How can I quickly "unclog" firefox when it runs out of memory (with 1000/2000 tabs)

Maybe don’t have a THOUSAND tabs

You're not likely going to get any real help since you're insisting on using the browser in an extreme and unconventional way. Your little world is just one browser/OS crash from losing all of those tabs.

I'm not going to tell you that you're managing your information wrong. I would physically die if I had ever more than 20 tabs (my ADHD couldn't handle it).

But I think you might be using the wrong tool. A browser (like Firefox) is not really designed as an information manager. It's primary purpose is navigating and visualizing web pages. So when you talk about "a few megabytes of text and images" thats not what your browser sees. Your browser handles more than just the text and images. It also handles fetching and prefetching, a browser history for every tab, a JS context and much much more.

What you want is some kind of personalized archiving system that processes websites into machine processable (ie searchable) structures. Firefox is not that. Maybe data hoarder communities will have the answers you seek.

The solution is to see a psychotherapist because dude is there something strange happening in your brain and it really needs fixing.

If you need quick access to this many pages I suggest organizing bookmarks. As this is what they are meant for. Tabs are meant for active pages you are working with. So anytime you get that many tabs with any browser its gonna run like shit.

Have you tried bookmarking things instead of leaving them open as tabs?

If you have over 1000 tabs... learn how to use bookmarks instead. I don't understand how you think 1000+ tabs is a feasible way of organizing.

geez, just press Ctrl+W when you're done with a tab, or if the tab is older than a couple hours

I don't understand why some are so attached to tabs. Search your history if you need it again.

Rather than try and force Firefox to deal with thousands of tabs, it’d be easier to use an add-on like SingleFile to download the tabs as self-contained HTML files. After that, you can search their contents using free tools like Agent Ransack or DocFetcher.

If you prefer to keep the data in your browser, then how about using a service like Instapaper that lets you save pages for reading/referencing later as well as search their contents?

Why do you have so many tabs open?

A tab suspender extension might help some, but there's only so much you can do to minimize the impact of thousand(s) of tabs. Cleaning out old tabs more frequently is probably a better habit.

I've read this entire thread like three times and watched all the videos you've posted, and I still don't understand your workflow at all.

If searching bookmarks/history is harder than using Google to just find the thing you want to get back to, why do you need to keep the things you want to get back to open rather than just using Google to find the page again later? Or when you want to get back to something you (think you?) have left open, do you find it just by scrolling through all your tabs until a title/favicon looks like what you're looking for?

Your last paragraph makes it seem like maybe you want to keep the tabs open so if the page/content gets deleted off of the server, you don't lose it. Is that correct? I'd imagine that doesn't always accomplish that, though, right? (Particularly for something like YouTube.) If that's a significant part of why you keep the tabs open, though, maybe that bit at least is a good question for a data hoarder community.

I haven't been able to find any "discard all tabs" addon for Firefox by Googling. And I can't guess what exactly it does. (Does it save tab states to disk and suspend - but also leave open - all tabs or something?) Are you sure that's the name of the addon you're using?

1000 tabs? What for?

I’m sorry I don’t have an answer

I'm really curious about the workflow you have that needs that many tabs. How does the History and Bookmark functions fall short of what you need?

I am not sure what you’re working on but from your answers I’ve read you seems to need access to a lot of information with a few keystrokes, like searching for a keyword or tag.

In my opinion you are using the wrong tool for that. Ditch the browser and learn about the Zettelkasten way of working. It is really powerful for plenty of applications like science, studies, dev, or even the way I use it, author repository of ideas/concepts/stuff I need when writing a book.

You can do that with several software but I like obsidian for that (and because of all its plugins you could probably find something to automatically copy webpage content)

On the downside side :

• You’ll have to learn Zettelkasten, Obsidian etc
• Obviously do the work of writing (or copy pasting) your vault.

But on the plus size :

• You’ll have all the information you need at your fingertips, searchable with keywords, tags, associations etc.
• Everything is basic text MD files so it will still be readable by any text editor or terminal in the next century.
• You can have images, run code, do some mathlib, jupyter etc inside.
• Text is light, easy to store, backup and retrieve.
• If you do good enough you can have a satisfying visual representation of your new brain, kinda mindmap (which is also possible)

Why don't you just open less tabs? Just close the browser when you are done using it

The solution to write your own application that does what you want because your workflow is not a use case that browsers are designed for. It's not bad to wish for features but your workflow is never going to be catered for in a browser and it's both unreasonable and unrealistic to expect otherwise - hence you need to do it yourself.

