[radicality]

Damn, 2k tabs, I’m not familiar with sideberry but with 2k of them are they even right to be called native ‘tabs’ or do they function more like bookmarks?

> computational costs are close to zero

Is that true for normal Firefox tabs (I usually use chrome/safari) ? Wouldn’t each one still use up some memory, keep any background tasks running etc. If some tab starts playing audio how do you even find it?

[hs86]

(Not OP) Sidebery is half tab manager, half session manager. It stays in the sidebar, and if I collapse parts of my tree, I have set it to unload those folded tabs after 60 minutes. There is also an option to hide those folded tabs from the native tab bar.

Sidebery, Tree Style Tabs, and Tabs Outliner (for Chrome) all go beyond just adding a linear/flat vertical tab bar to your browser. They preserve a nested hierarchy for child tabs and allow you to restore the entire tree (or just parts of it) on another device, which is super handy if you often switch between desktop, laptop, etc.

[ziddoap]

>Wouldn’t each one still use up some memory

Firefox unloads tabs that haven't recently been used, or as memory approaches system limits. You can also manually unload your least-recently-used loaded tab.

[seltzered_]

Yes, but in practice I've experienced Firefox (at least under linux) getting killed by the OS when RAM runs low. I recently lost some low-priority reading projects after I couldn't recover the tab sets (they were opened months ago, so hard to dig back through history)

I've found myself using Sidebery and the manual 'unload' tab option quite a bit.

[ksec]

Interesting, because out of all the three browser Firefox should be the best at memory management, unloading tabs along with Sessions recovery.

But I have only ever used it on Windows and Mac. So no idea about Linux. You can do About:memory to check out which tabs are using more memory as well as manual memory compact.

Firefox also allows unlimited History, unlike Chrome which I believe you cant even have history for more than 90 days.

[Izkata]

There is a memory problem on Firefox I only found out about a few months ago when it started happening to me after an upgrade, "ghost windows" that use memory and never get deallocated. Restarting Firefox is the only way to clear them.

[chupasaurus]

FF memory management on Linux is usually outpaced by oom_killer.

[seba_dos1]

Not my experience at all with 16 GB RAM. Perhaps a configuration issue? zswap and mglru do their job well here and the only issue with reaching tens of thousands open tabs in Firefox is that it tends to become noticeably slower at that point.

[chupasaurus]

Firefox with any number of open tabs is stable on memory usage because it has a target budget for it, most of the oom situations come either from external processes or a spike from FF's own.

[m4rtink]

I suggest using the session manager extension & having it do periodic snapshots.

[seltzered_]

Haven't heard of that one, thanks!

[m4rtink]

Its supper useful if you really want to make sure not to loose your session, as its serializes everything into files, which you can then even backup somewhere if you want. :)

[dredmorbius]

Not sufficiently in my experience.

Is this a user setting / tunable for aggressiveness?

[pxc]

There are various extensions that use the native "discard" API that is enabled by default, but give you more knobs to tweak. If you search for "discard tab" in the add-ons store, you'll find a bunch.

I use this one: https://webextension.org/listing/tab-discard.html

[PurpleRamen]

> Damn, 2k tabs, I’m not familiar with sideberry but with 2k of them are they even right to be called native ‘tabs’ or do they function more like bookmarks?

Sidebery offers a hierarchy of tabs, supports group-tabs inside the hierarchy and also has panels, which are basically groups outside/parallel to the hierarchy. With this, you can have very diversified organization-tools.

I also oscillate between 1k to 3k tabs, and I see them more as a process-state. I use tabs for my working-memory, and bookmarks for permanent memory. So any projects, I organize into groups, for every area I have a panel where I collect the corresponding groups. And if the project is over, I close them.

With bookmarks on the other side, I collect links to websites I might visit at some random time, but not necessarily because of a specific project, or with multiple projects. For example, I have bookmarks for my bank, my provider, video-sites (Youtube, Netflix...), Social Media, but also resources like Wikipedia, or self-hosted apps, etc. Those are links I never want to delete, unless the service itself shuts down, or I switch to a different one. So in that sense, they are "stateless".

[PaulDavisThe1st]

The tabs don't get loaded until I revisit them after restarting firefox.

So 90%+ of the tabs are just bookmarks really.

[OneDeuxTriSeiGo]

Well not exactly. Tab suspenders (at least the ones I use) dump the current DOM state, etc to disk so when you reload the tab, it reloads it in mostly the same state it was in when you left it. Of course some pages don't like that and force a full refresh but generally I find when I get a tab reload on a documentation page when it loads back up I end up at roughly the same part of the page I was on when I left off.

[SAI_Peregrinus]

That's a big reason why I prefer tabs to bookmarks. Unloaded tabs have their state saved, bookmarks don't.

[mixmastamyk]

Don’t believe that continues through a restart by default.

[OneDeuxTriSeiGo]

It seems to work across restarts from what I can tell. I just tried to verify it.

I have a tab group in Simple Tab Groups for a perl project I've been working on. The group is basically just a bunch of perl docs (metacpan, etc). I haven't touched the project or the group in a few weeks and I've in that time restarted both FF and my PC several times as well as having updated my FF install several times.

I just switched to that tab group and opened up a random cpan docs tab and it loaded it back in half way down the page. The scroll moved a little bit (only a few lines of text worth of scroll) but that was it.

Of course this doesn't work consistently for all pages. I know for a fact that social apps like bluesky don't tolerate suspends all that well and force a reload but most "vanilla" web pages like docs sites tolerate suspends quite well.

[mixmastamyk]

Sorry, "by default" I was trying to point to default firefox behavior. Not what an extension does.

[riquito]

They don't consume anything, at my peak I closed 2736 tabs (I have a photo to commemorate). Firefox somehow didn't care

[malfist]

If you don't mind to share it, I'd love to see it. I want to prove to my coworkers I've not got a problem!