Hi, Once in a while I try to clean up my tabs. First thing I do is use “merge all windows” to put all tabs into one window.
This often causes a memory clog and firefox get stuck in this state for 10-20 minutes
I have recorded one such instance.
I have tried using the “discard all tabs” addon, unfortunately, it is also getting frozen by the memory clog.
Sometimes I will just reboot my PC as that is faster.
Unfortunately, killing firefox this way, does not save the new tab order, so when I start firefox again, it will have 20+ windows open, which I again, merge all pages and then it clogs again !
So far the only solution I have found is just wait the 20 minutes.
Once the “memory clog” is passed, it runs just fine.
I would like better control over tab discard. and maybe some way of limitting bloat. For instance, I would rather keep a lower number of undiscarded youtube that as they seem to be insanely bloated.
In other cases, for most website I would like to never discard the contents.
In my ideal world, I would like the tabs to get frozen and saved to disk permanently, rather than assuming discard tabs can be reloaded. As if the websites were going to exist forever and discarding a tab is like cleaning a cache.
1000 tabs? What for?
A small subset of the stuff I’m trying to do.
“Small”
Is this your goal?
Cause I gotta say, I don’t think abusing your browser is your best bet.
I would settle for just taking over my own computer !
He just has a tab for each employee in a company
Ohh lord. I could actually believe that.
Just imagine how many tabs the NSA has
I tend to have ~10,000 tabs because I obsessively fail to clean up. But it never takes much memory or cpu, my PC isn’t amazing yet Firefox is always lightning quick.
I’ve never used the discard or merge windows features though, I can see why those might cause issues. I assume these two functions just aren’t optimised for so many tabs.
One addon I might recommend to help keep numbers down is Duplicate Tab Closer, which has options to specify how similar tabs can be to be considered duplicates, and also will detect across all open windows if desired.
You are manually caching web content. Were you aware that (a) your browser does that for you; (b) the internet does that for you ?
I’m as guilty of this as anyone and can tell you from experience that it’s sutpid.
i use auto tab discard and it works great
It blows my mind how many tabs people open. I rarely use more than 4.
I feel like Firefox should just start hard limiting the number of tabs.
I’m sorry I don’t have an answer
A tab suspender extension might help some, but there’s only so much you can do to minimize the impact of thousand(s) of tabs. Cleaning out old tabs more frequently is probably a better habit.
I tried a tab suspender, but it would replace tabs with a moz:// address that would end up breaking all my tabs when I copy & pasted them from a text file. Also tab suspender doesn’t work once firefox gets into that state. I think the internal scheduler is trying to load tabs and discarding them as fast as possible. What I need is a big “stop button” that stop it all from at least trying to load new tabs.
I think what’s happenning is when I merge all windows, many gets get woken up and, like the youtube tabs they seem to gobble up 2 to 4 gb of ram while initializing to that freezes everything.
It’s making it really hard to get to 10k 20k tabs when it really falls apart like that with not even 2k tabs.
This makes the browser experience really bogged down where most of the time is spent finishing and closing tabs instead of just getting on with the actual task.
I would really like to spend less time fiddling with my browser and it “just working”.
20k tabs? I struggle to see how someone could go through that many tabs, even over a long period of time. Your workflow is something the browser was never made to handle.
Try some popular non-Mozilla tab suspend extensions. I doubt that they all operate the same way.
The thing is that, it does work fine as long as I don’t disturb too many tabs. It’s the action of agglomerating all tabs to a single window that wakes up a bunch of tabs unnecessarily Surely there’s a shortcut or something to “stop all tabs” immediately. I would even take a “discard all tabs” to flush the tab memory. It seems to be what happens after a while, but it takes more than 5 minutes to happen on its own.
20k tabs means there are other problems that need to be addressed
Yes, my computer sucks, I need 256GB ram and 128 cpu cores apparently
Although even then it still would be too weak to do something crazy like search for text, in all tabs
My laptop is 15 years old, with only 8GB of RAM, but Firefox is handling >2K tabs over several windows just fine.
