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.
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
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)
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe don’t have a THOUSAND tabs
I will, not, do that.
I’m using the wrong tool in the wrong way and won’t stop!!!
Help me!!!
ROFL…
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
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.
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.
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.
From a practical standpoint, it’s hard to imagine what you could possibly be doing where it’s beneficial to have a thousand tabs open.
If I’m writing a research paper, I might want 5 or 10 tabs open at a given time. Let’s say I’m a little chaotic so I get up to 20. And then limitations on my working memory kick in, and having any more open tabs actually makes me worse off.
But then let’s suppose it’s a thesis that’s 50 pages long. So I might be relying on 40 or 50 references. I’m not relying on them all at the same time, right? So I definitely don’t want to keep those tabs open all at the same time.
What I could do, and what you could consider, is either bookmarking things or using archive.org to make a backup of the pages.
In one of the other comments you mentioned Facebook. That has me a little concerned again with your objectives. If it’s something private on Facebook that can’t be recovered later, and you need something reliable, then you have no choice but to do long screenshots or scrolling videos. If it’s not reliable, then why do you care so much to keep the window open? Just close the window, remember whatever you remember, and move on with your life.
Whatever you do, here’s a few rules of thumb… Your web browser is not an archiving tool. Printing to PDF is one way to archive things. There are other ways to archive things too. You don’t actually need to archive as much as you might think you need to archive. Most of the things that we think might be important now actually won’t be useful at all three months from now. Rarely would one actually want to have a thousand sources of information for any given task.
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.
I would prefer not to save and tags tabs 500 times per day. It’s easier to let them accumulate and handle them all in memory.
500 tab save and tag per day is too much labour, I would spend half my day just fiddling and sorting bookmarks !
What the hell are you doing that you need 500 NEW tabs every day?!
That takes too long. Organizing tab is the computer’s job !
Literally isn’t, which is why you’re hitting a wall.
Nah, FF handles thousands of tabs just fine. I literally have just as many if not more tabs than OP and have never seen this issue. It’s either from the merge they’re doing or something else. It would be better if y’all just worked under the assumption that this does work and something is otherwise wrong with op’s setup.
The issue is parsing all that. There is no way you can keep that many tabs readily accessible like tabs are meant to be. Which is why these addons were born and are not official parts of Firefox. This is one of those just because you can doesn’t mean you should situations. I get they’ve adopted this workflow, but reading through this it sounds more like daily driving than actual work. Which makes this even more bizarre, you can’t read them all, they have to reload when you open them after a while (ie download again) so all points are moot. You aren’t saving the page, you are holding onto a shell that will request the page again when you wake it up. If the server went offline never to be seen again your tab will not hold the information.
With this workflow, it might be better to have a crawler dump everything into folder hierarchies that are content searchable, and then search that like google using specialized software. I dont see any other reason you could even have 1k tabs open efficiently, you aren’t searching through that, might as well google again and follow the purple links.
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.
I search my open tabs in the search bar, and close it when I’m done. Super handy honestly.
You can also search your bookmarks (and your history!) in the search bar.
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
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.
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 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.
i use auto tab discard and it works great
Install Onetab
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?
Sidebery (FOSS, MIT license) has several features that could be used to help you merge thousands of tabs into one window without choking out your memory usage, and generally makes it really easy to organize a massive amount of tabs. It would take several steps. First, you’d right-click the panel (the top-level organizational unit in Sidebery, above the tabs) on each window and select
Save to bookmarks(example folder structure: selectingBookmarks Toolbar/merge/for a panel namedpanel1would save the tabs underBookmarks Toolbar/merge/panel1; click a folder twice in the selection dialog to expand it). Then you’d close that window and repeat with each window, being careful with the panel names so as not to overwrite any other window’s tabs. Once you’re down to one window, create an empty panel, right-click it, and selectRestore from bookmarks. From this dialog, selecting the top-level folder that all the other bookmarked panels reside in (Bookmarks Toolbar/merge/in this example) will import every tab from every window that was bookmarked, grouped by the window name.When Sidebery imports a panel from bookmarks, the tabs are imported in an unloaded state, so they have basically no effect on memory until you actually click into them and load them. I can restore about 50 tabs per second from bookmarks without my system even slowing down, taking me from 0 to 500 tabs in about 10 seconds. It’s not exactly a one-click option, but I wager it will be significantly faster and less prone to completely breaking than your current workflow, and a little easier to back up (even if window/session states get wonky, bookmarks sync pretty much instantly).
Once your tabs are all in the same window, you can load tabs you want loaded by selecting a bunch (ctrl-click, shift-click, etc., just like in file explorer) and refreshing them, presumably avoiding YouTube tabs (should probably download those with YT-DLP anyway if you want to keep them). Sidebery will actually limit how many tabs it reloads at once, so it’ll never choke out your system by trying to instantly load a thousand of them (unlike if you select “open all in tabs” in Firefox’s native bookmarks context menu… eurgh). Even if it isn’t faster (though I suspect it is) the browser is at least usable while that’s going on. I’m not sure how well this method preserves containers, mainly because I don’t use them, so if you do, keep an eye on that if you test it out. All I know for sure is Sidebery supports reopening a tab in a new/different container because that’s in the default context menu.
There’s more time savings than just window merging and tab loading, there’s the tree-style viewing, being able to collapse whole trees of tabs you aren’t actively paying attention to, seeing the full titles of 30-40 tabs at a time, no more sideways scrolling, a built in search bar to filter shown tabs by title, fully customizable keyboard shortcuts and context menus… it’s actually incredible how much this addon can do, and not only does it have a lot of settings and customization that should let you tailor its behavior to exactly how you want it, you can even sync its actual settings through Firefox! (just make sure to set your device name) Only thing it can’t do is remove the tab strip to give you more vertical real estate, but Mozilla might be working on that.
I know what it’s like to be attached to a cumbersome workflow. I hope this can help streamline things for you a bit and make life with ~2,000 tabs just a little less troublesome.
Have you tried increasing the size of your swap memory in windows? Otherwise known as “virtual memory”. Depending on the speed of your drive and available space, you might be able to increase the vertual memory size to get more performance.
But what about using a page archiving service, even a self-hosted one, like Shiori. Shiori has an extension that can allow for single click page archiving right from the browser. The pages are saved as html files or txt files and it will create a readability version of the file which is just the text and images. You could then search the files and their contents using something like VS Code to search the whole directory where the files are stored. There are plenty of other ways to do that search once you have those archives, though. I think even Windows File Search will search the contents of a txt or html file stored on the device.
Shiori also has its own search, which is pretty fast, and searches the contents of the archives as well.
Sounds great, I could use voidtool everything content: search
