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.

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.

Maybe don’t have a THOUSAND tabs

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?

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.

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?

i use auto tab discard and it works great

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.

Install Onetab

Have you tried bookmarking things instead of leaving them open as tabs?

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.

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: selecting Bookmarks Toolbar/merge/ for a panel named panel1 would save the tabs under Bookmarks 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 select Restore 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.

The solution is to see a psychotherapist because dude is there something strange happening in your brain and it really needs fixing.

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.

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.