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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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.
I am not sure what you’re working on but from your answers I’ve read you seems to need access to a lot of information with a few keystrokes, like searching for a keyword or tag.
In my opinion you are using the wrong tool for that. Ditch the browser and learn about the Zettelkasten way of working. It is really powerful for plenty of applications like science, studies, dev, or even the way I use it, author repository of ideas/concepts/stuff I need when writing a book.
You can do that with several software but I like obsidian for that (and because of all its plugins you could probably find something to automatically copy webpage content)
On the downside side :
- You’ll have to learn Zettelkasten, Obsidian etc
- Obviously do the work of writing (or copy pasting) your vault.
But on the plus size :
- You’ll have all the information you need at your fingertips, searchable with keywords, tags, associations etc.
- Everything is basic text MD files so it will still be readable by any text editor or terminal in the next century.
- You can have images, run code, do some mathlib, jupyter etc inside.
- Text is light, easy to store, backup and retrieve.
- If you do good enough you can have a satisfying visual representation of your new brain, kinda mindmap (which is also possible)
Cool I would love to navigate my data in a manner similar to this. However not obsidian, I am in the process of de-googling and I have severe cloud fatigue. But maybe QOwnNotes
I’m hoping something like Archivebox or squid or some other software can help me, autodump everything in a way that will become accessible to these second party data management software. Hopefully in a manner as transparent as opening a tab.
QOwnNotes is good but the UI is a little bare. Consider logseq
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.
Maybe don’t have a THOUSAND tabs
I will, not, do that.
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.
I’m using the wrong tool in the wrong way and won’t stop!!!
Help me!!!
ROFL…
Well then we can’t help you
Sidebery (FOSS, MIT license) has several features that could be used to help you merge thousands of tabs into one window without choking out your memory usage, and generally makes it really easy to organize a massive amount of tabs. It would take several steps. First, you’d right-click the panel (the top-level organizational unit in Sidebery, above the tabs) on each window and select
Save to bookmarks(example folder structure: selectingBookmarks Toolbar/merge/for a panel namedpanel1would save the tabs underBookmarks Toolbar/merge/panel1; click a folder twice in the selection dialog to expand it). Then you’d close that window and repeat with each window, being careful with the panel names so as not to overwrite any other window’s tabs. Once you’re down to one window, create an empty panel, right-click it, and selectRestore from bookmarks. From this dialog, selecting the top-level folder that all the other bookmarked panels reside in (Bookmarks Toolbar/merge/in this example) will import every tab from every window that was bookmarked, grouped by the window name.When Sidebery imports a panel from bookmarks, the tabs are imported in an unloaded state, so they have basically no effect on memory until you actually click into them and load them. I can restore about 50 tabs per second from bookmarks without my system even slowing down, taking me from 0 to 500 tabs in about 10 seconds. It’s not exactly a one-click option, but I wager it will be significantly faster and less prone to completely breaking than your current workflow, and a little easier to back up (even if window/session states get wonky, bookmarks sync pretty much instantly).
Once your tabs are all in the same window, you can load tabs you want loaded by selecting a bunch (ctrl-click, shift-click, etc., just like in file explorer) and refreshing them, presumably avoiding YouTube tabs (should probably download those with YT-DLP anyway if you want to keep them). Sidebery will actually limit how many tabs it reloads at once, so it’ll never choke out your system by trying to instantly load a thousand of them (unlike if you select “open all in tabs” in Firefox’s native bookmarks context menu… eurgh). Even if it isn’t faster (though I suspect it is) the browser is at least usable while that’s going on. I’m not sure how well this method preserves containers, mainly because I don’t use them, so if you do, keep an eye on that if you test it out. All I know for sure is Sidebery supports reopening a tab in a new/different container because that’s in the default context menu.
There’s more time savings than just window merging and tab loading, there’s the tree-style viewing, being able to collapse whole trees of tabs you aren’t actively paying attention to, seeing the full titles of 30-40 tabs at a time, no more sideways scrolling, a built in search bar to filter shown tabs by title, fully customizable keyboard shortcuts and context menus… it’s actually incredible how much this addon can do, and not only does it have a lot of settings and customization that should let you tailor its behavior to exactly how you want it, you can even sync its actual settings through Firefox! (just make sure to set your device name) Only thing it can’t do is remove the tab strip to give you more vertical real estate, but Mozilla might be working on that.
