Firefox Power User Keeps 7,400+ Browser Tabs Open for 2 Years (pcmag.com) 116
An anonymous reader shares a report: A software engineer has been keeping nearly 7,500 Firefox tabs open on her Mac computer for over two years -- and doesn't plan on closing them anytime soon. The Firefox power user, who goes by the pseudonym "Hazel" online, posted a screenshot showing 7,470 tabs open earlier this week after finding the browser initially unable to restore all the tabs. Hazel was able to bring the tabs back to life via a Firefox profile cache, however, and tells PCMag that reloading the full session took "no more than a minute."
"I feel like a part of me is restored," Hazel wrote on X once the Firefox tabs had returned. The Firefox fan tells PCMag in a message that she keeps so many tabs open for nostalgia reasons. "I like 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," she says. Surprisingly, all those tabs haven't impacted the computer's performance. "Firefox is quite memory efficient and isn't actually loading the websites unless I click on the tab -- so it's not very resource intensive," Hazel says.
"I feel like a part of me is restored," Hazel wrote on X once the Firefox tabs had returned. The Firefox fan tells PCMag in a message that she keeps so many tabs open for nostalgia reasons. "I like 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," she says. Surprisingly, all those tabs haven't impacted the computer's performance. "Firefox is quite memory efficient and isn't actually loading the websites unless I click on the tab -- so it's not very resource intensive," Hazel says.
The stupidity is breathtaking (Score:1)
nft
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I think the entire idea of tabbed apps is idiotic, at least on a full fledged PC. Tabs are for consumption only devices. PC's are for multiple windows that aren't in full screen for working on multiple apps and pages at once and comparing and contrasting between windows. Tabs are for useless consumption only devices that try to force everything to a full screen app.
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as a fluxbox user, that use tabs to group apps and quickly switch between apps using focus-follow-mouse (even different apps, thanks to fluxbox tab capability), i can say that windows and tab support is awesome. and not, i rarely use full screen apps and yes, i also use multiple virtual desktops and screen with multiple shells. Finally, i also use in firefox auto-tab-discard and tab containers.
All this i isolate apps, work , personal and fun stuff, different accounts (like aws, cloudflare, google accounts)
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Apple user can't figure out bookmarks.
Film at 11.
Unless Apple really is that bad and that really is the best way with their user hostile system.
Laziness (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not preservation for memory, that's just plain LAZINESS.
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Yeah, she should have made screenshots of those sites and put them all on InstaSnap or something like everyone else does.
And post about it on XBook, of course.
Re:Laziness (Score:4, Insightful)
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And post about it on XBook, of course.
You mean instaFaceTwit?
Sorry to go OT here; sometimes I can't help getting meta...
Re:Laziness (Score:5, Interesting)
I am one of those w/ way to many tabs open to count.
The real reason is that tab management is impossible.
Would like 3 things
1. Duplicate tabs (with option to close all dupes)
2. Sort by site/url
3. a better way to type a name and actually list and switch to said tabs (it appears very hit-n-miss even with a few hundred tabs)
Re: Laziness (Score:4, Informative)
Check out FoxyTab... it solves the first two you mentioned:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-... [mozilla.org]
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https://addons.mozilla.org/en-... [mozilla.org]
Tab Session Manager has the ability to automatically "remember" all tab sets that have been opened and edit/restore previous points in time. Although it can't sort.
Still, that person needs to understand the concept of bookmarks :)
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One Tab deserves a mention along with these other excellent suggestions.
https://www.one-tab.com/ [one-tab.com]
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My boss keeps too many open. It's Chrome and the tabs shink to tiny things with no hint about what's inside. Fiurefox at least leave enough that you can see an icon plus the first word.
Re: Laziness (Score:1)
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Re: Laziness (Score:2)
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vertical tabs is also very useful for people that store many tabs, i use https://addons.mozilla.org/en-... [mozilla.org]
also, discard inactive tabs using https://addons.mozilla.org/en-... [mozilla.org]
using something like this will help other understand how people keep many tabs, as both help managing all this
Tab hoarding (Score:5, Funny)
It's tab hoarding, sort of like the folks that lived through the Great Depression never throwing anything away but without a historically understandable motivation.
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more like diogenes syndrome. from time to time people is found living literally under their own shit and it isn't news either. sad, but not news.
