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Comment by sentenza | Hacker News Reader

So imagine you are a person that stopped browser hygiene during a few months while finishing their PhD and now _still_ carries around about 900 open tabs waiting to be sorted into bookmarks and junk. (Yeah, that's me.)

I have to re-start Firefox every 48 hours or else its resource consumption starts affecting the overall system. This is my primary issue with current Firefox versions, although I am aware that I'm an n-sigma outlier.

Intrestingly, however, the Firefox team has been greatly improving memory management, so that currently, even with my completely pathological browser session, Firefox remains usable for 48 hours with 900 tabs open.

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Right-click the tab bar, select "Bookmark all tabs", save them all to a new folder (name it after the current date or whatnot).

Or just close all those tabs. Realistically you're never actually going to get around to reading them and they're just there weighing you down. Seriously, close them. Forget they were ever there. If you haven't looked at them yet it means that they're not that important!

Yeah, this is the only way I keep my browsing sane. Over the years, a kind of "tab garbage-collection" habit has emerged. I find it works really well, since if a tab hasn't been visited in the last 20 minutes, I probably won't open it again.

Additionally, the history-tracking of the browser is good enough and my google-fu sufficient so I can find anything I need that I've previously visited.

Keeping my tabs lean makes me much happier!

I've found Evernote with it's web clipper to be great for this. Anything I figure I might want someday, but I don't know exactly when or why, goes into my EN archive. The full text is searchable, so it's like having Google for only stuff that I've found interesting in the past. (And the clipper can even add results from your library to search engine results, so you can re-find things even when you're not specifically looking.)

Firefox deals well with 900 tabs if you enable the "Don't load tabs until selected" option in Options -> Tabs.

Then once the browser is restarted it only loads the tabs you actually click on. A kind of tab lazy loading. I wish Chrome had that feature.

The Page Alarm/Tab Snooze extensions are also good for snoozing tabs for say a month until you need them again http://superuser.com/a/533498/7018

Mine can go for weeks with more than 750 tabs open. Especially if I restart it. Do you have less than 4 gigs of RAM?

You might like the unload tab addon: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/unloadtab/

Suspend Tab works for Firefox ~24 (Palemoon is still 24), and BarTab has a more official suspend/unload idle tabs feature.

I'm sure you've tried them with your browsing habits, but just to make sure.

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