There must be an issue outside the browser.
@weskerIt works fine, until I run “merge all windows” then many of them appear to be waken up. You are right, maybe one of my addon is causing them to wake up unnecessarily. But I have so many, it’s hard to tell which one it might be.
That seems like a reasonable theory.
I once had an add on (don’t remember which, something with videos, I think), which slowed everything down.
I found it by disabling add-ons one by one.
I’m really curious about the workflow you have that needs that many tabs. How does the History and Bookmark functions fall short of what you need?
It’s easier to use google than the bookmarks manager, which can’t even find text inside the pages. I do often dump all those thousands of tabs into a bookmarks folder. And it has never happened that I went back into that enormous pile to fetch something that would take hours to find again. I have no use for the history either. A gigantic, alphabetic ordered list of everything I have seen in the last 7 days. Again, easier to just use google.
The one thing that is better and faster than google, is not closing those tabs that may contain the stuff I need.
Of course, it’s not really possible to search the text body of open tabs, unless you search them one by one.
But I’m going to ask for only one computing miracle at a time !
What I’d recommend, based on the insistence that seeing to not change your workflow, is to locally download the pages you have open with httrack, wget or a similar application. This would allow you to locally search all your tabs and their contents very quickly without Google, they will load faster because of lack of needing to redownload them, which if I understand correctly Firefox is trying to do at some level.
Thanks, I didn’t know that one.
I have been experiementing with a transparent proxy like squid or something like Archive Box, to create static pages on the fly and load that.
But so far I’ve not made something seamless and pleasant to use. It would have to be at least as low friction as using google.
I am going to try using Mixtral 8x7b to perform natural language search over my archives and pull tabs from the collection of all pages I have ever seen. But that’s still a long way away from being operational !
…has Google still been giving you the same results recently? This is an extremely weak link in your setup to me. You’d be better off looking at a locally run search engine like peARs or something similar with locally downloaded and indexed files if you insist on using search, and it’ll be waaaay more reliable than an LLM here.
Google is giving me increasingly poor results, I am looking into deploying Searxng locally.
I really would like to operate my own local crawler and sorting algorithm.
I will check out the peARs you mentionned !
Maybe don’t have a THOUSAND tabs
I will, not, do that.
Well then we can’t help you
I’m using the wrong tool in the wrong way and won’t stop!!!
Help me!!!
ROFL…
Then you will have software that doesn’t work. This is not a Firefox problem, or a problem of extensions, or anything but a user problem.
If your 1998 Toyota Camry is struggling to haul a cargo container up a hill it’s not the car’s fault. You’re doing it wrong. Whatever tasks you’re trying to do with 1000 tabs, a web browser is the wrong tool for the job.
If you need quick access to this many pages I suggest organizing bookmarks. As this is what they are meant for. Tabs are meant for active pages you are working with. So anytime you get that many tabs with any browser its gonna run like shit.
I find organizing bookmarks incredibly tedious. I have bookmarks folder with thousands of tabs in and it’s just easier to use google again to re-find the information than to pick them out of bookmarks. Also tabs just keep the title and URL so you can’t even search the text inside. So, organizing a library of tabs is like a much worse version of google without previews. I also use the session manager addon but again, when you open thousands of tabs, it clogs up the memory almost instantly. It’s taking multiple gigabytes of ram, just to display a few kilobytes of text ! I wish the browser would just render the page as a static searchable text and image and then ditch all the javascript garbage.
May I ask why you have to have this level of access to thousands of pages? Even for my job I have maybe 8 active that I use Firefox keywords to jump to.
You can also tag your bookmarks and search for those.
I would prefer not to save and tags tabs 500 times per day. It’s easier to let them accumulate and handle them all in memory.
500 tab save and tag per day is too much labour, I would spend half my day just fiddling and sorting bookmarks !
That takes too long. Organizing tab is the computer’s job !
