Zero regrets: Firefox power user kept 7,500 tabs open for two years
techspot.com
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I believe browsers have had to adapt to this by basically converting tabs into auto-bookmarks that have advanced caching or something. So they automatically unload and have logic to determine when they are actually supposed to be active.
I wonder if eventually tabs, history, bookmarks, and tab groups will be completely merged into one flexible and intelligent feature.
On wider screens, a left sidebar might open by default with tabs stacked vertically.
Not sure but it seems like people don't use tabs as originally intended.
Maybe if they just made history more obvious then that would change the equation.
This is superior to bookmarks, as the server respose is saved along with scroll position etc.
I've long wished I could actively trigger this similar to making a bookmark. Bonus if they saved some embeddings too so I could search the contents of the saved pages.
I'm on Windows if that makes any difference.
Remember, we’re taking about a Firefox restart, not the back button.
And I do keep a text file with interesting links, so I don't have to keep 100+ tabs open. Seems much easier to me to skimp through a text file looking for something I remembered seeing than using bookmarks.
It's good.
Edge already does that. (Well, you can make it do that.) I don't know about other browsers.
I literally cannot live^W browse without it.
The experience made me realise that what you describe is exactly what I'm trying to do. I have pages I care about. I want them findable when I get back to it, even if that means three years hence. And there are other pages which I just visited once, like a news article, or which occupied me for three weeks, like documentation for a problem I've now solved. The act of closing a tab is a communication to the web browser. I wish it would listen to it.
I could also do with a searchable, browsable list of open tabs. I was recently searching for a car. Then I bought one. So I need to go back and find all the tabs about cars and close them. I want a fully interactive window like an oldschool history window that lets me find all my open tabs about cars and close them, no matter which window they're in - unless I see that it's my car's user manual or my service schedule, in which case maybe I want to keep it open for the next five years.
On the other hand, when I learnt about % in the searchbox, it was a gamechanger. Finally I could find and reuse the tab that is open, instead of the way by default Firefox prioritises search results over open tabs.
(The other thing I would like, is something in mobile Firefox that tells me how many tabs I have open. I hate the cute infinity sign. What's the point? Because their designer couldn't handle the idea of a slightly smaller font each time an order of magnitude is exceeded? Why not let me live with the costs of my actions? Also, an easier way to manage tabs on Firefox mobile. But maybe just better tab management in general.)
Even simple things like putting already open tabs at the bottom of the list when typing in the address bar makes things more painful than it should be. I almost always want the matching open tab, put that first!
You can still get that behaviour by disabling all but your main search engine in settings. One of the first things I do on any install.
The "Tab Session Manager" add-on probably will address the majority of your gripes with firefox's inbuilt session manager :
- It backs up your last 10 (can be changed) sessions.
- You can save specifics sessions for perpetuity. In your example, you can save some or all of the windows under a single session named "Car". You can add/remove tabs/windows from it at any time from within the menu. And it is always there ready to be restored when you need.
- For the rest of my unorgranised miscellaneous tabs (like random hackernews articles), i send them to OneTab rather than save them in a session.
- Overall, very friction-less, intuitive UX.
Two (rather cumbersome) work-arounds : - Save all tabs as collection - will tell you how many tabs you have - The "Clear History" option also tells how many tabs you have currently. (Just don't accidentally click "Delete"!! )
As if Chrome is an abandoned project, as if people realize that it is spyware, and that using it gives enormous power to a company that is actively working against the trust of their users...
As if users have stopped using Chrome... what a sweet dream.
For me I'd say I use it as a To Do list. Open tabs are things I mean to get to, and when I'm done with it I will close it. Bookmarks are things I might need at some later date.
My preferred youtube frontend, freetube, also does that.
I often have used separate browsers for this. One for each project, one for personal, etc. Can work well too.
Session history presented as a list that loads the session in a new window if mid-clicked and/or expanded if left-clicked from which each tab could be imported in the current one would solve this problem. On Firefox there's a function to bookmark all tabs which roughly does a similar job but it's less immediate.
I despise this behavior, they also love to unload the tab with my mobile boarding pass that I so neatly prepared at home, and attempt to reload it when I'm trying to fumble in front of the TSA dude, and inevitably crap out because the session cookie has expired.
They should at least maintain a "last known good" screenshot.
OneTab for your readinglist/todo-list tabs TabSessionManager for your organized topical tabs
See my comment : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41158725
- they keep sessions (a)live (audio/video, chat, where you stop reading)
- they can keep some or all of the history context ("how did I get here?")
- they can keep some of the browsing context ("what else was I looking at, what other tabs are around this one?")
