Firefox Power User Keeps 7,400+ Browser Tabs Open for 2 Years

That ain't no power user, that's a lazy tech who needs to clean up after himself and close a browser window every once in awhile.
- Of course the tabs would just come back up next time they open the browser window again. Can't risk losing those precious tabs, there might be an important one among them.
  Signed, a tab hoarder.
  
  As a previous tab hoarder, excessive use of bookmarks is the answer. Organized is more useful, but even a single bookmark folder for all of your "I'll need this later" tabs will do wonders for you, and being a bookmark hoarder is so much more functional than being a tab hoarder. You can actual reset your browser every once in a while.
- McDonalds Power User Keeps 7,400+ drive through bags in back seat for 2 years!
- Ctrl-h has entered the chat
  
  History search sucks.
- Herself. Did you read the article?
- Everyone uses tech in their own way.
  You and I might only have a few tabs open, this person has a lot.
  It's easy to be critical of them, but whatever.
  Maybe it's like saving shortcuts or files to the desktop. Seems ridiculous but if that's how nan wants to do it who cares.
  
  ill only judge them for not simply using bookmarks
- Yeah, I have a mental cutoff somewhere around 200 tabs. I don't count them, but I routinely so a "close to the right" and get 100+ in the "are you sure" pop-up. I do this about every week or two... And yes, I close a lot of tabs as I go.
  
  I just close them every day when I shut down my PC.
  If I need one back I just re-open them.
  If one of them really is that important that I need it multiple time, I create a bookmark for it.
  Sometimes I even close my browser multiple times a day in order to clear all cookies since that is the easiest way. (Firefox setting)

- The first time this meme has truly resonated with my soul.

What an idiot, thats why I have 7,400 bookmarks that I never intend to sort.
- Once you realize that you don’t sort or ever even revisit them, you can start using the browsing history to serve the same purpose.
  
  Then you realize bookmarks and history are worse than keeping the tabs

How is that a "power user"? That's just a poor way to use the browser. It's basically just 7400 bookmarks in one long list; you can't even group/nestle book marks on Firefox.
A power user would use something called "bookmarks" to organise that better.
- you can't even group/nestle book marks on Firefox.
  You can with extensions. Tree Style Tabs, I dont even have a top tab bar.
- Sidebery entered the chat

This must be her "superpower base"
I have no idea why anyone would do that, but for the bookmark collectors, checkout "404 bookmarks" which detects websites that are down.
Having a way to automatically use an archived version would be lit though
- Like the Neil Peart of internet surfing!
- Having a way to automatically use an archived version would be lit though
  Or at least to automatically make the archive!
  A few years ago I tried to use ArchiveBox for this purpose, but it had problems, and development didn't happen much since then.
  Then recently I have found Linkwarden. That also seems to be a tackled together solution, like the installation instructions and not just unclear but also incorrect, and the real steps are weird...
  Bit it seems to work so far. It can't handle multiple versions of a website nicely, but at least you can submit the same site multiple times, with some minimum time limit.
  Haven't figured out yet how to easily forward links to it from my phone, though.
  
  No I mean if a link is dead, auto change the bookmark to archive.org
  For whatever reason they have every website possible. I have no idea how they do that.

I feel like a power user would have a clean and clear bookmark game, not thousand of tabs... How the hell do you even navigate into this mess? I've just re-organise my bookmarks and folders, imported them in nextcloud, and I feel like I'm the master of the internet.
- With Quick Tabs Ported, you don't need to look for where tabs are; just invoke the extension and type any part of its name to find and jump to it. It's been life-changing for me, personally (but yeah, I don't keep anywhere near this number of tabs, still, haha).

In this comment section I have found my people
TAB HOARDERS, UNITE!

i appreciate ff can do this and all, but isnt this usecase covered by you know, the browser history?
- Bookmarks
  
  I find bookmarks simply useless compared to tabs. Massive cognitive burden to sort and categorize. Also can't search the content text.
  I prefer textfiles full of urls more than bookmarks
  
  I find bookmarks simply useless compared to tabs. Massive cognitive burden to sort and categorize. Also can't search the content text.
  I prefer textfiles full of urls more than bookmarks
- Well, no. Firefox deletes entries older than 6 months from history and there's no way to change this or to export the data.
  
  This says its not time limited, but firefox will start purging once it starts effecting performance:
  https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1410679
  
  Also history search is terrible
  
  I didn't know, that sucks so much.
  Though, someone made a post on superuser and a reply said that you can back up the database, so at least something is salvageable
  
  You can change how often it deletes history items, I'm sure I've done that before
  
  Just bookmark it, jeez...
  
  Mine has history going back to Nov 2022 (though I'm not entirely sure why it stops there).
- Of bookmarks, I always have like 20 tabs max open at once, I feel alone.
  
