Firefox user loses 7,470 opened tabs saved over two years after they can’t restore browsing session
Losing two years' worth of browsing tabs is no laughing matter.
cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/12299180
who does that?!
How can it be in any way useful to keep 7000 open tabs?
Has she not heard of bookmarks?
I am thoroughly confused
The article explains that she likes to look at tabs in the past as a reminder of something she was interested in.
It’s sort of a snapshot in time. I get it. But hell no I’m closing tabs.
You can bookmark a whole window full of tabs all into a single bookmark folder. It's called "bookmark all tabs" or something like that. Then later you can open all of them again into a new window using a single button again.
I know the average person isn't tech savvy, but this loss is almost entirely on themself. If you have 7000 tabs open and it's important to you that they stay saved, then it's on you to simply ASK someone if keeping them open is an ok way to do it
There's a tool I use at work for administrating Apple devices and it opens about four tabs for every profile you look at. You can quickly stack up to about 50 tabs. Utterly stupid programming.
But I'm not using it I have maybe 12 tabs open at a time.
I have a practical but niche answer to this. This is actually a bit of a wall of text but tldr: Not quite a power-user. Got 1.5k tabs, Bookmarks and Browser history lack proper system and contextual integration, are a poor experience to review, navigate, categorize for me, and many integrations make tabs effortless to work with, group up, and accumulate. Looking a bit into other systems and I can definitely see benefits but what I have works pretty well for me.
I'm not as much of a poweruser but I generally will have between 800 and 1,500 tabs open on my desktop with Floorp which is a Firefox fork with native web app support and a bunch of neat customization features. This is mainly because I find history and bookmarking features to be rather inconvenient to maintain especially for deep internet rabbitholes and complex projects that can have multiple topics or differing levels of priority to reference. Firefox and Floorp allow users to instantly search through their tabs using the search bar and this tends to be very helpful although I also will like to have older versions of websites cached or loaded locally so I can make comparisons, review through collections of tasks and their related segments which I have previously worked on, or see how homepages and different segments of the web have adapted as a whole or personalized for me over time. I can basically have my own pocket of the Internet curated for me which I don't need to go out of my way to find or maintain.
Now something to note is that it's a surprisingly efficient process, Most of the tabs themselves don't need to actually be active in memory with the browser in total generally using less than 8 gigabytes of ram and under 10% of my cpu when active. I have plenty of tab management extensions, Floorp provides a scroll bar at the top for multi-row tabs, Flow Launcher (ridiculously powerful search tool which can be run as a system-wide programmable hotkey.) within Windows has integration both for checking existing tabs and instantly opening new ones. It's pretty slick except when my browser is first rebuilding after a full reboot as that can take around two minutes to complete from disk.
I think the main thing at least for me is just that other resources and tools (Been looking into the raindrop bookmark manager.) might be more efficient for me to learn in the long run but I tend to be working on dozens of projects at once anyways and actively going out of my way to adapt to a new system like that would be counterproductive in the moment where it counts.
Hope this has been a helpful and insightful look into my process. I could probably attach screenshots or video later although I feel like this is sufficient as-is.
Yeah I don't really get it but it seems like it's not that uncommon to have heaps of tabs open. More than 7,000 is obviously exceptional but it checks out - there's a few users like this in mozilla's telemetry.
I think it's basically just concern that you might not be able to find your way back to something you were looking at before. To me that seems irrational but everyone needs to sail their own ship I guess.
I'll say it again - anyone who needs (or let's be honest, thinks they need) hundreds of thousands of open tabs has something wrong with their brain and should probably see a professional about it.
Isn't it just hoarding but in digital space?
I don’t understand people who use a million tabs. Most I’ll have is like ten. And that’s if I’m deep in a problem in a project. I hate clutter
some people visit many different sites, continuously throughout the day, and it doesn't make sense to keep reopening tabs, plus then you forget about it
That is fine, open as many tabs as you want, but don't keep a shitload of tabs open between sessions
Then you're really not doing that much research. I can easily open 20 to 50 tabs for just one project. I'm not defending leaving them open. I've finally started to address the problem by learning how to take notes. I chose Joplin for this.
Autism/ADHD is a bitch for some things and note taking and writing up research has never just "come to me".
I’m autistic as well and having that many tabs open gives me anxiety. I mainly code, and when I find a solution I either bookmark it until I can use it, it I use it and then close it. Maybe not immediately, but I try not to have so many open the broader can’t show them in the tab bar. Because it gets really disorganized after that
That is fine, the issue is not having 500+ tabs open, but having 500+ tabs persistantly open between sessions
ADHD and easier to type a url than open a new tab. People that can maintain a curated tab list.. I wish my brain would allow it.
Once a day I close browsers to make sure there’s not some work item I forgot to hit post on.
I'm going to read it later, really! If I make it a bookmark I'd have to organize it now, which is effort.
Screw all those replies amounting to 'stop having that problem.'
Mozilla has previously bragged about testing how Firefox handles hundreds of tabs. If you feel cramped opening a dozen - my condolences. But get out of our way. We're using all this RAM we paid for.
Is this a new mental illness I haven't heard of?
In an interview with PCMag, Hazel said she keeps all those tabs open because she likes “to scroll back and see clusters of tabs from months ago — it’s like a trip down memory lane on whatever I was doing/learning about/thinking about.” So, when she recovered her 7,000+ tab browsing session, she said, “I feel like a part of me is restored.”
Actually that's kinda cool. I shouldn't be a hater.
But... Firefox has a history feature that would serve her purpose much better?