Literally isn’t, which is why you’re hitting a wall.
Nah, FF handles thousands of tabs just fine. I literally have just as many if not more tabs than OP and have never seen this issue. It’s either from the merge they’re doing or something else. It would be better if y’all just worked under the assumption that this does work and something is otherwise wrong with op’s setup.
The issue is parsing all that. There is no way you can keep that many tabs readily accessible like tabs are meant to be. Which is why these addons were born and are not official parts of Firefox. This is one of those just because you can doesn’t mean you should situations. I get they’ve adopted this workflow, but reading through this it sounds more like daily driving than actual work. Which makes this even more bizarre, you can’t read them all, they have to reload when you open them after a while (ie download again) so all points are moot. You aren’t saving the page, you are holding onto a shell that will request the page again when you wake it up. If the server went offline never to be seen again your tab will not hold the information.
With this workflow, it might be better to have a crawler dump everything into folder hierarchies that are content searchable, and then search that like google using specialized software. I dont see any other reason you could even have 1k tabs open efficiently, you aren’t searching through that, might as well google again and follow the purple links.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/Tggq4jPPZaA
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Have you tried bookmarking things instead of leaving them open as tabs?
Yes, I find that it identical to closing a tab. I never go in the bookmarks manager after. It is very clunky to use, it adds extra steps compared to keeping the tab open. At that point, it’s usually easier to use google to find it again, since at least google can search text inside the page, not just the title. I do occasionally dump my thousands of tabs into the bookmarks managers, in a single unusable folder. It hasn’t yet happenned that one of these tabs was retreived. But I hope in the future that I could dump all these tabs into another piece of software that will fetch all the tab’s body data and allow me to search it all with a local LLM based search like “using my bookmarks, create one browser window with all URLs on the topic of the 7 megahertz maser” We’re close but not there yet.
You might be interested in this then, it’s an app that uses AI to auto-tag saved bookmarks: https://hoarder.app/
I came in here knowing exactly what the comments would look like, and I’m still disappointed. “Just don’t use so many tabs” is not an answer. If you don’t have anything constructive to say, just move on instead of getting uppity about…not using browsers very heavily or understanding other use cases.
Yeah, thousands of tabs seems extreme. But “you should dedicate a larger amount of time and effort all day, every day to make the computer’s job easier” is a bad take. That’s obviously worse than OP’s existing workflow.
Sorry OP, I don’t have a real answer either. You might find Arc Browser’s tab system to suit you better, but since it’s chromium-based I suspect performance might be worse.
Edit: out of curiosity, how much memory does your PC have, and how much is Firefox using during these freezes? I wonder how much of the delay is caused by swapping.
Just don’t use so many tabs" is not an answer.
Yes it is. If somone is holding a knife upside down and complaining it doesn’t cut their steak, are you rude and ignore them? or comment that they’re doing it wrong? OP has the knife upside down.
FF (or any browser AFAIK) is not designed to do this , OP is doing it wrong is a valid answer.
On the flip side OP wants FF to change so it can do what they want, which is also valid. After all, a sensible person adapts to the environment around them, an insane person expects the environment to adapt to them, therefore all progess is made by insane people. Have at it OP :)
FF was designed to do this. There have been hundreds of bug reports that have been fixed over the years to literally make FF handle thousands of tabs just fine. If instead you had operated under the assumption that something was wrong you literally could help OP resolve the issue which is most likely something like their swap mem or the extension itself being written badly.
Yes it is.
It is worse than OP’s existing workflow, even though the existing workflow sucks. “Do this thing that sucks even more” is not an answer. “I don’t have this problem, so you must be mentally ill” is also not an answer.
an insane person expects the environment to adapt to them, therefore all progess is made by insane people
LOL. I love this.
Frankly the answer is to not use so many tabs.
I think it’s crazy to need more than 10 active tabs open, let along thousands. I’m a software developer who will regularly go down rabbit holes and I’d never dream of opening so many tabs.
