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.
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.
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.
Zotero
I like the sound of that, thanks !
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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.
Well then we can’t help you
I’m using the wrong tool in the wrong way and won’t stop!!!
Help me!!!
ROFL…
Why do you have so many tabs open?
You have 64GB RAM and that’s still not enough for your browser. Wow.
I’ve come away from this with only more questions. What does your Downloads folder/Filesystem look like? Do you have notebooks or any real world allocation of information? What’s that like? What kinds of things do you keep in a junk drawer?
Absolutely fascinating.
I do not waste time sorting, emails, downloads and bookmarks
For my linux ISOs, which I have approx 60 terabyte of, I use dedicated sorting software and it does a really good job of keeping it all organized. I also make liberal use of symlinks and hardlinks to keep the original alive while also keeping things organized.
As for notes, I have notepad++ with an endless series of titled untitled text files of everything I ever want to remembered. Shared accross computers using a local git server
On my phone I have google keep which has a list of notes that has long since become far too long to scroll to the bottom off of. I am in the process of degoogling and I want to switch to a selfhosted file centric markdown note taking web app, not decided on which but this video is probably going to be one of them.
I don’t have a junk drawer, my stuff is sorted into bins, here is a glimpse of that
Why do you need 60TB of Linux Isos? Or do you mean “Linux Isos ;)”
Yes the ;) variety
Those ISOs must go back YEARS! Same with the files! What sorting software helps keep track of all that?
Notepad++ surely has some type of global search feature to help find the thought you saved for later, right? I’m utterly impressed with how much stuff you seem to have around, yet can still find and make sense of it. I would have long since buried myself under it all and given up.
Yes, files that go back to 1996 when I first got online. Much older stuff that I got afterwards
I was using Kodi and I am switching to Emby.
Various renamers
https://picard-docs.musicbrainz.org/en/config/options_filerenaming.html
https://github.com/mobeigi/filebot
and many custom bash and batch scripts
Yes, notepad has “search in all open files” which would be great in firefox, “search in all tabs” and then it shows you a tab list with the search text in context with excerpts, kind of like how google does. Then with one click you could jump to that place in the text in that tab.
Kodi and Emby. Ohhhhhh. ISOs. Ha! I knew exactly the types of sorting software that was coming when the idea clicked.
“Search in all tabs” would be so awesome. I don’t do 1000 tabs, but when doing research, I regularly have 30-40 I’m flipping through, and I tend to lose my place, know I saw something, and need that exact tab, and it’s always a bit of a chore to track it down before I forget why I wanted the tab in the first place.
I hope Firefox gets where you need it to be soon. I recently read the story of the 7000 tab person, so it’s clearly a use case.
1000 tabs? What for?
A small subset of the stuff I’m trying to do.
“Small”
Is this your goal?
Cause I gotta say, I don’t think abusing your browser is your best bet.
He just has a tab for each employee in a company
Ohh lord. I could actually believe that.
Just imagine how many tabs the NSA has
Ahh, so that’s what the super computers are for. Would be a shame if Chrome couldn’t restore them all after a crash.
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
You are manually caching web content. Were you aware that (a) your browser does that for you; (b) the internet does that for you ?
I’m as guilty of this as anyone and can tell you from experience that it’s sutpid.
I tend to have ~10,000 tabs because I obsessively fail to clean up. But it never takes much memory or cpu, my PC isn’t amazing yet Firefox is always lightning quick.
I’ve never used the discard or merge windows features though, I can see why those might cause issues. I assume these two functions just aren’t optimised for so many tabs.
One addon I might recommend to help keep numbers down is Duplicate Tab Closer, which has options to specify how similar tabs can be to be considered duplicates, and also will detect across all open windows if desired.
10,000 tabs? As in 4 zeros? How do you remember what’s open? Can’t you just close the browser nightly?
Why do you need so many open tabs to begin with? What is your usecase?
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.
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.
Your solution is a database or information management system.
I’ve researching that and it seems the bottleneck is going to be transfering the tab inner information to secondary storage software. This is often a multi step process and also imperfect. With many website expressly frustrating this attempt by deleting and reloading data which is out of sight.
For instance trying to archive a facebook thread. As you scroll down the thread, it loads tge text ahead, but it also delete a few pages behind.
I’m not sure tab data can be expected to translate reliably to another store systen. It might have to stay in the browser.
Best I could figure so far is a rolling video screenshot, but that makes the data huge and difficult and imprecise to search as you now have to OCR evety frame to make it searchable again.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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
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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.
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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 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.
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.
I was going to also say that OP might be wanting something like Recall (which might be one of the few instances where it constantly saving shit would be perfect). But they would need like the most extreme version that isn’t just saving searchable screenshots.
I also think that one major issue for OP is more about how the actual sites are coded these days. As even if a single tab is being used, the shit can just decide to force it to update the contents at any time (like how just having Gmail open you will see new messages just show up even without refreshing your browser).
It seems like the perfect situation for OP would be if the web still worked like it did pre-web 2.0, but with using the current version of FF. Outside of that, it really seems like they need to just start having sites be auto-completely downloaded for full offline use.
I am still shocked that the main issues being had seems to be that it taking 10s of mins to allow FF to process that much stuff is the frustration. Which does seem to mean FF is holding up pretty well given the situation. Their complaint about tab isolation being too much overhead seems odd though. As it would seem that going back to not having that would mean a much higher chance of just everything just being yeet-ed out of nowhere.
I am not sure how their headspace of using virtual machines approach would be much better as shit would still have the issues of sites still self-updating and loading up in the first place. Though given they seem to have dramatically more coding experience, I am much more ignorant of this shit.
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.
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.
