Locking this post. Pretty sure everything that’s needed to be said has been said so threads are devolving.
Is this a new mental illness I haven’t heard of?
In an interview with PCMag, Hazel said she keeps all those tabs open because she likes “to scroll back and see clusters of tabs from months ago — it’s like a trip down memory lane on whatever I was doing/learning about/thinking about.” So, when she recovered her 7,000+ tab browsing session, she said, “I feel like a part of me is restored.”
Actually that’s kinda cool. I shouldn’t be a hater.
But… Firefox has a history feature that would serve her purpose much better?
who does that?!
How can it be in any way useful to keep 7000 open tabs?
Has she not heard of bookmarks?
I am thoroughly confused
I have a practical but niche answer to this. This is actually a bit of a wall of text but tldr: Not quite a power-user. Got 1.5k tabs, Bookmarks and Browser history lack proper system and contextual integration, are a poor experience to review, navigate, categorize for me, and many integrations make tabs effortless to work with, group up, and accumulate. Looking a bit into other systems and I can definitely see benefits but what I have works pretty well for me.
I’m not as much of a poweruser but I generally will have between 800 and 1,500 tabs open on my desktop with Floorp which is a Firefox fork with native web app support and a bunch of neat customization features. This is mainly because I find history and bookmarking features to be rather inconvenient to maintain especially for deep internet rabbitholes and complex projects that can have multiple topics or differing levels of priority to reference. Firefox and Floorp allow users to instantly search through their tabs using the search bar and this tends to be very helpful although I also will like to have older versions of websites cached or loaded locally so I can make comparisons, review through collections of tasks and their related segments which I have previously worked on, or see how homepages and different segments of the web have adapted as a whole or personalized for me over time. I can basically have my own pocket of the Internet curated for me which I don’t need to go out of my way to find or maintain.
Now something to note is that it’s a surprisingly efficient process, Most of the tabs themselves don’t need to actually be active in memory with the browser in total generally using less than 8 gigabytes of ram and under 10% of my cpu when active. I have plenty of tab management extensions, Floorp provides a scroll bar at the top for multi-row tabs, Flow Launcher (ridiculously powerful search tool which can be run as a system-wide programmable hotkey.) within Windows has integration both for checking existing tabs and instantly opening new ones. It’s pretty slick except when my browser is first rebuilding after a full reboot as that can take around two minutes to complete from disk.
I think the main thing at least for me is just that other resources and tools (Been looking into the raindrop bookmark manager.) might be more efficient for me to learn in the long run but I tend to be working on dozens of projects at once anyways and actively going out of my way to adapt to a new system like that would be counterproductive in the moment where it counts.
Hope this has been a helpful and insightful look into my process. I could probably attach screenshots or video later although I feel like this is sufficient as-is.
The article explains that she likes to look at tabs in the past as a reminder of something she was interested in.
It’s sort of a snapshot in time. I get it. But hell no I’m closing tabs.
“Look, just add in an option to re-enable spacebar heating.”
Meanwhile no one considers whatever happened to DenverCoder9
I have 4 virtual desktops, usually each with their own Firefox instance. I still have less than 10 tabs open.
YOU DON’T NEED THAT MANY TABS
How do you deal with Firefox updates?
I type
yay
I’ll say it again - anyone who needs (or let’s be honest, thinks they need) hundreds of thousands of open tabs has something wrong with their brain and should probably see a professional about it.
Isn’t it just hoarding but in digital space?
I don’t understand people who use a million tabs. Most I’ll have is like ten. And that’s if I’m deep in a problem in a project. I hate clutter
some people visit many different sites, continuously throughout the day, and it doesn’t make sense to keep reopening tabs, plus then you forget about it
I’ve been betrayed early enough and often enough to take monthly backups of my profile and export tab lists as text files. Just in case.
All of you going ‘well that’s not my use case’ don’t have to get it, you just have to shut up and let us do our thing. Yours is the same aggravating attitude as ‘so what if the computer reboots to forcibly update?’ Listen: go to whatever physical space you’ve carefully organized, dump all that shit onto the floor, and then pick it back up piece by piece to make it right again. How you feel doing that is how we feel several times a month.
How you feel doing that is how we feel several times a month.
Because you’re doing something dumb. That’s really all there is to it.
I am using software in a way that suits my intent.
The ability to do this is one of the reasons I choose this software.
Do you think they’re adding vertical tabs for you people with six of them?
I am using software in a way that suits my intent.
Against the intentions of that software. Square peg, round hole.
Mozilla has proudly advertised testing how Firefox handles hundreds of tabs.
There’s not some upper limit. A computer remembering a hundred things has not been impressive since the days of drum memory. Open tabs in a restored session are barely more than bookmarks.
It can handle them just fine – they’re meant to be impermanent. They never claimed you can keep hundreds of tabs open forever.
I can hammer in nails with the back of a screwdriver. That doesn’t make it the right tool for the job.
Sessions aren’t restored by coincidence. They’re meant to be persistent - that’s why there’s a mature and stress-tested feature to keep them persistent.
Go whine at someone expecting their hammer to work on a thousand nails. They don’t write on the packaging that it’ll work that long! It’s only designed for a couple dozen nails, and then you throw it out.
Tabs also need to be closed occasionally for major updates. You know how I know that? Because it happens regularly enough that you’re here whining about it.
You’re welcome to keep banging your head against that wall, but if you publically whine about how it hurts your forehead, people are gonna tell you its your own fault. And they’re right.
