> computational costs are close to zero
Is that true for normal Firefox tabs (I usually use chrome/safari) ? Wouldn’t each one still use up some memory, keep any background tasks running etc. If some tab starts playing audio how do you even find it?
Sidebery, Tree Style Tabs, and Tabs Outliner (for Chrome) all go beyond just adding a linear/flat vertical tab bar to your browser. They preserve a nested hierarchy for child tabs and allow you to restore the entire tree (or just parts of it) on another device, which is super handy if you often switch between desktop, laptop, etc.
Firefox unloads tabs that haven't recently been used, or as memory approaches system limits. You can also manually unload your least-recently-used loaded tab.
I've found myself using Sidebery and the manual 'unload' tab option quite a bit.
But I have only ever used it on Windows and Mac. So no idea about Linux. You can do About:memory to check out which tabs are using more memory as well as manual memory compact.
Firefox also allows unlimited History, unlike Chrome which I believe you cant even have history for more than 90 days.
Is this a user setting / tunable for aggressiveness?
I use this one: https://webextension.org/listing/tab-discard.html
Sidebery offers a hierarchy of tabs, supports group-tabs inside the hierarchy and also has panels, which are basically groups outside/parallel to the hierarchy. With this, you can have very diversified organization-tools.
I also oscillate between 1k to 3k tabs, and I see them more as a process-state. I use tabs for my working-memory, and bookmarks for permanent memory. So any projects, I organize into groups, for every area I have a panel where I collect the corresponding groups. And if the project is over, I close them.
With bookmarks on the other side, I collect links to websites I might visit at some random time, but not necessarily because of a specific project, or with multiple projects. For example, I have bookmarks for my bank, my provider, video-sites (Youtube, Netflix...), Social Media, but also resources like Wikipedia, or self-hosted apps, etc. Those are links I never want to delete, unless the service itself shuts down, or I switch to a different one. So in that sense, they are "stateless".
So 90%+ of the tabs are just bookmarks really.
I have a tab group in Simple Tab Groups for a perl project I've been working on. The group is basically just a bunch of perl docs (metacpan, etc). I haven't touched the project or the group in a few weeks and I've in that time restarted both FF and my PC several times as well as having updated my FF install several times.
I just switched to that tab group and opened up a random cpan docs tab and it loaded it back in half way down the page. The scroll moved a little bit (only a few lines of text worth of scroll) but that was it.
Of course this doesn't work consistently for all pages. I know for a fact that social apps like bluesky don't tolerate suspends all that well and force a reload but most "vanilla" web pages like docs sites tolerate suspends quite well.