The fact is OP isn’t using the browser in a way that it was designed for. Plus they’re being unreceptive and rude in some of their replies.
Ff literally was designed for this. It has had a significant number of bug reports over the years that improved this exact thing, opening thousands of tabs. That’s not the problem (I also have thousands of tabs open). If instead you had operated under the assumption that that wasn’t the problem maybe you could have helped OP find the actual problem, which I bet is probably that they disabled swap mem or the extension they’re using isn’t written well.
I have to ask, how does one even manage thousands of open tabs?
Like how do you find the 1 in 1756 tabs that you are looking for?
Excuse me for thinking that that is an insane way to work and there is no way it can be productive. Like if you have a thousand open at any given moment, what are they all. What are you doing that warrants this? What’s wrong with bookmarks.
I think the consensus here has been clear in that you guys are in the minority of people. And that’s on Lemmy where we skew tech literate and would mostly be power users. I just can’t see how it can be productive.
Not calling you out here. Like I really need to know your workflow with some examples of the why?
You have different windows, different Multi-account containers. And if you type in something into your address bar it will just automatically jump to an open tab if you already have it open. No need to perform another search and find it. It’s not hard to maintain this many tabs. Just like it’s not hard to know where stuff is in your house. You keep the tools and cars in the garage, the yard equipment in the shed etc. You have thousands of items in your house or apartment, you don’t have trouble keeping those separated do you? Unless you’re one of those people that just tosses stuff as soon as they don’t need it anymore, but I don’t think that’s the majority of people, at least not from talking to my therapist it isn’t.
And it’s not about being productive. Like, if I have one window open it might be for the research for a thing I want to buy, for example we’re thinking about getting starlink for camping. So I have a window open with like 50 fucking tabs because choosing a powersupply, figuring out the calculations for how much wattage I’m going to be using, etc. I need all those open. I mean I could move that into an obsidian doc, but that’s a hell of a lot of stuff to write down for something I only need to research and buy once. And then it gets left open because I already did the research and it’s much easier to find if I have to step away to do something else, or I put off the research for a week since we’re not camping yet.
The same goes for work stuff. We’re testing stuff in salesforce and I have 10 tabs open for every test because you have to verify every single field of data I’m pushing from the backend into salesforce.
But it’s not like I’m even noticing the 950+ tabs that are open. I don’t have that window open. I use sidebery so I can see all the tabs in my window with their full names at a glance (here’s an example of the current window where I’ve been responding to lemmy comments.
And a lot of the times I open an article to read, then someone messages me to help them, I jump over to help them, and then I come back to the article in a week. Or two weeks. Or three months. And then after I’m finished with it I close it. But I’m not gonna bookmark that. Bookmarks are for stuff you keep coming back to. Managing bookmarks in a browser isn’t like managing a bookmark in a book you’re reading. Deleting them is harder, filing them is harder, etc.
Anything more than 10 and titles become illegible
Yeah, thousands of tabs seems extreme. But “you should dedicate a larger amount of time and effort all day, every day to make the computer’s job easier” is a bad take.
Computers don’t magically make things easier, it just does as it is told(as instructed by code). Computers don’t come out as a self-made human assistant that adapts to your personal needs and can magically do anything you want.
If it’s so much of a burden that smarter people haven’t figured it out, go at it. You might just fix it.
But “to make computer’s job easier” is the dumbest shit I’ve heard in a while.
I am going to keep beating that drum until firefox gets better It’s already improving, I used to struggle at 700 tabs now I almost make it to 2000. Of course it is mostly artifice as most tabs get fully discarded and what I want is all tab texts in live memory and the ability to search all tab text. Maybe even text search in all pictures in all tabs using object recognition, but clearly we’re not anywhere near that yet !
Why don’t you just open less tabs? Just close the browser when you are done using it
You have 64GB RAM and that’s still not enough for your browser. Wow.
