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johannkokos | 6 years ago

How many tabs do you consider to be too many tabs? Most of the time I open up to 10 tabs, and Firefox is performing fine. But I have also seen people opening 40 tabs.

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philliphaydon|6 years ago

At home I have like 60+ tabs open. And at work I have > 100. Firefox is pretty rock solid now with many tabs on windows. Chrome can’t cope with that. Or it couldn’t a year ago when I switched to Firefox. The tabs are mostly blogs and things I’m slowly reading or such. I just open more than I close :(

kibwen|6 years ago

I sometimes have hundreds of tabs open (Firefox on Windows), and a feature that I'll leverage if things start chugging is that, upon starting, Firefox will only load the contents of a tab if you put focus on the tab. So if I open a ludicrous number of tabs, I can quickly restart Firefox (just timed it; took six seconds) and all the tabs but the one that last had focus will be unloaded. I believe they're working on making this more automatic by actively unloading tabs if certain criteria have been met, but no convenient heuristic here is ever going to be as outright effective as this. As a tab addict, I can live with it. :P

shstalwart|6 years ago

Interesting. Pretty sure __I__ would crash with that many tabs open.

juststeve|6 years ago

40+ tabs on Linux running nightly Firefox. No issues.

Drup|6 years ago

As an alternative data-point:

My firefox session is persistent (tab are restored when I open firefox again). Apparently, I'm around 500 right now, which is a bit above average for me (I usually stay around 300).

Firefox's lazy loading is very good, which means I only have 10 to 100 tabs that are actually loaded. Firefox is still fast in these conditions. Since I use tree-style-tabs, most of the tabs are neatly sorted in trees by topic.

nothis|6 years ago

You guys seriously have _500_ tabs open?!

dredmorbius|6 years ago

I recently found the scalars internal values, and discovered how many tabs I have open: 1,355.

https://joindiaspora.com/posts/14824223

(Yes, I'm an infovore.)

And performance (iMavc v.17 Retina) is usually accetable, at least initially. Somewhere between a few hours to days in, ahard kill becomes necessary.

But; On Android or Linux, both older machines, even with just a tab or two open, within recent weeks, performance has been abysmal. Several other options (console browsers, Dillo, Konqueror, Surf) are at least responsive for very light browsing.

I've wiped Chrome and Chromium from Mac and Linux. That's not possible on Android, and though I'd much prefer avoiding it, I'm typing this on Chrome/Android.

(The question of why I've got so many tabs open, or how to manage/adjudicate them, is ... a longer post. TL;DR: tab management user state management, workflow, and ergonomics all suck. And Chrome is far worse about this than Firefox.)

sjwright|6 years ago

It is absurd to suggest that anyone needs more than a few dozen tabs. Once you get to the point where you're leaving tabs open for more than a couple of days, you should recognise that you're misusing tabs as a brittle form of bookmarking.

(In my opinion, Firefox and others could solve this by blurring the lines between bookmarks and tabs with some clever UI.)

finder83|6 years ago

More like 40. I usually try to run < 10, but sometimes it gets out of hand...I tend to have multiple "tasks" of research going on at the same time. Like if I start researching at home at night I'll sometimes leave it open through a whole workday until I can return to it at night. Then multiple things at work, etc. So yeah...probably my browsing habits that may need to change.

keypusher|6 years ago

You should try the Tree Style Tabs add-on for Firefox. You may need to tweak some of the settings a bit, but once you experience the power of this extension I guarantee you really won’t ever go back to Chrome.