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My oldest child is well on his way with >500. All YouTube videos he's going to watch later. I extracted them all one time and found like 30 of the videos didn't actually exist anymore. :D
There's a button to add videos to the Watch Later playlist.
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The functionality of the Watch Later playlist doesn't work the same as a standard playlist, so I created one called Watch Now.
What is "lazy" anyway. (Score:3)
That's not preservation for memory, that's just plain LAZINESS.
Ironically enough no one is labeled that when they're considered The Best, and essentially identified as a Record Holder of some kind.
The YouTuber known as Mr. Beast could have been considered quite lazy all those years ago when he spent hours filming himself reading numbers or a dictionary aloud, and yet look what kind of wealth and celebrity status he managed to obtain. From those "lazy" beginnings.
Society has a weird definition of "lazy" now. One that tends to not punish as much as you might assume it
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Mr. Beast's story isn't a repeatable path to success. It's a great example of how consumerism, materialism, and advertising has warped our culture's values.
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Mr. Beast's story isn't a repeatable path to success. It's a great example of how consumerism, materialism, and advertising has warped our culture's values.
Do you feel the problem of consumerism, materialism, and advertising has actually changed to make a repeat event as impossible as the first?
I don't.
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I think the media will eventually report on someone as being "the next Mr Beast". But I don't think it will ever be true.
YouTube is too different now for someone new to achieve the same kind of notoriety and fortune, especially in a short time. Going forward, and we see this already, everything is going to be manufactured by content mills. Add AI generated content on top, and I think I have a pretty good idea what the content kids are going to mindless absorb every day. Maybe if YT dies and is replaced by a
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"power user" according to the title
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It's not laziness. I typically run at least low hundreds of tabs open, frequently up into the low thousands. I know I've cleared 5,000 before, but I'm not in the business of tracking too closely--I'm just not interested in how many there are.
Bookmarks are not the same thing as open tabs; a site can vanish but still be available in browser cache/memory. A bookmark may help you find a page you were on earlier, but it's hard to know *why* you bookmarked it, to organize them linearly, and to distinguish betwee
Hoarders (Score:5, Insightful)
Online edition.
Re:Hoarders (Score:4, Interesting)
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If there's a nuclear war we'd need that.Hopefully he has copies of wikipedia in multiple languages too .. and journal articles and patents.
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Probably she's got other kinds of data hoarding behavior. You can also guess she's probably a normal hoarder too at least for some things like books. My co-worker has a PETABYTE of storage at his mansion along with apparently like 10,000 books ... all in 95 sqm. Like why do you need that, they have libraries and impossible he needs a petabyte.
Some people prefer to have their own collections of things. If someone has one or more cars, do you tell them that they should get rid of them because they have busses?
Over the past few years, maybe because of age, or maybe just finally growing up, I have adopted a 'Live and Let Live' philosophy. This woman is not sucking the electrons out of everyone's house, turning people into zombies, and sending the electrons into the Long One to devour.
Re: Hoarders (Score:3)
High bit rate 4K porn will fill up a PB without trying too hard, and is probably not available at your local library. Not that I would know anything about it.
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Why do you need 4K porn? Back when I was growing up, we had low grade black and white digital images, and we were happy with that!
(and scrambled pay tv, for that matter)
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Back when I was growing up, we had an 819-line analog monochrome CRT TV. It was a maybe 14" in size, if that. I believe it came in a suitcase form factor for portability, but can't quite recall all the details, I was very young. I never saw any porn on it. We later upgraded to a 20" color TV, and that was revolutionary. Only one channel broadcast porn, and it was scrambled. We didn't subscribe. You could still make out the silhouette of the porn actors event though it was scrambled, but you would only see
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LOL yeah I remember that scrambled TV pr0n. It was like omg I see a tit ! I see it! .. no wait nevermind I think that's a doorknob. Fun times.
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I can see it now talking to the therapist:
"Ok, how about this craigslist listing for a free dresser. Do you think we can close that one? Do you still need it?"
"Well, but I might want a dresser like that one so I want to keep the picture."
"Ok..."
Re: Hoarders (Score:2)
"What about this photo frame"
"Oh I was thinking of keeping that on top of the dresser in case I went ahead and bought it"
"What about this beeswax polish"
"In case I bought this wooden bowl instead of the photo frame"
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Yep, came here to say this. Keeping dozens or hundreds (let alone thousands) of tabs open, is a sign of disorganization and lack of control. There's absolutely no way those thousands of open tabs perform any useful purpose for him.
