How many tabs do you consider to be too many tabs? Most of the time I open up to 10 tabs, and Firefox is performing fine. But I have also seen people opening 40 tabs.
At home I have like 60+ tabs open. And at work I have > 100. Firefox is pretty rock solid now with many tabs on windows. Chrome can’t cope with that. Or it couldn’t a year ago when I switched to Firefox. The tabs are mostly blogs and things I’m slowly reading or such. I just open more than I close :(
I sometimes have hundreds of tabs open (Firefox on Windows), and a feature that I'll leverage if things start chugging is that, upon starting, Firefox will only load the contents of a tab if you put focus on the tab. So if I open a ludicrous number of tabs, I can quickly restart Firefox (just timed it; took six seconds) and all the tabs but the one that last had focus will be unloaded. I believe they're working on making this more automatic by actively unloading tabs if certain criteria have been met, but no convenient heuristic here is ever going to be as outright effective as this. As a tab addict, I can live with it. :P
I'm currently over 1000 tabs in Firefox. Most aren't loaded in memory. I know this is terrible, one of these days I need to KonMari my tabs and start using bookmarks again. Thankfully I'm not a hoarder of non-digital goods.
Either way, I only get bad performance from a few tabs at a time, usually a Fandom wikia or the pinned Gmail tabs. The first can be solved with a few seconds on about:performance, and the second well... after reading this article and Gorhill's reply, I opened a Fastmail account. We'll see how it goes. But if they're really planning to put all users at risk with an automatic update, Google has finally crossed the evil line.
I sometimes creep above the 1000 mark as well. At 250 right now. I recommend the tabstats extension; it'll especially help when you discover that you've opened the same url in 12 tabs, which is easy to do when the tab count gets that high.
I also recommend periodically declaring tab bankruptcy. It feels so light and clean! For a little while, at least.
You, sir, are a gentleman and a scholar. I'm under 1000 now! (ok... 999) Deduplication of tabs is pretty useful for the Jira issues (I usually follow links from Slack). If only Jira pages would load faster.
Tab bankruptcy scares me. It's hard to know how much of it is an action I still need to take. Some of it is research I don't want have to find again, but I need to take the time to bookmark.
My firefox session is persistent (tab are restored when I open firefox again). Apparently, I'm around 500 right now, which is a bit above average for me (I usually stay around 300).
Firefox's lazy loading is very good, which means I only have 10 to 100 tabs that are actually loaded. Firefox is still fast in these conditions. Since I use tree-style-tabs, most of the tabs are neatly sorted in trees by topic.
The fact that people do this should not be viewed as a personal failing on their part. This should be seen as an indictment against bookmark UIs. If bookmarks were friendly to use, people would use them instead of tabs.
Ive never gotten anywhere near 500, but if a legitimate number of users are needing 500 tabs open that's a perfectly reasonable use case for a browser that fails to support it.
It's kind of like saying "oh no, people are trying to do x with our platform but it's not built for that..." Well, now enough people are doing this, so it's time to change up your UI / performance.
And performance (iMavc v.17 Retina) is usually accetable, at least initially. Somewhere between a few hours to days in, ahard kill becomes necessary.
But; On Android or Linux, both older machines, even with just a tab or two open, within recent weeks, performance has been abysmal. Several other options (console browsers, Dillo, Konqueror, Surf) are at least responsive for very light browsing.
I've wiped Chrome and Chromium from Mac and Linux. That's not possible on Android, and though I'd much prefer avoiding it, I'm typing this on Chrome/Android.
(The question of why I've got so many tabs open, or how to manage/adjudicate them, is ... a longer post. TL;DR: tab management user state management, workflow, and ergonomics all suck.
And Chrome is far worse about this than Firefox.)
It is absurd to suggest that anyone needs more than a few dozen tabs. Once you get to the point where you're leaving tabs open for more than a couple of days, you should recognise that you're misusing tabs as a brittle form of bookmarking.
(In my opinion, Firefox and others could solve this by blurring the lines between bookmarks and tabs with some clever UI.)
More like 40. I usually try to run < 10, but sometimes it gets out of hand...I tend to have multiple "tasks" of research going on at the same time. Like if I start researching at home at night I'll sometimes leave it open through a whole workday until I can return to it at night. Then multiple things at work, etc. So yeah...probably my browsing habits that may need to change.
You should try the Tree Style Tabs add-on for Firefox. You may need to tweak some of the settings a bit, but once you experience the power of this extension I guarantee you really won’t ever go back to Chrome.