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.
Maybe don’t have a THOUSAND tabs
I will, not, do that.
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
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/YaSl1Bb750Y
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
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.
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.
That takes too long. Organizing tab is the computer’s job !
Literally isn’t, which is why you’re hitting a wall.
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.
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.
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.
Your solution is a database or information management system.
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
geez, just press Ctrl+W when you’re done with a tab, or if the tab is older than a couple hours
I don’t understand why some are so attached to tabs. Search your history if you need it again.
I tried closing tabs, I have to finish reading them, make sure I got everything and that whatever reason I had for opening that tab was done. The result is that I spend all most all my time trying to close and sort and order tabs instead of doing what I was trying to do in the first place. And then the browser freezes for 10 minutes.
Something is very wrong that 64GB is nowhere near enough to handle a few megabytes of text. And searching text inside of all tabs is an unthinkably difficult operation ?
Where did the web go wrong !?
It’s not the web it’s you dude. You’re not using the software the way it’s intended to be used. There is no reason at all to ever need 1000+ tabs open.
It’s not the web. It seems to me you might have an attention deficit issue. Try improving your workflow.
My computer should bend to my will, not the other way around.
Then invent the technology that makes what you want to do reasonable, otherwise don’t blame a drill for being incapable of hammering nails fast enough for you.
Say these problems are fixed for now. How many tabs is enough? How do you see this tab hoarding progression being sustainable at all?
I would put the full text, image and video of every tab I have ever opened into the context memory of an open source LLM if I could. I would only consciously delete stuff that needs to stop existing immediately, like doxxing data or illegal data or malicious code.
This is like asking, how many email should you keep.
Well at work we auto delete all emails after 60 days.
But my personal email has every email going back to 2006, the last storage failure before backup, and it’s all quickly searchable.
The other limit would be storage space, but my cluster has still 180 terabyte empty space, I don’t see that getting filled up from plain browser data any time soon.
Of course, I would like better automated data catalogging tools. I would like to ask my local open source LLM to “pull up all tabs regarding 7 megahertz maser project” and it should should open a browser window that contains every tab I have ever come accross on that topic. Including now-dead websites. It should all be sorted by date, it should know to put the more basic tabs to the left and the cutting edge stuff on the right. All this without me tagging a single thing, without wasting a minute of my time doing sorting busywork.
It is the job of the computer to organize my data, in an offline, private, reliable, open source-based, enshittification-proof manner with infinite memory and perfect recall. So that I can get on with doing the stuff that I want to do and not fiddle with browser settings.
Mozilla foundation has revenues in the 500 million range and a 7 million a year CEO, I expect nothing less.
I applaud their initiative with llamafile, however I hope that was just an appetizer.
yeah mate - you need a knowledge management software, not a browser.
tabs were always ephemeral and that’s unlikely to change because they’re much more than text and images.
that’s simply an unreasonable expectation for a browser.
I’m honestly surprised Firefox even handles more than a few hundred open tabs.
That’s fair, maybe you’re using the wrong tool though, something like an internet archive sounds more like what you need.
Take every tab you open and save a PDF, all the text, and all the images, then put a timestamp on them before deleting the tab. That’s not the point of a browser though, that’s an entirely different product.
You’re welcome to build it though, or ask Microsoft if they can make Recall work for tabs.
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.
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.
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.
I’ve read this entire thread like three times and watched all the videos you’ve posted, and I still don’t understand your workflow at all.
If searching bookmarks/history is harder than using Google to just find the thing you want to get back to, why do you need to keep the things you want to get back to open rather than just using Google to find the page again later? Or when you want to get back to something you (think you?) have left open, do you find it just by scrolling through all your tabs until a title/favicon looks like what you’re looking for?
Your last paragraph makes it seem like maybe you want to keep the tabs open so if the page/content gets deleted off of the server, you don’t lose it. Is that correct? I’d imagine that doesn’t always accomplish that, though, right? (Particularly for something like YouTube.) If that’s a significant part of why you keep the tabs open, though, maybe that bit at least is a good question for a data hoarder community.
I haven’t been able to find any “discard all tabs” addon for Firefox by Googling. And I can’t guess what exactly it does. (Does it save tab states to disk and suspend - but also leave open - all tabs or something?) Are you sure that’s the name of the addon you’re using?
why do you need to keep the things you want to get back to open rather than just using Google to find the page again later?