- they are a filter. Every useless site, popup, get's into the history (>"If they don't close it, they want to remember it forever.")
- they (at least on desktop) have better ux than bookmarks and history (they're always there)
> they keep sessions (a)live (audio/video, chat, where you stop reading)
I'd also note that at 7500 tabs your computer almost certainly is not keeping those sessions alive. It's stunning how far we can get but wow, watching Chrome over the years claw it's way towards being fast to load & staying responsive, in spite of being many 100's of tabs in on a mid-range 201X phone was an incredible saga of improving software architecture. It got better and better.
There's whole means of backgrounding & persisting pages (and of preloading new pages) that's just amazing.
Those tabs were and are just screenshots, and reload when clicked, you could realistically not have more than around 5 open at the same time without reloading.
Unfortunately, I'm not sure I understand your phrasing.
> I'd also note that at 7500 tabs your computer almost certainly is not keeping those sessions alive
The person I was responding to was not talking specifically about the article, but "many people". And some people may use the tabs for one, more, or none of the reasons I listed. I was not trying to sell anything. I don't even think that tabs are a good product, only the best so far, with regard to those considerations.
in a way, yes. I'm one of these users. My 6000+ tabs with ~10 windows load in an unloaded state. I have addons that unload already-clicked-by-me tabs if I need the RAM or if some JS script is running wild on FF but I still might need that tab. I simply treat it as: I might come back to that topic later. 70-80% of the time I rarely do lol. or it takes me 2 years.
>they (at least on desktop) have better ux than bookmarks and history
it simply is easier to click on the list in the sidebar than having to go through a bookmark window and wait for the UI to load the tabs itself.
what's funny is, with Firefox, when I close a window with 1000 tabs and were to restore it, it takes Firefox way longer to restore that window than if I were to load my session from zero/Windows.
* Ability to unload tabs and prevent tabs from unloading, by domain (youtube) or picking from the context menu for one-offs. (Auto Tab Discard) (Unless it's changed since I got this addon, the built-in discarded tabs won't unload tabs, it only does anything when the browser is restarted, preventing all but the current tabs from loading)
* The left sidebar is actually a tree, where links opened in a new tab are automatically children of the tab they opened from. The whole thing becomes self-organizing with context, and the parent tabs can be expanded/collapsed. (Tree Style Tab)
* The left sidebar also auto-collapses to ~3 favicons in width (userChrome.css manual modification, originally copied from something shared online), so it works fine even without a wider screen.
* Addon for vim-style controls (Tridactyl), which in addition to everything else includes a way to search and jump to tabs by matching title and url.
I'm somewhere around 1500-2000 and it has replaced my bookmarks.
Firefox does have an excellent setup for multiple spaces, groups of tabs, etc.
I tried once on my old 2018 i9 macbook, and was able to get to 2100 tabs without needing a plugin to unload a tab.
Having tabs organized in groups for projects is really useful. Especially if it can be paired with a window manager to keep groups of tabs ready to go between multiple spaces/workspaces.
But I guess its not like that nowadays. The other day I checked the uptime on my system and it was 130 days and that is nothing abnormal. I feel like some people only reboot their systems on major OS updates. Like M1 Macbooks that have only been restarted 3 times. We take it for granted now.
To be fair I use it as a terminal to my work PC, which stays on, so it has very little "state" of its own. And it boots in 8 seconds. Both attributes which make this fast and convenient.
This is a desktop not a laptop so it's as fast to shutdown as it is to hibernate so nothing failed from hibernation or sleep mode.
It doesn't save a -lot- but it's saves enough that I can measure it. (Couple kw/h over 14 hours).
One can have a desktop that's as efficient as a laptop... but you lose part of the exchange; mobility for power. The consumption/heat is less of a concern, solar aside. Plenty of room for cooling and components :)
I had a system that would idle at over 150W, not counting the three displays that cumulatively match that. Transceivers use mildly less power than 10GbE Ethernet... but still consume a bit of your budget.
I do this, if I lost my dozens of windows with an order of magnitude more of contextual tabs... No matter. They're still in history, and partially, my memory.
The Jira tickets or whatever begetting that information still remains. There is a reason calling for it, if that's lost in the process - hurray! This can be a good thing, too.
For what truly matters, context can be recreated - the workspace was disrupted, that's it. That can happen to nearly anyone/anything. Singling out browser state is interesting.
I'm in awe at the people who curate things to never look at them again. Eg: bookmarks. Maybe there's an exhibit I missed. I have no FOMO; there's plenty to mind.