I know what it’s like to be attached to a cumbersome workflow. I hope this can help streamline things for you a bit and make life with ~2,000 tabs just a little less troublesome.
Yeah I was going to suggest sidebery as well, but not because of the window merging stuff. It just makes handling thousands of tabs much easier. I’m pretty sure that OP’s problem is the add-on he is using can’t handle his workflow and that it has absolutely nothing to do with Firefox. Because I can drag and drop several hundred tabs from one FF window to another in sidebery without ff even so much as sneezing.
Why do you have so many tabs open?
The solution to write your own application that does what you want because your workflow is not a use case that browsers are designed for. It’s not bad to wish for features but your workflow is never going to be catered for in a browser and it’s both unreasonable and unrealistic to expect otherwise - hence you need to do it yourself.
If you can’t or don’t know how to do that yourself, I suggest you listen to the advice everyone else is giving you. Organisation does require ongoing work and given your comments it will likely require a lot of upfront effort to change your browser hygiene habits but once you are more organised it becomes a lot easier and a lot less work to stay on top of things.
It’s none of my business but I wonder why you feel it’s so important to open 500+ tabs just to buy something small online. Doing research and being informed is good but it seems disproportionate and perhaps talking to a professional might help you with that.
browser hygiene habits
You used that term, and frankly I recoil a bit a this term because of the implication that it’s not a deficiency of the software but that it’s the users who are wrong.
Still, I typed in the phrase into chatgpt
And I see “reading lists” as an alternative to bookmarks (that I find to be, straight up unusable)
So I found this reading list addon give a try.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/reading_list/
I have a very specific use for a “reading list”, which I take to be something like a FIFO stack of links. And that would be going through youtube videos.
Putting this in case someone else is reading this thread looking for answers.
However, it’s a side bar thing, and you have to add links one at a time, can’t select multiple tabs and add them
As for opening 500+ tabs to buy a thing.
You do know that sellers now use algorithmic pricing and often there will be hundreds of sellers for the same thing.
Plus the price will be obfuscated with various artifices that all have to be overcome to find the best seller with the best price.
Defeating all of that means openning a shit-ton of tabs.
Here’s an example of the process I’ve designed for aliexpress
https://github.com/igorlogius/gather-from-tabs/discussions/8
You used that term, and frankly I recoil a bit a this term because of the implication that it’s not a deficiency of the software but that it’s the users who are wrong.
I wouldn’t say FF is deficient in this case - not being designed for your exact use case doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with it.
As for opening 500+ tabs to buy a thing.
You do know that sellers now use algorithmic pricing and often there will be hundreds of sellers for the same thing.
Plus the price will be obfuscated with various artifices that all have to be overcome to find the best seller with the best price.
Defeating all of that means openning a shit-ton of tabs.
I usually only buy things if I agree with the price it’s being sold at. If I don’t I will look elsewhere but ultimately I value my time more than money. Extra money can be earned, time cannot 🤷♂️ If you have to drive 100 miles to a fuel station to save 2 cent per gallon, are you actually saving money?
Here’s an example of the process I’ve designed for aliexpress
https://github.com/igorlogius/gather-from-tabs/discussions/8
So it’s a script generating all the tabs?
No, I have to setup all the tabs in just the right way. Then for each tabs it gets the price and shipping information I paste that into excel Combine the total together and sort with ascending price Then I repeat that for every quantity value for 1,2,3,4,5,7,10,15,20,25,50,75,100 Then I find the minimum quantity to get the best price.
This is because if you go to the website and just ask “order by price” it either hides most results, or straight up lies and still place them out of order. It also lies about the shipping cost. But it can’t lie on the last page before clicking buy.
I expect the internet to continue becoming more deceptive and manipulative in this manner, my method is almost not good enough. If my tools don’t continue to evolve it will simply become impossible to find the best price for anything. It will all become an endless maze where they measure how much mental stamina you’re willing to waste to save another dollar. At that point the price of things will become whatever the maximum you individually will bear.