If you can't or don't know how to do that yourself, I suggest you listen to the advice everyone else is giving you. Organisation does require ongoing work and given your comments it will likely require a lot of upfront effort to change your browser hygiene habits but once you are more organised it becomes a lot easier and a lot less work to stay on top of things.

It's none of my business but I wonder why you feel it's so important to open 500+ tabs just to buy something small online. Doing research and being informed is good but it seems disproportionate and perhaps talking to a professional might help you with that.

I have no direct solution to you exact problem but your usage of tabs sounds like a nightmare.

A while back I found Omnivore which works like a charm if you want to "freeze" the contents of a website to read them later. You can also self host it if you like.

I took it a step further because I love Obsidian as personal knowledge management and I want to have everything in one place. There's a plugin to sync all your saved pages from Omnivore to Obsidian. In the template for it I then have my marked highlights, the links to the version in Omnivore and the original URL and also the whole content. So I have all of that in markdown which is really nice to work with.

Maybe that's a solution you too could be happy with.

From a practical standpoint, it's hard to imagine what you could possibly be doing where it's beneficial to have a thousand tabs open.

If I'm writing a research paper, I might want 5 or 10 tabs open at a given time. Let's say I'm a little chaotic so I get up to 20. And then limitations on my working memory kick in, and having any more open tabs actually makes me worse off.

But then let's suppose it's a thesis that's 50 pages long. So I might be relying on 40 or 50 references. I'm not relying on them all at the same time, right? So I definitely don't want to keep those tabs open all at the same time.

What I could do, and what you could consider, is either bookmarking things or using archive.org to make a backup of the pages.

In one of the other comments you mentioned Facebook. That has me a little concerned again with your objectives. If it's something private on Facebook that can't be recovered later, and you need something reliable, then you have no choice but to do long screenshots or scrolling videos. If it's not reliable, then why do you care so much to keep the window open? Just close the window, remember whatever you remember, and move on with your life.

Whatever you do, here's a few rules of thumb... Your web browser is not an archiving tool. Printing to PDF is one way to archive things. There are other ways to archive things too. You don't actually need to archive as much as you might think you need to archive. Most of the things that we think might be important now actually won't be useful at all three months from now. Rarely would one actually want to have a thousand sources of information for any given task.

Zotero is a citation manager, with a firefox extension to save an article (but really, a tab) with one click.

It also has fulltext search. You can search snapshots of everything you save.

"But I can't save all my tabs at once"

(There are some solutions, but nothIng official)

Save as you go. Computers simply don't have enough ram for 2000 tabs.

Anyway, it also seems to be able to run javascript plugins, and I saw you have some experience with that.

It also has support for folders, so you can organize it a bit better than tabs work for that.

You have 64GB RAM and that's still not enough for your browser. Wow.

I've come away from this with only more questions. What does your Downloads folder/Filesystem look like? Do you have notebooks or any real world allocation of information? What's that like? What kinds of things do you keep in a junk drawer?

Absolutely fascinating.

I terminate Firefox and reopen it any time it's chewing up my RAM, but I usually don't have more than 500 tabs open at any one time. My tabs persist when Firefox starts again, but tabs don't fully load until I click on them again. This saves my memory from getting chewed up immediately, and can usually go a week or so before I need to do it again.

Reduce to a sane number. Like less than 20.

Have you tried increasing the size of your swap memory in windows? Otherwise known as "virtual memory". Depending on the speed of your drive and available space, you might be able to increase the vertual memory size to get more performance.

But what about using a page archiving service, even a self-hosted one, like Shiori. Shiori has an extension that can allow for single click page archiving right from the browser. The pages are saved as html files or txt files and it will create a readability version of the file which is just the text and images. You could then search the files and their contents using something like VS Code to search the whole directory where the files are stored. There are plenty of other ways to do that search once you have those archives, though. I think even Windows File Search will search the contents of a txt or html file stored on the device.

Shiori also has its own search, which is pretty fast, and searches the contents of the archives as well.

Why do you need so many open tabs to begin with? What is your usecase?

i use auto tab discard and it works great

You are manually caching web content. Were you aware that (a) your browser does that for you; (b) the internet does that for you ?

I'm as guilty of this as anyone and can tell you from experience that it's sutpid.