If it’s already in memory, that’s one few step to reach it.
My tab manager can’t search google
do you find it just by scrolling through all your tabs until a title/favicon looks like what you’re looking for?
I search my live memory with Tab Manager Plus
Sadly, it can’t search tab body text, only tab titles.
if the page/content gets deleted off of the server, you don’t lose it. Is that correct?
My software should not discard data without my permission. When it runs out of RAM it should dump to disk cache, not delete. But browser have the builtin assumption that the web remembers everything, which is false. I also think bookmarks should save all tab data, all text, all images, all code, all video, and the code should remain as functional as possible. That’s a long way off, currently the only way to do that is freeze the tab with its browser and operating system inside a virtual machine live snapshot.
I haven’t been able to find any “discard all tabs
I believe this one can do, discard selected tabs, but not discard all tabs
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/discard/
Discard is the action where all tab content is deleted, keeping only URL, title and favicon
I haven’t found discard all tabs either.
I would like “stop all tabs” to work
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/stop-all-button/
But it will only work after firefox has cleared the clog, it currently freezes with the rest of the browser.
If it’s already in memory, that’s one few step to reach it.
I search my live memory with Tab Manager Plud
Oh, so you’re doing something like Googling just to find the page title and then rather than clicking the link in Google, (closing the Google results page, I hope and) searching through your tab titles with Tab Manager Plus to find and switch to the open tab where you already have the page in question open?
Though, I still don’t understand why you keep the tab open in the first place rather than juat closing the tab when you’re (at least for the moment) done with it and then Googling to find the content again and clicking the appropriate link to get that same content in a new tab when you do need it again. I asked whether the reason was so that if the content is removed from the server, you didn’t lose it, but I don’t think anything you said in your last post answered that question. You did say:
My software should not discard data without my permission. When it runs out of RAM it should dump to disk cache, not delete.
Which wasn’t quite a direct answer to my question. And you then directly admit that the browser doesn’t even keep content that’s open in a tab:
But browser have the builtin assumption that the web remembers everything, which is false.
So that must not be why you keep content open in tabs, right?
Is it maybe something like if you keep something open in a tab, the presence of that page title in your tab manager gives you confirmation when you later Google to find the page title that such-and-such particular result in the Google results is indeed the thing you’re looking for and not a different page than the one you were looking for?
Just as an aside, my web browser use is probably atypical as well. I have my browser forget all cookies, history, cache, etc (basically everything but my bookmarks) every time I fully close it. And I close it every time I switch activities to keep my online personas isolated from each other. (So I’m never logged into my Google account and my Amazon account at the same time, for instance. To reduce targeted ads and such.)
Also, I’m wondering if something more like a caching proxy with maybe page searching capabilities and finegrained control of what is cached and what isn’t might fill part of your use case, but I still don’t have a firm grasp on your use case.
I’m sorry I don’t have an answer
1000 tabs? What for?
A small subset of the stuff I’m trying to do.
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 !
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 !
If you need offline version of the sites you can save them with SingleFileZ
I have no direct solution to you exact problem but your usage of tabs sounds like a nightmare.
A while back I found Omnivore which works like a charm if you want to “freeze” the contents of a website to read them later. You can also self host it if you like.
I took it a step further because I love Obsidian as personal knowledge management and I want to have everything in one place. There’s a plugin to sync all your saved pages from Omnivore to Obsidian. In the template for it I then have my marked highlights, the links to the version in Omnivore and the original URL and also the whole content. So I have all of that in markdown which is really nice to work with.
Maybe that’s a solution you too could be happy with.
Thanks, never heard of Omnivore
“Distraction free. Privacy focused. Open source”
They do hit the right notes. I was going to try QOwnNotes but I’ll put that on my list.
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?
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 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
Looks like this when zoomed all the way out
You can select tabs, press enter, it will open them in another window
You can select by right click, or by typing keywords in the search
There are also many other operation you can perform
also these
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/close-duplicate-tabs/
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/order-tabs-by-domain/
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/go-to-sound-tab/
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/close-tabs-right/
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/window-merger/
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/profile-switcher/
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/stop-all-button/
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/switch-to-previous-active-tab/
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/traduzir-paginas-web/
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/spoof-geolocation/
The full list here
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.
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 !
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/6TEMLxkEIPo
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Why do you have so many tabs open?
