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.
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.
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.