  Don't be, I normally have no more than 3, no more than 7 when actively multitasking

Maybe it's just my ADHD, but I can't even imagine managing that many tabs.
In my workflow, I start a project, then keep opening new tabs as I need to look things up, frequently moving tabs between multiple browsers spanning my 32" monitor. So long as I'm working on that problem, I just keep opening new tabs.
Then, when I've finally squared away the section of the project I was working on, I usually just close the browser entirely and start fresh.
Needing to manually sift through the 80+ tabs I chaotically opened in the last hour or so to figure out what's worth keeping? Hell no. That's what browser history is for. It's Etch-a-Sketch time! Shake it clean and start fresh.
- Seems like your ADHD manifests in a different way than some others. I have no less than 90 tabs open across three monitors and damnit I nEeD all of them!
  
  I typically have 50-200 browser tabs open, but I also usually have 5+ browser windows running. So, like, when I'm building something, I'll have the thing I'm building and all its parts spread across two windows, and a third window with all my reference materials. Then I can cleanly kill them all when I'm done.
  I don't really know what I'd keep from those when that workflow is done. The thing is built, so I don't need any of it anymore.
- I feel the exact same
  Seeing colleagues crawl through 10 different tabs every time they want to check a documentation is quite a bit frustrating
- You want the session addon. Also profile switcher. My project topic usually span 500-1000 tabs each and I often have 15-30 projects going in a single session. Can't wait until I can use open source LLM to ask questions about all the content of all my tavs.

I have three open and feel like its a bit much.
- Same How do people navigate all those tabs? Or do they always open a new one? It's SO much clutter
- I have three pinned tabs, and about 10 more important ones. Here's what I generally have open:
  Pinned @ work:
  Jira
  Okta
  Postman (I'm a BE dev)
  "Essential" tabs at work:
  about 5 main Github repos (we have over a dozen, but I mostly stick to those)
  a couple Confluence pages
  a couple Google Docs
  QA test run page
  Pinned at home:
  email
  wavemaker - creative writing, and I always forget the hostname
  "Essential" tabs at home:
  my gitlab
  a couple game wikis
  FOSS projects in development I depend on
  I can get to pretty much everything else quickly with DDG bangs or memory.
  So at work, a "clean" browser is mostly filled with tabs, and at home it's about half filled with tabs. I keep the essential ones on the far left, so "close to right" generally works well.
- Yeah same. Discord, gmail and whatsapp web, plus whichever ones I'm actively using. And those will be closed by end of day at the very latest.

I understand it since switching to vertical tabs via Sidebery. You can organize them into panels/groups/nested hierarchy, and tabs are only reloaded when you open them, so it's not as if you maintain 7k tabs in RAM. Think of it more like bookmarks that are actually organized and useful. It's what bookmarks might have been if not for Pocket.
- Not heard of sidebery, but totally relate as a Tree Style Tabs user. That and multi account containers means I regularly have a couple hundred tabs per window...

A Mozilla rep confirms to PCMag that having tons of Firefox tabs open consumes "practically no memory whatsoever."
Is there an extension to change this? I literally want to keep all of my tabs in memory no matter what. It drives me nuts when I change tabs and it reloads the page, or the bank website will only load slowly while I'm looking at its tab.
- I'm not sure if it fixes your problem, but it fixed mine.
  Pin the tab.
  In my case, Whatsapp web didn't get loaded when I opened firefox, so notifications didn't reach me unless I opened the tab at least once.
  If the tab is pinned, however, it will load when you open firefox, I'm unsure if the tab stays loaded.

TIL my dad is a power user with his ":D" tabs in Chrome on Android /s
- :D and ∞ are the manifestations of my struggle
  
  I recently saw it change to ;), whatever that means...

I have only 64gb so 1500-2000 with about 60 addons the practical limit. Really wish wevhad better management tools and VM like controls for tabs. There is still headroom in the system but the problem is operations that wake up too many tabs too fast
- You can use Tab Center Reborn & OneTab for a much better tab hoarding experience.
  
  I can't deal with vertical tabs, I use tab manager plus in full tab plus list view.
  Unfortunately, the addon is abandonned

This makes me feel better about the 100-200 tabs I have perpetually open.

Putting bookmarks in Folders, and using keywords for frequently visited sites is enough for me.
- A man culture I see

ADHD moment
"I have so many topics I want to look at at once!" proceeds to get distracted with one of them and forget about all the others
- Out of sight out of mind.
  That's my problem. Three screen setup. I have three browser instances open.
  Instance 1: YouTube. (Left screen) Instance 2: Gaming wiki's and info for the game I'm currently playing. (Right screen) Instance 3. Online courses and study materials. (Right screen. I swap between instance 2 and 3 based on what in currently doing on my main monitor).
  I'll constantly delay or forget to study just because it's not the currently opened in the foreground.