Sidebery (FOSS, MIT license) has several features that could be used to help you merge thousands of tabs into one window without choking out your memory usage, and generally makes it really easy to organize a massive amount of tabs. It would take several steps. First, you'd right-click the panel (the top-level organizational unit in Sidebery, above the tabs) on each window and select Save to bookmarks (example folder structure: selecting Bookmarks Toolbar/merge/ for a panel named panel1 would save the tabs under Bookmarks Toolbar/merge/panel1; click a folder twice in the selection dialog to expand it). Then you'd close that window and repeat with each window, being careful with the panel names so as not to overwrite any other window's tabs. Once you're down to one window, create an empty panel, right-click it, and select Restore from bookmarks. From this dialog, selecting the top-level folder that all the other bookmarked panels reside in (Bookmarks Toolbar/merge/ in this example) will import every tab from every window that was bookmarked, grouped by the window name.

When Sidebery imports a panel from bookmarks, the tabs are imported in an unloaded state, so they have basically no effect on memory until you actually click into them and load them. I can restore about 50 tabs per second from bookmarks without my system even slowing down, taking me from 0 to 500 tabs in about 10 seconds. It's not exactly a one-click option, but I wager it will be significantly faster and less prone to completely breaking than your current workflow, and a little easier to back up (even if window/session states get wonky, bookmarks sync pretty much instantly).

Once your tabs are all in the same window, you can load tabs you want loaded by selecting a bunch (ctrl-click, shift-click, etc., just like in file explorer) and refreshing them, presumably avoiding YouTube tabs (should probably download those with YT-DLP anyway if you want to keep them). Sidebery will actually limit how many tabs it reloads at once, so it'll never choke out your system by trying to instantly load a thousand of them (unlike if you select "open all in tabs" in Firefox's native bookmarks context menu... eurgh). Even if it isn't faster (though I suspect it is) the browser is at least usable while that's going on. I'm not sure how well this method preserves containers, mainly because I don't use them, so if you do, keep an eye on that if you test it out. All I know for sure is Sidebery supports reopening a tab in a new/different container because that's in the default context menu.

There's more time savings than just window merging and tab loading, there's the tree-style viewing, being able to collapse whole trees of tabs you aren't actively paying attention to, seeing the full titles of 30-40 tabs at a time, no more sideways scrolling, a built in search bar to filter shown tabs by title, fully customizable keyboard shortcuts and context menus... it's actually incredible how much this addon can do, and not only does it have a lot of settings and customization that should let you tailor its behavior to exactly how you want it, you can even sync its actual settings through Firefox! (just make sure to set your device name) Only thing it can't do is remove the tab strip to give you more vertical real estate, but Mozilla might be working on that.

I know what it's like to be attached to a cumbersome workflow. I hope this can help streamline things for you a bit and make life with ~2,000 tabs just a little less troublesome.

Install Onetab

I tend to have ~10,000 tabs because I obsessively fail to clean up. But it never takes much memory or cpu, my PC isn't amazing yet Firefox is always lightning quick.

I've never used the discard or merge windows features though, I can see why those might cause issues. I assume these two functions just aren't optimised for so many tabs.

One addon I might recommend to help keep numbers down is Duplicate Tab Closer, which has options to specify how similar tabs can be to be considered duplicates, and also will detect across all open windows if desired.

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

https://piped.video/Tggq4jPPZaA

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

I kinda wanted to jump on a train of recommending to use bookmarks but last time I checked the bookmark implementation was dogshit in every single browser. Too many steps, too inconvenient to navigate, and breaks you out of normal browser workflow overall.

Also looking for a solution, even though I don't do 1000+ tabs. Currently I found myself using Vivaldi with tab groups, and allowing the browser to unload unused tabs contents after some time. Not so sure it scales, but seems to be at least usable to me.

Oh, hmm, interesting. I would simply not bother trying to clean up your tabs (it's what I do, 6476 baby!).

Perhaps consider also getting more RAM. 128 is good, 256 is better. Thanks to ddr5, ddr4 isn't all that expensive now (and 5000 series can't use ddr5 anyways).

I came in here knowing exactly what the comments would look like, and I'm still disappointed. "Just don't use so many tabs" is not an answer. If you don't have anything constructive to say, just move on instead of getting uppity about...not using browsers very heavily or understanding other use cases.

Yeah, thousands of tabs seems extreme. But "you should dedicate a larger amount of time and effort all day, every day to make the computer's job easier" is a bad take. That's obviously worse than OP's existing workflow.

Sorry OP, I don't have a real answer either. You might find Arc Browser's tab system to suit you better, but since it's chromium-based I suspect performance might be worse.

Edit: out of curiosity, how much memory does your PC have, and how much is Firefox using during these freezes? I wonder how much of the delay is caused by swapping.