Not sure what your coding level is but you could interact with and scrape the sites with python. I’m sure other languages have similar frameworks.
Even if you aren’t very familiar and don’t know any pythons, it’s a good one to learn and though it could take a while to learn enough to do what you want, you would be more motivated to figure things out and it would save you a lot of time (and money) in the long term.
https://realpython.com/modern-web-automation-with-python-and-selenium/.
https://www.projectpro.io/article/python-libraries-for-web-scraping/625
I kinda wanted to jump on a train of recommending to use bookmarks but last time I checked the bookmark implementation was dogshit in every single browser. Too many steps, too inconvenient to navigate, and breaks you out of normal browser workflow overall.
Also looking for a solution, even though I don’t do 1000+ tabs. Currently I found myself using Vivaldi with tab groups, and allowing the browser to unload unused tabs contents after some time. Not so sure it scales, but seems to be at least usable to me.
You’re not likely going to get any real help since you’re insisting on using the browser in an extreme and unconventional way. Your little world is just one browser/OS crash from losing all of those tabs.
I can save all the tabs easily
Here I show how to save 1775 tabs with one click
Ordering and sorting them, that is an impossible task That’s why i keep them open
What is amazing to me is how some people will come out of the woodwork to tell a person when they think they’re using their browser “wrong”. Just let them be if you have nothing to contribute.
If someone is trying to achieve a goal through (what they might not know are) impossible means, “letting them be” isn’t going to help them.
Although it might not seem very helpful (and indeed there are better ways of helping) pointing out the flaws in the approach is contributing more than “letting them be”. Doesn’t cost a thing to be civil about it though.
What OP is trying to do isn’t impossible it’s actually very interesting. There are lots of people who use tab workflows instead of bookmarks. And I think everybody would benefit from better in-browser search. Just because bookmarks is how it was done 30 years ago doesn’t mean we can’t try new things.
Unless you bring a solution to the table, taking the position that it isn’t impossible is just cheap contrarianism on your part. Sure we can try new things, but if it doesn’t work and everyone is commenting the approach isn’t helping, then maybe take the hint. Or not, and keep swimming against the stream (in which - seeing OP’s other comments - they seem to be more interested than actually solving the problem)
You dream to small Bookmarks suck and are cumbersome They sucked in 1996 and they still suck today ! Bookmarks have apparently been a crutch to make the browser more usable. Like for instance, instead of discarding a whole tab, keep a text index of the html body and make that searchable. But no, it’s an all of nothing thing, either 2gb of youtube javascript per tab, or we only keep URL and tab title.
Also, you don’t actually need to bring a solution to the table just to say “this thing is not working right” You don’t have to be a mechanic to say “the car is broken” You don’t have to be a doctor to say “this person is sick”
Clearly my message just need to be said over and over until it gets implemented. It is obvious where browsers are going. A total web awareness platform that remembers everything you’ve ever seen. There will be infinite tabs and a local llm will know it all 7 ways from sunday “Firefox, write a song about the 500 first tabs I’ve seen in June 2017, in the style of a broadway musical”
The resulting song would be useless to everyone, including you. In the hypothetical eventuality where what you’re asking for is implemented, only a tiny minority of the tabs you’ve collected will be of the slightest usefulness to you, ever. Fundamentally, why did you ever open a given tab in the first place? In the case where you ever need to recall it, it will be trivial to open it again in a fresh browser session. You acknowledge googling is easier than managing bookmarks in these volumes, and you’re right. That’s what you should do. Your current approach is simply hoarding.
Why would it be impossible to search through tab content if it’s available in memory?
That’s not how it works. Right now the situation is: it doesn’t work. You claim it should be a workable situation. Show how it should work, don’t ask people to prove a negative.
Feel free to use your browser how you want, but I will feel free to not help you troubleshoot your problem because it won’t help you in the end.
They ARE contributing, in this case the correct answer is “don’t do that”…
You are objectively using it wrong. Its is like asking how to make your minivan break the sound barrier because you want to get to work faster.
