[SkyMarshal]

When it completely bogs down the browser so that opening a new window stakes 5s and other normal actions are extremely laggy, no other features matter. This can happen even on my 64GB workstation when Firefox hasn’t consumed all the available memory yet. Performance is a feature.

(That said I continue to use Firefox exclusively b/c 1) Firefox is really good now, 2) best addon/extension support, 3) Google’s leadership is Evil now, and 4) I don’t want a rendering engine monoculture).

[aliceryhl]

It's weird, I keep seeing people complain about the memory usage and it being slow, but I've literally never experienced any of these kinds of issues, and I have 80 tabs open right now. Are you using some weird plugin or what?

[eitland]

It is dependent on machine, OS and what plugins are installed.

I'm fairly certain I used to have hundreds of tabs open back in the old Firefox with even less lag than I see today.

[pbhjpbhj]

I'm pretty sure it depends a lot on profile cruft too.

[SkyMarshal]

I do have a bunch of plugins installed, is there any way to profile them and see if any of them are the culprit? (Ubuntu 18.04)

[webmobdev]

That's understandable. But what exactly is the thought process in having so many tabs (10+) open in the first place?

[newscracker]

Having multiple tabs (or "too many tabs") is a neat and very visible way to keep track of what's to be read and processed. It does result in keeping things for far too long sometimes, but there is no better interface that surfaces all the different sites/URLs to be processed. It's very useful when you're troubleshooting or researching something (could be some tech stuff in general, some software development/debugging stuff or anything else you're researching).

[webmobdev]

Ok, using browser tabs as "bookmarks".

I used to do something similar too with Opera (the original one with Presto engine) but with their "Speed Dial" feature. I miss Presto Opera - it was light-weight, fast and wasn't bogged down by even with 100's of open tabs and had fantastic browser features that nearly all their competitors copied.

[newscracker]

It's actually way better than bookmarks because it stores the content in a quickly accessible way (unless the tab has been unloaded manually or through another extension), and it also stores history (you can go back and forward in each of those tabs). Bookmarks and "Speed Dial" (which is available on Firefox) do not support tab history. I do not know how Opera's Speed Dial worked though.

[webmobdev]

> It's actually way better than bookmarks because it stores the content in a quickly accessible way

I am skeptical about this part. If you tag your bookmark's, it then becomes easy to look it up right from the address bar by just typing a tag name. That is actually much easier and faster than searching through 100's or 1000's of tabs.

> ... and it also stores history

That's a very good point that I hadn't considered.

[SkyMarshal]

I used to do the exact same with Presto Opera, still my favorite browser UI of all time. MDI > tabs. Wish modern browsers would understand that.

[duhi88]

"read it later" window, sites for research, Slack in the browser, podcasts or music in the background, etc.

I usually don't close my research tabs until I've completed the task I was working on. Not having to worry about memory means I don't have to worry about finding useful webpages again.

[webmobdev]

Ok, looks like you all prefer to use the tabs as bookmarks!

If I have too many tabs open, I just bookmark and tag the site I still may want to want peruse later, and close the tab.

[barrkel]

Inbox, rather than bookmarks. Bookmarks suggest repeated visits; an open tab is something to be visited at least once, but not known to be worth keeping a link to.

[SkyMarshal]

Open tabs = bookmarks for unread stuff, basically. Once I’m done, optionally bookmark it if necessary and close the tab.

The problem with bookmarks is my list of bookmarks eventually grows even larger than my open tabs, far larger, and stuff just gets lost in there. Once out of site, then out of mind. Leaving it open in a tab I’m more likely to go back and read it when I have time.

[SAI_Peregrinus]

Bookmarks discard information (history, non-url parameters, parent tab, etc). Often that information is important!

[paulryanrogers]

For me it was a read-later queue that I rarely ever used. Now after purging it more often I don't need things like vertical tabs as much.

[tofflos]

I can’t imagine getting by with so few. My tab counter extension is currently showing 1053.

[aliceryhl]

It's an easy way to manage things I want to go back to at some point in the future.

[eitland]

Seeing things in context.

Multi tasking (each task can easily have a good number of tasks open)

[vsareto]

If people are so concerned about tab performance, why not use the history pane?