Similarly, thousands of unread emails in your inbox don't serve any purpose. Might as well just archive them and start over. If there are unread emails more than a week or two old, they probably are no longer relevant to anything anyway.
No (Score:4, Insightful)
A part of you was never taken nor restored. Hazel is just extremely mentally unwell.
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A part of you was never taken nor restored. Hazel is just extremely mentally unwell.
Personally, my diagnosis is: attention-whore.
The simple fact that we're hearing about this suggests that. If it was just "the way I do stuff", nobody would know. For instance... if I just really liked to take the icons for all of the things on my desktop and replace them with mirror images of the original because something something nostalgia, nobody would know about it. It'd just be some idiosyncratic thing I do.
No, no, this made it to PC Magazine. That's deliberate. That's why 'she' did it. So 's
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A part of you was never taken nor restored. Hazel is just extremely mentally unwell.
Personally, my diagnosis is: attention-whore.
With the way society handsomely rewards the best of our professional narcissists financially, I'm curious; is it really attention whoring, or is it more 21st Century marketing for a valid career opportunity in the pimp-my-personality world that capitalizes on it?
If you want to remember a site... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Even without bookmarks, there's no need to keep tabs open. Just hit "Ctl-H", then enter a word related to what you want to go back to. You'll almost always find what you're looking for in your own history list within seconds.
I could never understand why anyone would keep more than half a dozen tabs open at any given time. The WWW was designed to be stateless: "Ctl-W" is your friend.
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You're presuming everyone has a history list. I don't. I specifically have it turned off. As someone else above mentioned, I bookmark whatever I want. No need for a history if you have what you want.
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2x webmail tabs.
2x Social Media tabs.
2x work-related web apps.
Home Assistant.
Unraid.
Ubiquiti Monitoring.
2x 3D Printer tabs.
Blue Iris Webapp.
That's 12 tabs I access several times a day. They are all pinned, they don't take much on the tab bar.
Apart from those, my browser can balloon to 20+ other tabs when I perform whatever subject research, but then I need to clean them up.
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Even without bookmarks, there's no need to keep tabs open. Just hit "Ctl-H", then enter a word related to what you want to go back to. You'll almost always find what you're looking for in your own history list within seconds.
I could never understand why anyone would keep more than half a dozen tabs open at any given time. The WWW was designed to be stateless: "Ctl-W" is your friend.
She has a Mac.
That's Command-W, you insensitive clod!
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I have found palemoon (firefox-based) history search works but you must know part of the URL (possibly title) so if you know an exact string ("related" won't cut it) it's instant and powerful.
Surprisingly it's chromiums that don't seem to store all my history or do searches poorly, they're supposed to be king of search. Seems they let gmail channel that power yet the browser forgets I was on vendorsite.com before long. Even though the search worked fine last week. And older sites can still show.
As for TFA s
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Try to keep in mind that it's Friday evening and Slashdot users don't get the opportunity to pick on anyone else very often.
hmmm...could be useful (Score:3)
"I like 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,"
If only there was some built in tool, some kind of, say, 'things you've looked at' function...a journal or diary type thing.... to keep track of what web pages you visited.
Re:hmmm...could be useful (Score:4, Insightful)
"I like 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,"
If only there was some built in tool, some kind of, say, 'things you've looked at' function...a journal or diary type thing.... to keep track of what web pages you visited.
Yeah, some sort of "historical list" or something... that would be very useful.
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Firefox does truncate the history list and this behavior is probably not what hoarders are looking for.
I seem to have history for the last 53 weeks but I don't know if truncation is time based, cardinality based, space based, or some blend of those factors and perhaps others - and don't care because I bookmark and tag URLs I may want to return to later rather than relying on tabs or history. Bookmarking and tags are far, far better organizational tools than history or tabs.
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What she is trying to do is impossible.
She wants to see history, unaltered from her original experience; however, as soon as she goes to the previously opened tab, it performs a 'refresh' which means the data is no longer the same and may have been altered.
She is mentally unwell, but only because we live in a society that is addicted to gaslighting people. Her path out of gaslighting is not effective.
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Pushing something beyond its immediate intended usage is one thing. Having close to 5K tabs open is a different problem, one that goes deep into the realm of pathology.