My position is aided by the fact that my operating system includes a window manager. I don't have to shuffle things, just get back to work. Window class "work-firefox" is always run on business day login, appearing on the assigned workspace
It dumps all tabs in a window into a list. You can just as easily send those tabs back into a window, or “export” (copy+paste) the list into a text file.
Though what I really need is something that can I can dump a link into from either mobile or desktop (or consume lists of links) and produce a self-hosted searchable archive on my NAS. For example there are many HN threads I’d love to have something to archive both whatever the link was, and the associated thread with all of the comments, with increasingly rare checks for changes, saving the differences in case of censorship. Finally, being able to add both automatic and manual tags for the listing, and a way to search either the tags or text content so I can find that cool project I want to get back to, or they insightful comment.
Actually that’s another thing I’d love is the ability to highlight specific comments or sections of pages and give them their own set of tags for searching.
Such a thing would clear up my “need” for so many bookmarks/link lists, because it would actually complete the task I want to accomplish.
(I've been using onetab for almost 3 years and never gone back and actually re-opened a tab I sent to onetab. But it's kept my open tabs very clean that whole time!)
Unfortunately many times this isn’t successful, and I would absolutely get more use out of it if I could just type “VFIO” or “Linux security” and pare down the search space to find that cool project, documentation or gotcha in a comment that I wanted to refer back to that’s now just a fuzzy blur in my mind.
But I do agree, the vast bulk of it is just coping mechanism to try to soothe the panic of potential loss resulting from the fire hose of novel information falling through my colander brain.
It’s an honest question by the way. I don’t think I have ever felt the need to have more than 10 tabs open at the same time - that was when cross-referencing things in Jira - and I generally have no more than 5 open. I would like to understand what I am missing.
W.r.t. the difference to browser history though: I literally never find stuff when looking through my browser history. I either forgot on which website I found something, or what the name of the tab was. I sometimes wish that searching the browser history also searches through some additional metadata, like the sites description meta tag or something like that.
Speculating (extrapolating?) for someone who keeps a lot of tabs open: tabs represent desired history, closed tabs represent stuff they might specifically want to ignore.
It's almost useful to think of creating two "close tab" buttons -- one that sends the tab to the searchable service, and one that just ditches it.
Yes, it's basically an effortless replacement for bookmarks. Especially if you have Tree Style Tabs or equivalent, opening a link in a new tab creates a child tab that treats the parent as a folder. For example, the way I use it, all HN posts are children of the homepage, and the homepage can be opened/closed like a folder in the sidebar. These go arbitrarily deep, so interesting links from that thread become children of the thread, etc etc.
For mobile it is more crude as Firefox extensions are more limited. I just use Markor to see the file and Syncthing just works.
I think about making a WebExtension out of this just so I could automatically sync links from the markdown file to a specified bookmark folder.
The code: https://github.com/hadrianw/notetab
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc...
[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/close-discard...
If my fan starts running fast, every time it is due to one or more LinkedIn tab running at 100% CPU, on Mac.
There may be other sites that are worse and I’m just not using them.
(61 points, 3 months ago, 95 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40250672
(29 points, 3 months ago, 33 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40263948
Panorama was there. It was beautiful.
Simple Tab Groups works OK.
Works perfectly for me. I have a tab group for every possible activity on my computer - Banking, take-out food, one for each research topic, one for each software or hardware project I am working on, and so on.
Altogether thousands of tabs, and STG manages them without a hitch.
I wouldn't call it working without a hitch. It's not crashing often, but it does occasionally, usually associated with a Firefox update. There's something wrong with the way either that addon, or Firefox itself, manages updates that have been recently applied. I've started making sure I make a backup of my tabs before Firefox does any updates, because it's almost certainty something goes wrong.
Usually I just need to restart Firefox and nothing else, but sometimes Simple Tab Groups has also lost the containers I'm using. That is a real pain in the ass to recover from.
I learned to periodically export all my OneTab links in the extension's export option and save them to text files named by date range. I'd suggest the same or similar to anyone using OneTab and obsessive about saving tab links.
Tabs were not actually loaded. It is like saying there were 7500 bookmarks.
My use case is about 200 tabs, with memory savings disabled (open weekly news at once, no waiting to page load). Firefox was quite unstable with this, until a few years ago.
- Save all your tabs and windows which come under a single topic (say "Buy car", "Learn OpenCV", "Work") as a named session using Tab Session Manager
- You can restore, replace your saved sessions at any point in the future. You can also edit sessions, add/delete tabs, windows from the drop-down menu.
- It also backs up your last 10 (can be adjusted in settings) sessions.
