[benedikt]

> well-managed environment (ie one that has non-rudimentary window management and a browser/extension that handles idle tabs with negligible ongoing resource use).

Can you elaborate on this? Which extensions are you talking about?

I also rack up hundreds of tabs and my browser is often the main resource hog for me. I’ll often have to kill -9 it to force it to start with “oops we crashed, here are your previous tabs in an unloaded state”, but it sounds like you have a better way of doing this

[wutbrodo]

I currently use the Great Suspender on Chrome, which will suspend a tab that's been open for a while. The suspended tab just shows a Great Suspender icon, so it takes up ~0 RAM. I've whitelisted certain domains and sites (eg Messenger apps).

I know there are a ton of extensions aimed at this problem, including OneTab (which will collapse many tabs into a single page of links), but TGS works the best for my workflow.

I also use Session Buddy to periodically backup my current window/tab state, which I find more reliable and powerful than the default tab-restore functionality.

[herewulf]

DANGER, Will Robinson!

I could really use something like the Great Suspender. However, looking into it, I found quite a bit of controversy surrounding its new (since June) "maintainer". This issue sums it up well: "SECURITY: New maintainer is probably malicious"[1]

Here is the gist of it:

> Using the chrome web store version of this extension, without disabling tracking, will execute code from an untrusted third-party on your computer, with the power to modify any and all websites that you see.

So, installing from the Chrome Web Store is a complete no-go.

One can still install the extension from GitHub, but with Chrome constantly evolving and the now, unmaintained-on-GitHub extension having known issues with losing all your tabs (to which there are workarounds), I'm very wary of using this extension.

[1]: https://github.com/greatsuspender/thegreatsuspender/issues/1...

[wutbrodo]

Thank you for the heads-up! The way extension stores work always made me a little uneasy about using smaller ones like this.

Edit: haha, someone seems to have seen your comment and made a post that made it to the Frontpage of HN

[herewulf]

You're welcome! Yes, it's quite problematic and there are numerous ways malicious code can abuse the sandboxed environment.

That's great news about that article! Thanks for pointing that out.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25622015

[fuzxi]

The Firefox extension "Auto Tab Discard" is what you're looking for. Not sure about equivalents for other browsers.