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If she had a dozen bitcoin asics going 24x7, consuming 24,000 watts of power 24x7, would that make it okay, then?
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"I like 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,"
If only there was some built in tool, some kind of, say, 'things you've looked at' function...a journal or diary type thing.... to keep track of what web pages you visited.
Perhaps, other than a good therapist, someone should introduce her to macOS' premiere "Journal" Application, Day One:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/... [apple.com]
That will do until Apple Ports their newly-released, Free, iOS "Journal" App to macOS. . .
Tab Session Manager (Score:2)
Tab Session Manager [mozilla.org] is great for those browsing sessions you want to finish "later".
Awkwardlookmonkeypuppet.jpg (Score:2)
Ooof, I'm not too far behind this guy...and yeah Tab Session Manager is the glue holding this shitshow together...
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Oh, correction, not too far behind this lady ;-) Hey girl, you up for some tab hoarding and chill? :-P
"Power users" (Score:3)
In my experience these folks tend to be the biggest support headaches... primarily because they tend to assume they know a lot more about tech than is actually the case; and secondarily because they convince other users of the same.
They're a lot like "tech" bloggers, but (fortunately) with a smaller audience.
Can you imagine if she used Chrome (Score:2)
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There is no possible way to do this in Chrome. Chrome blows up it's tabs so often I and my others install add-on's like Session Buddy explicitly for purpose of picking up the crumbs when Chrome drops them on the floor. I'm something of a tab hoarder myself but it is something like 60 or 70, not 7400.
Sounds fake (Score:2)
Alternate headline: (Score:2)
Person with undiagnosed mental health condition demonstrate a plea for help online.
No seriously. There is no sane reason to do this, which can leave only insane reasons. We have an entire field of medicine which deals with the insane.
Whatever you do, don't post any technical details! (Score:2)
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How (Score:1)
firefox won't stay running with 5 open tabs for longer than two weeks before becoming unresponsive.
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Untrue. I run Firefox with a dozen windows each of which has hundreds of tabs. All it takes is enough RAM, but I make sure I have plenty. If RAM pressure is a problem for you then look up the BarTab extension (it's defunct, but I believe there are some active forks). Firefox absolutely can do this.
Now Chrome, that's where you'll have trouble. IT was really not designed for a large number of open tabs. Its minimum tab width is ~48px and once you have enough of those to fill the horizontal bar new tabs open o
WARNING:Post contains sexist content (Score:2)
How did I know that it would be a woman's [pitribe.com] computer?
I've found my soulmate (Score:1)
ADHD (Score:5, Insightful)
If you have hundreds or thousands of tabs open... it may be a hint you have ADHD.
The tabs form a mix of a todo list (they're things you want to do but, because of executive dysfunction, you can't get yourself to do them), and a coping mechanism for "out of sight, out of mind" (which is common for ADHD). Bookmarks don't work as an alternative because those are out of sight.
If you're not familiar with it, executive function is the part of your brain that turns the knowledge that you need to do something into actually doing the thing. If that's not working properly then you'll struggle to get yourself to work on things (even things you want to do or that you know are important), and you'll also struggle to stop doing things once you get stuck into them (like, reading books for hours straight). It's a big part of ADHD (which, frankly, is very badly named, it's more dysregulation of attention than a lack of it, and you'd think hyperfocus being a thing would have been a hint to the namers but apparently not).
I'm pointing this out in the hopes that it helps somebody. ADHD is treatable, but first you have to figure out you have it, and most people only know wrong stereotypes about it rather than anything accurate that would let them recognize it in themselves. I really wish someone had pointed out some of the obvious ADHD things I do so I could've got it treated sooner... so here's my attempt at doing that for somebody else.
I suspect saying this won't go down well with the crowd here at /., the place seems to be infested with the sorts of people who would argue you're just being lazy or some stupid shit, but... that's not the case. It's an actual physical problem with your brain that can be treated.
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Definitely ADHD for me, and yes - I have too many tabs open. But the amount of mental work saved by not closing them is tangible. Similar to trying to keep an inbox zero state. It's OK. Email software is fast with 100,000+ messages in the inbox. Search works the same whether it's in a carefully filed away folder or deep in the inbox.
