[mapcars]

>400 tabs >like gMail and two copies of Slack, a gDocs or two, sometimes the godawful work LMS. >under 10% CPU, under 2GB of RAM

Any proofs? Stock firefox can't go further than 100 tabs, and you can't do literally anything else on your computer at that time.

[bzbarsky]

> Stock firefox can't go further than 100 tabs

about:tabs (see https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-stats/ ) is showing me "151 tabs" and "57 tabs have been loaded" for my current session. The other 90-some I haven't looked at this session, so they're left unloaded. I can post a screenshot, but I could fake that just as easily as I could fake my claims above, so it's not any more "proof".

I'm certainly doing other things right now (e.g. compiling).

It _really_ depends on what you have in your 100 tabs. If you have 100 copies of gmail, you're more likely to have a bad time than if you have 100 sane pages. ;)

[errnoh]

I have to one up this one.

After being burned by incompatible bookmark formats years ago (I used to keep everything in bookmarks that were tagged within firefox) I ended up with a habit that whenever I have something that I want to read (or refer to) later I leave it open in a tab.

Only browser that could handle this habit was indeed Firefox, running on Windows 7. How it usually went down was that whenever I hit 1000 tabs I reserved some time to read what was worth reading and close tabs that weren't interesting anymore, until I was down to about 200-500. I didn't use addons much, I remember only having vertical tab list, one of the (ad)blockers and an addon that displayed current tab count below the tab list.

That setup had 8GB of RAM, and I didn't have problems playing games without closing the browser. IIRC it usually reserved around 2-4GB. When I installed Windows 10 on the same machine the browser had 1370 tabs open. I know I still have the sessionstore.js backup somewhere, but I did start from 0 again with the new install.

I'm quite sure that some Mozilla people have noticed my crash reports every now and then :) (though mostly the browser was running fine without problems)

I've since started to use things like Google Keep and Stash to keep the tab count down a bit. Browser that I'm currently on has 229 tabs open, mostly temporary, work related things.

[newscracker]

> Stock firefox can't go further than 100 tabs, and you can't do literally anything else on your computer at that time.

Perhaps it's because of what else is running on your system and your system's hardware and OS. I regularly use Firefox with a few hundred tabs open across a couple of windows. On Windows, I find that if I have IE or Edge or Chrome running, each with a few tabs, most of my RAM just goes to them. I also hibernate my system and restart it only once every few weeks.

I use several extensions with Firefox too:

- uBlock Origin (block ads)

- Privacy Badger (tracking blocker)

- Perspectives (distributed certificate checks and better error handling)

- HTTPS Everywhere (default to https on sites and avoid plain http)

- Self-Destructing Cookies (self-destruct cookies for a tab after closing it)

- Tab Mix Plus (better tab management)

- Session Manager (better session management between restarts)

- Tree Style Tab (hierarchical tab list management)

- TooManyTabs (almost self-explanatory)

- Lazarus (save form data to restore or reuse)

- Link Alert (so I know if a link is a file or an internal site link or external site link or a popup and can then decide if I want to click it)

- FoxyProxy (switch proxies easily)

- Foxclocks (handy clocks in different times zones)

- DownThemAll (easier downloads of multiple items, which I need occasionally)

- and many more

Although I experience slow starts and long shutdowns, in general, and in comparison, the browser is not RAM hungry compared to opening just a couple of tabs on Internet Explorer/Edge or about ten tabs or so in Chrome (with fewer extensions than above in Chrome). On OS X/macOS though, Firefox seems more RAM hungry, is a bit more sluggish and consumes more energy than Safari.

Shutting down the browser and opening it again will also help since Firefox by default does not load tabs until they get the focus (this "load tabs on demand" behavior has been around for quite sometime). It will load some stuff from the cache though. One more thing you can try is create a new profile (take care to get bookmarks from the old one) and see if that avoids any problems with extensions or other cruft in the older profile.

[jholman]

> Any proofs?

Ha ha, what proof would satisfy you, where my word does not, O doubting Thomas? If I was going to lie to you on HN, I'd also be able to fake a screenshot. Maybe you'd like administrator access to my machine, so you can satisfy your smug certainty of what is not possible?

I haven't had my FF (stock plus a few plugins) under 300 tabs in months. It doesn't stop me from playing AAA titles, max settings at high resolution, at 30-60 fps. Sometimes while running a VM (because Windows is a gaming OS, not a work OS). I only mention that to disabuse you of the claim that...

> you can't do literally anything else on your computer at that time

I assure you, I can.

[hashhar]

I have stock on 153 tabs with two processes each using 670MB of memory (1.3 GB total) and CPU is at a comfortable 1.5% + 0.9% (2.4%).

EDIT: Oh, I do have 22 extensions installed.

[1]: http://i.imgur.com/Epkfydj.png

[sebtoast]

My Firefox goes higher than 100 tabs, I've actually installed an add-on called Max Tabs to limit it to 100 tabs.

[pfisch]

That is not my experience. Maybe the mac version isn't so great?