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.
Then you will have software that doesn’t work. This is not a Firefox problem, or a problem of extensions, or anything but a user problem.
If your 1998 Toyota Camry is struggling to haul a cargo container up a hill it’s not the car’s fault. You’re doing it wrong. Whatever tasks you’re trying to do with 1000 tabs, a web browser is the wrong tool for the job.
I’m using the wrong tool in the wrong way and won’t stop!!!
Help me!!!
ROFL…
Well then we can’t help you
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.
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.
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.
They ARE contributing, in this case the correct answer is “don’t do that”…
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’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.
I die at anything more than 5
Well so far, it would be too much friction and extra labour to export each tab to external software.
I’m not even sure what software other than a browser would display live web pages in a more organized manner than firefox ?
I’m pretty sure I just hit a bug that’s causing firefox to wake up too many tabs and not handle tab discarding correctly. Firefox does seem like the best tool still even if it’s not working right.
What I would like instead is a browser that treats tabs more like virtual machines that you can roll back, suspend to disk and resume. Little package of data that get frozen in time and are externally searchable.
Anyway, here’s my setup
What I would like instead is a browser that treats tabs more like virtual machines that you can roll back, suspend to disk and resume. Little package of data that get frozen in time and are externally searchable.
Maybe look at ArchiveBox. IIRC it has pretty much everything you ask for including an import from your browser history and bookmarks.
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.
Yes, it’s a disease called “having a lot of shit going on and not wanted to spend my afternoon sorting tabs” It is cured by “throwing all tabs in the bin and starting over” because today’s computer are so incredibly weak they can’t handle a few megabytes of text anymore.
Your solution is a database or information management system.
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.
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.
You have thousands of things going on?
If you have over 1000 tabs… learn how to use bookmarks instead. I don’t understand how you think 1000+ tabs is a feasible way of organizing.
Have you tried bookmarking things instead of leaving them open as tabs?
Yes, I find that it identical to closing a tab. I never go in the bookmarks manager after. It is very clunky to use, it adds extra steps compared to keeping the tab open. At that point, it’s usually easier to use google to find it again, since at least google can search text inside the page, not just the title. I do occasionally dump my thousands of tabs into the bookmarks managers, in a single unusable folder. It hasn’t yet happenned that one of these tabs was retreived. But I hope in the future that I could dump all these tabs into another piece of software that will fetch all the tab’s body data and allow me to search it all with a local LLM based search like “using my bookmarks, create one browser window with all URLs on the topic of the 7 megahertz maser” We’re close but not there yet.
You might be interested in this then, it’s an app that uses AI to auto-tag saved bookmarks: https://hoarder.app/
Neat!, thanks
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.
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.
Rather than try and force Firefox to deal with thousands of tabs, it’d be easier to use an add-on like SingleFile to download the tabs as self-contained HTML files. After that, you can search their contents using free tools like Agent Ransack or DocFetcher.
If you prefer to keep the data in your browser, then how about using a service like Instapaper that lets you save pages for reading/referencing later as well as search their contents?
Why do you have so many tabs open?
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.
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.
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 !
“Small”
I’m sorry I don’t have an answer
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
Why don’t you just open less tabs? Just close the browser when you are done using it
I am not sure what you’re working on but from your answers I’ve read you seems to need access to a lot of information with a few keystrokes, like searching for a keyword or tag.
In my opinion you are using the wrong tool for that. Ditch the browser and learn about the Zettelkasten way of working. It is really powerful for plenty of applications like science, studies, dev, or even the way I use it, author repository of ideas/concepts/stuff I need when writing a book.
You can do that with several software but I like obsidian for that (and because of all its plugins you could probably find something to automatically copy webpage content)
On the downside side :
- You’ll have to learn Zettelkasten, Obsidian etc
- Obviously do the work of writing (or copy pasting) your vault.
But on the plus size :
- You’ll have all the information you need at your fingertips, searchable with keywords, tags, associations etc.
- Everything is basic text MD files so it will still be readable by any text editor or terminal in the next century.
- You can have images, run code, do some mathlib, jupyter etc inside.
- Text is light, easy to store, backup and retrieve.
- If you do good enough you can have a satisfying visual representation of your new brain, kinda mindmap (which is also possible)
Cool I would love to navigate my data in a manner similar to this. However not obsidian, I am in the process of de-googling and I have severe cloud fatigue. But maybe QOwnNotes
I’m hoping something like Archivebox or squid or some other software can help me, autodump everything in a way that will become accessible to these second party data management software. Hopefully in a manner as transparent as opening a tab.
QOwnNotes is good but the UI is a little bare. Consider logseq
Can you please tell me about that obsidian, google and cloud relationship ? Cause I don’t know anything about that and I’m curious.
I don’t use any cloud except my own, self hosting FTW!