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What would you say about my case? I open tabs when there's some news item or search result I want to know more about. I close them when I have reviewed the thing, even if it's just to decide I am no longer interested. For example, I've opened six tabs from the /. front page today. I'll read the ones that are of the highest interest immediately (there were three this time) and leave the others for possible consumption in the future, if I have time, at which point they'll either be closed or left open as a bo
Messy Desktop (Score:2)
Its the same as having a Messy Desktop, either virtual or your real desk. There actually is organization in it. I use Session Buddy plugin for Chrome and it works great, except that Chrome is a memory hog. But I have 1,110 Tabs open, used to have more until Session Buddy changed their format and I had to reset it all. Chrome will make them inactive till you need them. I don't understand how people cannot have so many tabs open. I use book mark manager also.
Stress testing (Score:2)
While this scenario does seem excessive, I would be curious how different browsers deal wit this situation in terms of memory usage, CPU usage and generally stability.
Ideally a dormant tab should be using zero CPU and almost zero memory, with state being on disk until accessed.
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It's all a matter of proper structure. Remember when people were obsessed with cleaning up cookies? Yeah, tens of thousands of .txt files is slow compared to a SQLite database. Oh and people are still obsessed with deleting cookies for some reason.
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Sometimes it is handy to reset one's pr0n recommendations.
And how many are now 404? (Score:2)
Snooze Tabs addin (Score:1)
bookmarks (Score:2)
Have you heard of bookmarks?
And I thought I was a tab-whore (Score:2)
Oh well, it's way less self-destructive than normal hoarder behavior, so she can do her. The ability of modern hard drives to act as practically unlimited storage you never have to delete anything from makes us all digital hoarders.
I am a tab hoarder (Score:2)
Some people can use bookmarks. I am not one of them. Bookmarks is a write-only medium for me. My brain is not wired to use bookmarks. I have tried. Many times.
On the topic of Firefox, I was a Firefox user like many people, before Chrome came along. And that is what I have been using since. But I have noticed that Chrome is slow at certain tasks, even with just one tab open. For example, I was downloading a few large files. 20 files of about 10GB each. Chrome started choking up and would occasional
This is a bad idea (Score:2)
Who knows how old the build of Firefox holding all those tabs is and whether it contains security flaws or other bad bugs.
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you know that you can update firefox and restart the browser and still keep all the previous tabs, you can even change to that be the default behavior for normal browsers quit
Aieeee (Score:2)
OMG. My OCD kicks in if I have more than about 7 tabs open at once...
A glimpse into a disorganized mind. (Score:2)
I don't understand how that could possibly be useful for anyone. Is this just a syndrome of ADHD or something?
I'd personally take it as a relief to have all that stuff cleared away. I accumulate all kinds of crap on my desktop, every year I take it all and move it to an "old" folder. If I don't need anything from it in a few months, it gets deleted. I don't even bother looking through it.
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Disorganized?! Quite the reverse. Linear tab lists are how I organize things. One window per desktop, each window a different type of browsing (e.g. news/research/productivity) and then open tabs in each window. Disorganized would be somehow trying to track all of those URLs some *other* way. What, do you have thousands of bookmarks? How would you manage to relate them back to the type of task they're related to, and the time they were bookmarked?
A power-user? (Score:2)
Firefox power user ...
What makes Hazel a power-user? The term implies a high level of knowledge, effectiveness and probably, efficiency. Having over 7,000 tabs loaded doesn't sound efficient for her or her equipment.
Challenge Accepted! (Score:2)
Current tab count is 7850 on Legion 5, AMD Ryzen 7 5800H, 64GB memory, Win10 Home. There is a Firefox plugin that helps with recovery - Tab Session Manager. It has saved me from searching through the folders / sub-directories to locate the previous session files. Uptime is currently 67:18:14:04. Record was 123: something. I keep Windows/SoftwareDistribution/Download empty and rename it once in a while. I'm currently looking at all of the things I need to change to stop Windows updates from happening.
Why (Score:2)
not a power user (Score:2)
Sad (Score:2)
The level of misogyny in this page is sad, the article being poor/lacking info is on PCMag as it is their article. Half the discussion here is valid talk about browsers, memory etc and the other half is nasty pointless and baseless attacks. And I won't be wasting my time replying to attacks directed at me for pointing this out.
when the mentally ill run the asylum (Score:2)
Impressive (Score:2)
Every time I remember opening a ton of different tabs I would inevitably run clear out of GDI objects and the UI would start going bonkers. That was years ago with far less than 100 tabs.