces in Vivaldi also helped reduce the clutter a lot along with tab groups)

Small tangent: I wonder what people are seeing when they say they have "too many" tabs open.

I had over 1000 tabs open in Firefox (macOS) and never noticed any problems. (Trying to clear them out. Down to 920 now.) 2.26 GB out of 32.00 GB is used by Firefox. I have about 70 open in Chrome (since only a certain number fit on the screen) and it's split across 12 processes which are between 12 MB and 158 MB each. I have nearly 500 tabs open (because that's the limit) on my iPhone and iPad each, in Safari.

huh... WTF do you have 500 tabs open for?

I usually carry 3 sets of tabs, typically around ~10 each:

Personal info sites, like reddit and its links...

Tech Sites, like HN and its links....

Video Sites, like Nexflix / Prime...

EDIT:

Also - what tab-mgmt extensions do you use? Like Tab Grouping etc...

Also - one of the things I attempted to do, but failed to do so consistently, was to swipe to a different desktop between, work, person, and learning/browsing... instead of tab groups I had "workspaces" but that is a hard habit to build, for me, it seems.

i ususally keep tabs open to retain the context because i am too lazy for bookmarks.

yea, tab-grouping is essential. (tabkit in the good old days, sideberry currently)

>i ususally keep tabs open to retain the context

This is the way I do it as well - but I cant hold ~500++ 'context' threads in my head...

I typically hit a tab and wind up here: https://i.imgur.com/KWmVAD0.jpg

> what tab-mgmt extensions do you use

I didn't answer before because the answer is none. Not sure if anyone will see this but today Firefox recommended some extensions and one was OneTab. That let me turn all my tabs into a list. Then I could search those and (manually, one by one) open all of the tabs from a given site as long as it's in the title. I'm already down to 264 tabs (from 900+) today in just a little bit of time, and still going.

> I had over 1000 tabs open in Firefox

this is me

> 500 tabs open (because that's the limit) on my iPhone

that's my wife

Same, I was around 1500 tabs across three windows when I finally moved from the HP Z420 workstation I'd been using as my primary sometime around JAN 2023. Machine was fine with it.

Just curious: what kind of workflow results in having over 1000 tabs open? (Oldschool Unix hobbyist here, so I always feel like drowning when I'm nearing 20+ tabs. :)

Not OP, but opening almost every link as a new tab, and keeping old tabs around because you don't have a great bookmark organization system.

I am trying to break myself of these habits, but they do have some benefits. For instance when I do a web search on a complex topic, I often scan the results, opening the most promising looking results as tabs. Then I look through the tabs comparing them. The trouble is I never remember to close them when the task is done.

I'm not a 1000+ tabbed, but I can relate to what you're describing. I'd add that it seems like it's getting harder all the time to find what you're looking for with the current state of web search, so when you come across a good page you don't want to "lose" it. Sure you could bookmark it, but you probably won't want it forever, just until you're done with whatever you were working on that prompted you to search for it in the first place. So bookmarking just moves the mess from the tab bar to the bookmark folder. Kind of like cleaning your room by stuffing all the mess in your closet.

That feeling completely disappeared with workspaces in Vivaldi (though for me the discomfort started with maybe around twice as many, vertical layout with more smaller tab height helped)

For work:

Mainly just not having a workflow of going back to close them. So it's just previous work like a view of some logs, a merge request, a link to a file in a repo, a monitoring dashboard, an alert in a monitoring system, etc.

In Chrome, I do end up closing them eventually because there's no more space to work.

For personal:

it's more like a bookmark, but don't often review them rather than open a new tab to research whatever I'm currently curious about.

Technically, all the bookmarks you have are hibernating tabs.

There's a whole spectrum of activity you can have on a tab, and to me I see really no difference between "unhibernating" a tab and just reloading it from scratch.

Either one is very slow in modern crap software.

Unless it happens under 150ms, it is slow.

I would expect thawing a tab to present me with the tab as it was last time I saw it, no reload; whereas, being a link, I'd expect a bookmark to load the current version.

... Actually the latter is incorrect, in truth I'd expect bookmarks to present me with the exact version I had in front of me back when I bookmarked it, including if the site is temporarily down, has vanished, or if I navigated a more recent version.

This is what I see on a linux machine with only 6GB of ram: https://blog.imraniqbal.org/ram/

(TL:DR OOM errors and the kernel starts reaping processes)

Just seems so odd as I remember playing gta vice city on a pentium 3 with 128mb of ram and now I need 6GB+ to just browse the web

Certain sites are absolute murder. A single wikia (now Fandom) tab or new reddit tab left open can sometimes bring a browser to its knees. I've seen google mail do the same when they screw something up.

edit: That is, I think people sometimes attribute the lag they're experiencing to the number of tabs they have open, when only a handful of their tabs are to blame.

(It would be cool if dormant tabs can just hold the URL, and kill all memory requirements when dormant after N period of time..)

The problem with this is that a lot of web pages don't handle this gracefully. You don't end up back where you left off!

It would be nice if all the details of the inactive web page were saved to storage, and then retrieved from storage when the tab is reactivated, without having to make any network calls at all.

I turned off JavaScript one day and found my browser memory woes completely evaporated. Now I turn it on per site on a case by case basis and it's easy to figure out which sites leak a lot and prepare accordingly.

Browsers have gotten worse. In..2013, I believe, I regularly had 200+ firefox tabs open on a laptop. It was a high-end laptop, with IIRC 16 gigs of ram, but it was still a laptop. The number may have been much higher than that - I've hit over a thousand tabs before, but I can't recall if that was then or more recently.

Multi-process firefox seems to have absolutely obliterated the performance of firefox with large numbers of tabs until recently (it seems to be have improved).

i think edge and chrome have started doing this recently

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