Install Onetab
The solution is to see a psychotherapist because dude is there something strange happening in your brain and it really needs fixing.
I think the machine built to handle hundreds of trillions of operation per second should be better at handling a few gigabytes of text and images.
Fuck, you’re welcome to create your own web browser if it’s that easy.
Oh sorry, i forgot you have a lot of shit going on.
Yes, it’s a disease called “having a lot of shit going on and not wanted to spend my afternoon sorting tabs” It is cured by “throwing all tabs in the bin and starting over” because today’s computer are so incredibly weak they can’t handle a few megabytes of text anymore.
Your solution is a database or information management system.
Okay I know people are being rude. You have to understand its not just text. Your browser sends a request to a server for a webpage and it downloads that webpage, all media included. Its not just text. The only solution here is disabling all of your addons and going one by one until the merge all works. Or finding a work flow that doesn’t involve the goal of reaching 20k tabs. Browser are not designed to search through tabs. Firefox has bookmark tags and keywords to search or instantly open a link. But tabs are not meant to be this repository of where you’ve been.
I mean, look at how much data a youtube tab actually download, versus how much it occupies in memory. I think the strict memory isolation between tabs, so that one tab crash doesn’t take down the entire browser, has become uneconomical. I think combining some tab memory. Especially tabs of the same websites, especially their libraries, would greatly reduce the memory consumption and probably overall speed. I rarely ever get crashes until I bust both my ram and swap. I would sacrifice some tab isolation to get some memory back.
You have thousands of things going on?
because today’s computer are so incredibly weak they can’t handle a few megabytes of text anymore.
I mean, sites today are more richer compared to earlier 2000s. We have css, more complex js scripts, embedded fonts, embedded videos etc. I’m sure you understand that it takes more than a few megabytes of RAM.
Zotero is a citation manager, with a firefox extension to save an article (but really, a tab) with one click.
It also has fulltext search. You can search snapshots of everything you save.
“But I can’t save all my tabs at once”
(There are some solutions, but nothIng official)
Save as you go. Computers simply don’t have enough ram for 2000 tabs.
Anyway, it also seems to be able to run javascript plugins, and I saw you have some experience with that.
It also has support for folders, so you can organize it a bit better than tabs work for that.
Rather than try and force Firefox to deal with thousands of tabs, it might be easier to use an add-on like SingleFile to download the tabs as self-contained HTML files. Then once you have the pages downloaded you can search their contents using free tools like Agent Ransack or DocFetcher.
If you still want to keep the data in your browser, then how about using a service like Instapaper that lets you save pages you want to read/reference later?
I’m not going to tell you that you’re managing your information wrong. I would physically die if I had ever more than 20 tabs (my ADHD couldn’t handle it).
But I think you might be using the wrong tool. A browser (like Firefox) is not really designed as an information manager. It’s primary purpose is navigating and visualizing web pages. So when you talk about “a few megabytes of text and images” thats not what your browser sees. Your browser handles more than just the text and images. It also handles fetching and prefetching, a browser history for every tab, a JS context and much much more.
What you want is some kind of personalized archiving system that processes websites into machine processable (ie searchable) structures. Firefox is not that. Maybe data hoarder communities will have the answers you seek.
Well so far, it would be too much friction and extra labour to export each tab to external software.
I’m not even sure what software other than a browser would display live web pages in a more organized manner than firefox ?
I’m pretty sure I just hit a bug that’s causing firefox to wake up too many tabs and not handle tab discarding correctly. Firefox does seem like the best tool still even if it’s not working right.
What I would like instead is a browser that treats tabs more like virtual machines that you can roll back, suspend to disk and resume. Little package of data that get frozen in time and are externally searchable.
Anyway, here’s my setup
What I would like instead is a browser that treats tabs more like virtual machines that you can roll back, suspend to disk and resume. Little package of data that get frozen in time and are externally searchable.
Maybe look at ArchiveBox. IIRC it has pretty much everything you ask for including an import from your browser history and bookmarks.
I die at anything more than 5
Reduce to a sane number. Like less than 20.
