[quesera]

This is wrong.

My daily-driver M2 16GB has been up for 54 days, running three web browsers simultaneously (all Firefox, which does help, about 30K tabs across them), plus a medium-sized Rails app and postgres, iTerm2 and tmux (about 38 panes), and the Slack (Electron!) app.

Current RAM usage is 6.14GB.

Things change when I run local LLMs or VMs or Xcode, of course.

[darkstar999]

How can 30k tabs even be useful? What are you doing? That is ridiculous.

[kdheiwns]

There's a subset of people that likes collecting tabs and thinks it's some impressive measure and I've encountered them more and more recently, I guess as some attempt to brag that their computer can handle something? It's like saying you have 30000 pieces of junk mail in your living room. It's just sloppy.

30000 tabs is about 10x as many pages as there are in the entire Harry Potter series. Nobody remembers all pages in those series. Nobody remembers why they have 3000 tabs, much less 30000.

[ewoodrich]

It’s also a pretty useless metric since modern browsers suspend stale tabs aggressively these days.

[quesera]

No need to be obnoxious.

I noted the tab count because it's a weak measurement of memory requirements, which is directly relevant to the topic at hand.

I keep tabs because they're better in most ways than bookmarks. I'd be happy to expound on that opinion, but I suspect you're unreceptive.

FWIW, Firefox with Sidebery can handle more tabs than you or I need. Someday I'll clean them out, maybe, but I don't need to. Thanks to Mozilla, Apple, and Sidebery.

[jombib]

How do you use firefox? Once I get to the amount of tabs that I have to scroll through them I find it pretty necessary to close tabs otherwise the duplicates get out of hand

[quesera]

The Sidebery extension is the key, for me. Tabs are vertical, hierarchical, and searchable.

I also set the color of specific tabs (another Sidebery feature) that have some special returnability reason. I don't love the color options, nor the default ordering (would prefer the more traditional color spectrum order (red-blue or inverse) so that I could infer the tag/priority/etc from the color, but I only use a few colors and it's fine.

I don't have a problem with duplicates. If it's a page/app that I return to often, I know that and just jump to it. I'm sure I have some dupes hiding in there though. NBD.

[quesera]

I use tabs as temporary bookmarks. It's still a lot, sure, but it comes at no cost.

The browser with the highest tab count is the one I use for HN. 21708 right now. The oldest tab is about 3 years old, which reflects the last time I bothered to clean them up.

It's also a measurement of how many HN articles I read. About 20 per day, I guess. I don't usually close HN tabs when I'm "done" with them. I can't defend that practice, really. In the short-term, I might reload to see more comments. In the longer-term, there are some that I will want to revisit. Actually, for particularly relevant/useful comments, I reopen them in new child tabs, so that they're easy to find and see responses to. This inflates my overall count.

Anyway, older tabs scroll off my sidebar viewport and I can mostly forget about them, but I don't want to simply close them all. Obviously the vast majority are closeable, but again, keeping them around has zero cost.

Someday I'll winnow them and sweep the remainder into (real) bookmarks. Or maybe I won't -- it makes little difference, as it turns out.

[alpaca128]

I am "only" ranging around 800-2000 tabs and 95% of them are practically bookmarks that aren't hidden in some menu but visible in the same visual context as everything else, which feels more natural to me. They're not loaded in RAM anyway.

The brain is amazing at remembering the rough location where I have tabs of a specific site/topic, so I just switch to the right window and scroll for a few seconds. Only works with a vertical tab bar though. It's not the most optimal solution but the best that actually exists and works smoothly.