- Very frictionless and intuitive UX.
- Send all the rest of your unclassified tabs (interesting hackernews articles, your readinglist) to OneTab
Its an amazing technical feat to handle that ...
But a total UI failure because this isn't what I wanted.
In comparison, my Safari session is well managed in several tab groups.
Interestingly, the 'Close Duplicate Tabs' things made the situation worse, because it takes ~5 seconds for the overflow menu to show. I guess they are doing some work on the UI thread.
I would say 90% tabs are unimportant, but I am afraid to nuke the session from orbit because there are some hard to find links / important ones in there.
Are they easy to find in the list of 4400 tabs?
Thus according to this strategy I would just nuke my session and start from a blank sheet as I won't be missing it. For the same reason I donated and sold tons of stuff over the year before each move because I realised there is no point owning something you use only every 10 full moons or can't even remember it is hidden somewhere in a storage room. You can borrow/rent that to someone.
Besides, you should still have the links in your history.
Each project gets a new note in Obsidian or OneNote or whatever note taking tool you are using. Each day gets a new #H1 heading with the day. Any relevant URLs get added to the note.
At the end of the day, review your notes and clean them up to be concise. Explain to your future self what you did and why those links are important.
Then close your browser tabs, they are saved in the notes.
If you need the content from the website itself (maybe you are concerned about the site disappearing), use something like Pocket or copy code snippets, text, etc directly into the note. Screenshots help too.
Personally, I have stopped trying to understand why people do it. I’m just not wired that way. I am fairly sure my way of organising and sorting through information would be similarly bemusing to someone from the other side. If you are in product, it’s just a good reminder that you are not representative of your users.
It may be working for you.
People who easily accumulate 1000s of tabs, though, would now have 1000 page notebook and 1000 tabs. Don't ask me how I know.
I suspect the major browser vendors are not incentivized to create a solution for this problem. In the case of Microsoft and Google, they'd prefer you avoided bookmarks and asked their search engine so that they can serve you ads. Apple has never prioritized cross platform conveniences, so that leaves out Safari. Firefox is better about this, but only with other instances of Firefox.
The bigger problem with bookmarks for me is the inability to manage relationships. With the Tree Style Tabs add-on in Firefox and vertical tabs in Orion, child tabs are opened in a tree. It codifies my search context and makes tab management quite easy. The analog in bookmarks is using folders, but they’re rather tedious to create when bookmarking and I can’t think of any browser that will auto-create nested folders when bulk bookmarking tabs.
Absent that, it’s considerably easier to leave the tabs open. The tree will even be restored when the browser starts should I need to reboot.
I can't understand the tab thing when history is pretty easily accessed in modern browsers... but it's common enough not to judge too harshly.
It is like I have a huge desk with papers that appear to be strewn across it, but actually are organized and the layout is important to my train of thought.
Support different groupings, regexp renaming, persistent original date order + additional last used orders, etc. (I have a longish list of wants).
I want better autofiltering on history (eg: dump all map url's that proliferate on every slight viewport change; dump all (say) HN links unless explicitly saved; save type XXX, quesry type YYY's for saving, etc) and overall more thought on easy organisation and "restoring" a particuar view of the internet from X time ago.
Also i think they're bringing back tabgroups : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39985626
For me, i never really liked tab groups. I prefer to organize my tabs under topical windows. Tab groups is kind of an ugly duckling in that paradigm, but thats just me.
Example: When I read a Wiki page, I middle-click on links to open up a bunch of tabs to read in sequence. After I read each tab, I close them so that I remember I've read them.
I can't think of a workflow in which I would keep tabs open -- seems like I would lose track of what I've read and what I haven't. How do many-tab people not lose track?
Imagine a scenario where you have 200 tabs open. Unlike bookmarks, they aren’t categorized into folders.
I imagine one can keyword search all open tabs, but that’s kinda like googling them again except you have a filter on what you’ve opened. When would you ever want to do that vs just doing a new google search?
I can sort of imagine having open tabs as a kind of “saved state” when doing research without the additional hassle of curating bookmarks (adding/deleting/classifying). But just curious if people think of it this way.
The organization is basically that of a desk with stacks of papers on it: impenetrable to others maybe, but completely logical to me.
1. I installed an extension (can't remember the name) that makes visited links (from history) purple (like the old times) so that I won't reopen a duplicate tab
2. After reading a page I add them to bookmarks in a specific (have read) folder so that they're marked by the star in Firefox URL bar and I can easily check if I've already read them just by looking
Lets you, among other things, archive however many tabs you have open and re-open them later.