No it's probably s mental illness or something. If she like the tabs as a memoir thing, she should do what people have done on vacations for decades - take pictures (aka here as screenshots or saved pages).
So not archiving these memories in the way you would determines whether or not it is a mental illness? How is taking photos any mpre or less of a mental illness than leaving the tabs open?
Seems like quite the jump to conclusion to assume it is a mental illness.
Do people not know about browsing history?
Or bookmarks?
Or Notepad, if the links are really that important?
I seem to remember a post on Lemmy from a user asking about how to keep a browser responsive with about 10,000 tabs open so it's certainly a usage pattern for some.
What’s the point tho? It’s not like you’re actively using the 10k tabs.
It’s an impossible amount of tabs to manage so the only explanation is they are opened, looked at once, and then thrown into an abyss for another tab to be opened in a continuous cycle.
The post is here: https://lemmy.ml/post/16965449
In short, they wanted to keep the tabs bookmarked but didn't like working with the bookmarks implementations in conventional browsers
Firefox is not the right Tool for the job. And so many Tabs open? That doesn't make sense in any concievable way.
That just means they haven't updated Firefox in years.
What would be the right tool for the job of keeping 7k tabs open?
Did you know that Firefox has this cool new option (spoiler: it's not new), that lets you bookmark websites into folders and when you click on that folder from your toolbar it says "Open All in Tabs" at the bottom of the list. BAM! Tabs restored.
You could also tie this folder and command into a Terminal command in Linux, so you could just type "psychosis" and it will open Firefox with 7,470 tabs open if you'd like.
I'm sure this will cause your laptop to explode, but that's a downstream issue.
How is that person's Firefox not crashing with that many tabs opening. These people are knob heads!
BROWSING HISTORY, nuff said lmao
How did they get a reporter into my house
Good.
This instance demonstrates Firefox’s memory management capabilities, which put unused tabs to sleep to save memory via Tab Unloading. Mozilla released this feature with Firefox 93 in October 2021
This has been a thing since at least 2012.
And there's literally dedicated extensions to tracking open tabs for you
if you want to keep something forever, you gotta make backups
Just screenshot your tabs. 😇
Tab Stash people, its the perfect extension for tab hoarders like me. It saves and closes all your opened tabs as bookmarks with a single click, and gives you a neat view of everything you saved.
Meanwhile there's me who wipes his cache and data after every browser session...
Get some help.
When a confessed degenerate says that, you have a problem.
I've been betrayed early enough and often enough to take monthly backups of my profile and export tab lists as text files. Just in case.
All of you going 'well that's not my use case' don't have to get it, you just have to shut up and let us do our thing. Yours is the same aggravating attitude as 'so what if the computer reboots to forcibly update?' Listen: go to whatever physical space you've carefully organized, dump all that shit onto the floor, and then pick it back up piece by piece to make it right again. How you feel doing that is how we feel several times a month.
How you feel doing that is how we feel several times a month.
Because you're doing something dumb. That's really all there is to it.
My dad does this, he allways restores his tabs and hardly ever use bookmarks.
I had to help him migrate this shitshow to his new computer, and whenever it breaks he gets really upset.
He likes being able to have access to the history of every tab.
I may be an IT guy but I could not stand doing this.
Is it this person?
Locking this post. Pretty sure everything that's needed to be said has been said so threads are devolving.
AKA User was so stupid, he or she should better not use a computer in the first place.
It's not stupid if it works (also user is satisfied). But it's just another bug that can wipe user data, so it better gets fixed.
I usually save neither the browsing history neither the opened tabs. I add interesting pages in bookmarks, but rarely check them again.
Somebody teach the new boys what a bookmark is pls.
Should make that a feature
Should have used OneTab
How do you even navigate that many tabs?
People can keep 5-10 things in their short term memory. Anything beyond that you can't feasibly multitask with so it should be a bookmark instead of a tab.
Maybe browsers should merge the two functions. (We already have pinned tabs too)
You can search through your open tabs by typing % followed by space in the search bar. I often do that since I tend to reference a lot of documentation/merge requests/admin interfaces/etc. and end up with quite a few tabs in a working session (usually clear them out the next day). Nowhere near 7000, though. Maybe 50.
Been there, done that. 😓
(Though a couple times I was able to recover them or a sufficiently close session.)
Tab session manager that difficult to install? 😮💨
There are some judgmental assholes here. Worse than the political communities.
🎻
Frankly I think even the people with 25+ tabs open have a problem.
I can easily do that in a day of work because I often have to reference documentation from many different sources.
I'll probably have 1-3 tabs for jira boards/tickets, a couple for gitlab merge requests, at least a few for the documentation of different third-party libraries I'm using, a few confluence pages, a few for different specs, 1-2 for Figma designs, a handful for different admin panels I need access to, a couple production dashboards/logs, in addition to whatever searching I need to do. I usually clear them out at the start of the next day, but they can add up pretty quickly.
It's amazing how many people think having tons of tabs is insane. How about all browsers start limiting how many tabs can be opened at a time (to accommodate proper, sane usage rules)?
Firefox Focus on Android is there and it doesn't have a button to add a new tab. You can only create one by clicking a link from those already existing. Also, just four shortcuts for some reason and no bookmarks.
It's a great default browser to open random links from your apps: no cookies, no logins, always a private tab experience. But when you need a bit more (like translating a word in an article you are reading) it's restricted. Because Moz decided that's the way it should be.
Work in IT and have many different tickets and projects. 25 is nothing.
It's really not a big deal if you use tab groups or similar. Not all are loaded at all times but ephemeral enough that i wouldn't want to save down to bookmarks.
And that problem is called "ADHD"