I dunno if I should be honored or terrified to know such people walk amongst us mortals.

God, I think I had 500 open on my old phone alone... Though I usually don't pass 50 on desktop, because they're easier to manage and harder to bury or forget about
- I have like 20 on my phone, usually 100-200 on my desktop, so the reverse. Since tabs are harder to manage on my phone, I tend to clean them up a lot more often.
  
  ...Meanwhile im over here clear all on close
- 534 tabs for me currently on FF Android. A good part of it is fanfiction, the ones I've not read or chosen not to bookmark yet.

Of course I know him, he's me.

I wish there was an option to keep certain integral tabs open fully.. Annoying when I need to copy some code and it relaunches
- Doesn't pinning essentially do that? I do it for Jira and switching to it is usually fast.
  
  Pinning keeps them open

Imagine if you accidentally hit "reload all"...
- Or even worse: close all
  
  "restore last session"
  Same thing will happen I guess. You melt your computer.
  
  You mean "even better" they get to be free finally.

Imagine her reaction when she finds out that firefox got a browsing history feature
- and it even has a bookmarks feature with folder support!

My grandma doesn't understand what tabs are and never closes them either.

I wonder if they were using FF back when they had the Panorama feature back in the day. That many tabs seems like it would be great for organizing everything. It is almost hilarious to think that FF was so far ahead of the game that it just didn't make sense. Now all the other major browsers are adding some kind of tab groups feature.
The way FF did it was cool and was like having virtual desktops but groups of tabs. Aside from proper vertical tabs that keeps theme and doesn't require hacking settings to get rid of the horizontal row (Edge and Brave are good examples as their hover to expand titles and collapse when using the pages are smooth). Bringing back grouping tabs like Panorama had them would be really cool to have again.
Though I would love to see a blend of nice vertical tabs and groups like what I see in screenshots of browsers like Arc. Very different looking but in a good way. If FF could make their own spin of that UI work with both vertical and horizontal tabs. It would be dope af.

I can’t imagine keeping tabs open between tasks
- Same. It's just that my tasks tend to stretch multiple days and overlap, so there's rarely a clear cutoff.
  I'm a software developer and team lead, so I'm often involved in two separate releases simultaneously, planning on one or two major features, and new development on another project, so I have tabs related to each. I try to make time every couple weeks to clear out a couple hundred tabs that have accumulated.
  My workflow works for me though, and it feels real good to close hundreds of tabs knowing that one big project is finally finished.

Should try that in chrome

~~Hoarders~~ Household power users

So anyone can be a power user if they never close their tabs?

Hazel sounds like my soulmate. I have a good 1500+ tabs open on any given moment
- May I ask you what you actually need that many tabs for? I do research for my work but I usually start closing stuff at 50ish tabs lates
  
  A lot of things stay open and I might lose touch for sure.
  But I have a lot of "per window" tab groups about specific work subjects, specific technologies, specific subjects of interest. A lot of it stays open until I look into it, which sometimes can take a while
- Your addon list please
  
  I use a tab manager, and a tab killer that kills the process while not actively in use to save resources. I believe the tab killer is auto tab discard, and the tab manager I can't remember which it is right now
- How do you even know what's open after 50??
  
  Well I have about 40 tabs of Lemmy threads, another 30 of news sites, 12 of them are recipes where I was trying to decide on dinner...

Rookie numbers tbh.
That's barely two projects that I won't event finish worth of research.
- Average night when you accidentally open tvtropes.

hell

Damn, that's a lot of tabs.

If I want to keep a site longer than a day I bookmark it. I have no clue how anyone can cope with this many tabs, it's like an email backlog but for your browser.

So from a security mindset, this is a nightmare. This person must be a paid plant for Big Cross-Site-Tracking

This makes me feel good about my 300+ open tabs😅

I use Tab Stash if I'm about to close/restart the browser or I changed the focus of my research, but if I don't wanna lose some keywords or something, I prefer to use KNotes (or any sticky notes) and write why some keywords are important and their context, so I don't have to maintain too many open tabs. Just yesterday I had like 15 tabs and was overwhelmed lol

im a scrub with just around 1k and opening and closing my browser a few times a week.

And here am I, getting twitchy the moment the tab size shrinks. I can't imagine having so many tabs open.
It's bad enough my brain already does that by itself

- The point is, it didn't. Tabs do not take memory space unless you actively interact with them in Firefox.
  
  And yet since switching to firefox last year I've had more problems with FF eating memory and the browser slowing down, than I ever with Chrome. (not that I'm switching back)

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