I flush my open tab once a week with it, and whenever I search for something I was looking at a couple of weeks back, I can just grep through the list of URLs
Mind you, it won't solve the problem that the website content might have changed in the meantime.
For that, archive.is is your friend, but it requires conscious effort to archive a specific site so not ideal either.
Allows for naming windows, moving tabs between windows, and saving tabs from a window as a bookmark folder.
Compared this to Safari. Not only does opening Tab Overview will reload most of your Tabs, meaning you will either crash your browser due to memory pressure, or you create so much paging Data you write from 100s to 1000GB to your SSD. Quite literally killing your SSD. It also does not freeze old tabs or unload tabs. The only way would be you quit Safari and reopen it often. It is also the slowest browser once you have multiple tabs opened.
These issues had been with Safari for at least 5 - 8 years and even in Safari 18 it doesn't seems to be improved.
Sometimes, but mostly not, I'm able to Ctrl/Alt/Backspace to kill X and then resume with startx. If I can do this, I'm able to rescue my session without a hard reboot. More often I must hard power down. And when Ctrl/Alt/Backspace does work it's after at least 20 attempts. I tried reducing the priority of FF, but not sure if it'll help.
Anyway, as a compulsive tab horder, this is a completely new bug for me. But I will never give up, and if necessary I will fight to the bitter end.
*Active as opposed to merely open
Edit: maybe if Ubuntu releases Tabular Tyrannosaurus I'll change distros.
It could be anything. Personally I'm a bit freaked out by how much effort has been poured into Storage Buckets, into stronger isolation, and have a fear that there's significant overhead to doing so. But this is a reflexive concern; it could be anything, or just lots of everything.
But whatever it is, man I worry for FF.
At least once a week or so, the browser loses my tabs (this usually happens after a forced update at night). No biggy, the browser will recover them for me. Oonce every couple of months the browser fails to recover my tabs after losing them. Annoying but no biggie, it was only 10 or so tabs.
How on earth do people keep thousands of tabs alive for years, and never lose them? I do not understand how this is possible. Or do they lose their tabs regularly, but reinstate them manually from browser history?
Firefox is very capable of managing this many tabs. You can also use things like % in the address bar to quickly jump to any ob those tabs, even, if they are not loaded, which most of them will not be.
I ran around with 4k tabs for quite a while. It does slow down startup of the browser a little though, and that is what made me close most of them.
From time to time, usually when Chrome crashes, it restarts without the tabs history saved so you cannot restore them. I also can't remember the last time this happened tho, it's been at least a few years.
I've tried the add-ons that attempt to workaround this fundamental lack of tab management issue (Sidebery, Tree Style Tab, OneTab, etc.), and none of them function like tab groups in chromium.
Also, the incessant Firefox crashes on Linux with nvidia drivers when one has hardware acceleration enabled has me often wonder why I bother being ride-or-die with Firefox. (Then again, nvidia drivers f up many a thing on Linux, except chromium apparently)
See my comment here : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41158725
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/simple-tab-gr...
[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc...
Reminds me more of those newb users who had several dozen toolbars (and stuff...) running on Internet Explorer[0]. Or... current newb mobile users who need help closing the hundreds of tabs they have running:
[0] https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/605041-internet-explorer
I did close them all: https://www.vice.com/en/article/88adya/death-by-1000-tabs-co... (but alas, the number creeps up again)
Even in the middle of heavy research, I will periodically tidy up my unused tabs. I treat them as completely ephemeral. If I need to recall something, I'll bookmark it or find it in my history.
I genuinely cannot understand people that have hundreds or thousands of tabs open. It seems bonkers to me; almost pathological, like digital hoarding. I would probably hate to see how they keep their filesystem or their home.
Why would somebody do that? To me, it's just another consequence of never actually fulfilling Vannevar Bush's vision of the Memex.
If you only open one tab, that's FF Focus.
... which brings up a simple text listing, one URL per line, of all tabs you have open. This would allow you to quickly, easily, checkpoint (or, bookmark) your open tabs.
I, personally, and rsync.net as a firm have offered bounties for this simple feature for over ten years now. I think we offered up to $2k at one point ?
This doesn't need to be a plugin - it is so dead simple and so necessary that it should just be built in.
Not always, but tabs are preserved after a restart.
I'm my own worse enemy sometimes.
[dupe]
Lots of discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40250672
Likely they are not a programmer.
I struggle to understand ppl who brag about tabs count
On Android,after about 70 tabs it starts to fail to open the tab navigator at the current tab consistently, often starting at the beginning tab, necessitating closing and reopening the tab navigator until it decides to open next to the current tab.