I’ve come away from this with only more questions. What does your Downloads folder/Filesystem look like? Do you have notebooks or any real world allocation of information? What’s that like? What kinds of things do you keep in a junk drawer?
Absolutely fascinating.
I do not waste time sorting, emails, downloads and bookmarks
For my linux ISOs, which I have approx 60 terabyte of, I use dedicated sorting software and it does a really good job of keeping it all organized. I also make liberal use of symlinks and hardlinks to keep the original alive while also keeping things organized.
As for notes, I have notepad++ with an endless series of titled untitled text files of everything I ever want to remembered. Shared accross computers using a local git server
On my phone I have google keep which has a list of notes that has long since become far too long to scroll to the bottom off of. I am in the process of degoogling and I want to switch to a selfhosted file centric markdown note taking web app, not decided on which but this video is probably going to be one of them.
I don’t have a junk drawer, my stuff is sorted into bins, here is a glimpse of that
Those ISOs must go back YEARS! Same with the files! What sorting software helps keep track of all that?
Notepad++ surely has some type of global search feature to help find the thought you saved for later, right? I’m utterly impressed with how much stuff you seem to have around, yet can still find and make sense of it. I would have long since buried myself under it all and given up.
Yes, files that go back to 1996 when I first got online. Much older stuff that I got afterwards
I was using Kodi and I am switching to Emby.
Various renamers
https://picard-docs.musicbrainz.org/en/config/options_filerenaming.html
https://github.com/mobeigi/filebot
and many custom bash and batch scripts
Yes, notepad has “search in all open files” which would be great in firefox, “search in all tabs” and then it shows you a tab list with the search text in context with excerpts, kind of like how google does. Then with one click you could jump to that place in the text in that tab.
Why do you need 60TB of Linux Isos? Or do you mean “Linux Isos ;)”
Yes the ;) variety
I terminate Firefox and reopen it any time it’s chewing up my RAM, but I usually don’t have more than 500 tabs open at any one time. My tabs persist when Firefox starts again, but tabs don’t fully load until I click on them again. This saves my memory from getting chewed up immediately, and can usually go a week or so before I need to do it again.
What? Even 500 tabs? I don’t understand this. I get about 10 open and I can’t read what they are. Please share a pic of what it has to look like with that many tabs open because I totally do not get this? I feel like this would be akin to asking “I can’t see out of my car windshield because I have completely covered it with sticky notes. How can I get to where I need to go?” This is not how browsers were designed to work.
I have over a thousand just like OP and it works fine. Use a tree style tab browser and it’s much more usable than chrome or anything like that. OP’s problem is not having too many tabs.
Here is a quick scroll through my “tab manager plus” view, zoomed out hopefully this doesn’t contain doxxing information
Thanks for sharing. That was wild… You probably have more tabs than I have bookmarks.
Just buying one little dodad on ali express has me opening 500-1000 tabs, for just one search ! I really wish the computer could keep up with me !
…
I needed to buy 15x CH9121 and that was the difference between 15$ each to 4.5$ each.
I often have 100+, so I set a fixed width for tabs so I can see more and they don’t get too small. To find tabs, I use the drop down to see a scrollable list. But honestly, the biggest win is the “switch to tab” feature when typing in the URL bar.
I see about 20 at a time, and they’re usually all related to the same topic because I opened them around the same time.
When I’m done with a project, I “close tabs to the right” and it’s clean again.
Interesting. I still don’t think I could use that workflow. I use bookmarks, and the dropdowns in the bookmark toolbar when I need to organize links into groupings. And even then I only keep the necessary dropdowns in my list. Everything else I organize by bookmark folders and subfolders.
Bookmarks take work, especially when my projects run for a couple weeks at a time. I rarely need to reference stuff after those weeks, so I’d constantly be adding and removing bookmarks.
But everyone’s workflow is different.
Try this addon https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/tab-manager-plus-for-firefox/
It’s really great, but the default settings are unusable
set open in own tab set to vertical view set to darkmode
