I rely on open tabs. Firefox' search bar helpfully orders its results by priority: tab-search results first, browser history second, and search-engine results third. It makes a convenient workflow for re-discovering things I've already found before. I'm too lazy to close tabs, since new ones proliferate a lot faster than I can keep up. And if I dedicate time to clearing out old tabs, like a garbage-collection sweep, I waste far too much time because I get sidetracked by all the "read later" stuff I'd forgotten about.
When it goes up to several thousand open tabs, Firefox starts lagging, so I switch to a fresh browser profile.
Once, Hacker News IP-banned me because Firefox crashed, and the post-restart recovery tried to load several hundred HN tabs at the same time. Firefox no longer does this; restored tabs are loaded lazily, when they become foreground tabs.
when firefox started lagging because there were to many open tabs, i took advantage of that lazy loading feature and restarted the browser, causing all tabs except the active ones to remain unloaded.
now i installed an extension that suspends tabs that are not visited for a while. that keeps active tabs to a few dozen, so i never have to restart any more because of that.
apparently i have more than 3700 tabs (spread over a dozen windows, each window for a somewhat defined activity, which should make cleaning out a bit easier, since tabs are related, although i would still have to take some time off to clean through all off them).
> the post-restart recovery tried to load several hundred HN tabs at the same time. Firefox no longer does this; restored tabs are loaded lazily, when they become foreground tabs.
I wonder if this is the problem with Safari on Mac. There is some Critical Number of Tabs, beyond which it refuses to stop the beachball. I have to go into Safari on iOS to delete tabs from the Mac.
When it goes up to several thousand open tabs, Firefox starts lagging, so I switch to a fresh browser profile.
Once, Hacker News IP-banned me because Firefox crashed, and the post-restart recovery tried to load several hundred HN tabs at the same time. Firefox no longer does this; restored tabs are loaded lazily, when they become foreground tabs.