interdimensionalmemeHow can I quickly "unclog" firefox when it runs out of memory (with 1000/2000 tabs)
I’m sorry I don’t have an answer
ArcticAmphibianA 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 tried a tab suspender, but it would replace tabs with a moz:// address that would end up breaking all my tabs when I copy & pasted them from a text file. Also tab suspender doesn’t work once firefox gets into that state. I think the internal scheduler is trying to load tabs and discarding them as fast as possible. What I need is a big “stop button” that stop it all from at least trying to load new tabs.
I think what’s happenning is when I merge all windows, many gets get woken up and, like the youtube tabs they seem to gobble up 2 to 4 gb of ram while initializing to that freezes everything.
It’s making it really hard to get to 10k 20k tabs when it really falls apart like that with not even 2k tabs.
20k tabs? I struggle to see how someone could go through that many tabs, even over a long period of time. Your workflow is something the browser was never made to handle.
Try some popular non-Mozilla tab suspend extensions. I doubt that they all operate the same way.
The thing is that, it does work fine as long as I don’t disturb too many tabs.
It’s the action of agglomerating all tabs to a single window that wakes up a bunch of tabs unnecessarily
Surely there’s a shortcut or something to “stop all tabs” immediately.
I would even take a “discard all tabs” to flush the tab memory.
It seems to be what happens after a while, but it takes more than 5 minutes to happen on its own.
Dr. Wesker20k tabs means there are other problems that need to be addressed
Yes, my computer sucks, I need 256GB ram and 128 cpu cores apparently
Although even then it still would be too weak to do something crazy like search for text, in all tabs
SanctusIf 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.
I find organizing bookmarks incredibly tedious.
I have bookmarks folder with thousands of tabs in and it’s just easier to use google again to re-find the information than to pick them out of bookmarks.
Also tabs just keep the title and URL so you can’t even search the text inside.
So, organizing a library of tabs is like a much worse version of google without previews.
I also use the session manager addon but again, when you open thousands of tabs, it clogs up the memory almost instantly.
It’s taking multiple gigabytes of ram, just to display a few kilobytes of text !
I wish the browser would just render the page as a static searchable text and image and then ditch all the javascript garbage.
Tywèle [she|her]You can also tag your bookmarks and search for those.
I would prefer not to save and tags tabs 500 times per day. It’s easier to let them accumulate and handle them all in memory.
500 tab save and tag per day is too much labour, I would spend half my day just fiddling and sorting bookmarks !
What the hell are you doing that you need 500 NEW tabs every day?!
May I ask why you have to have this level of access to thousands of pages? Even for my job I have maybe 8 active that I use Firefox keywords to jump to.
That takes too long.
Organizing tab is the computer’s job !
Literally isn’t, which is why you’re hitting a wall.
Nah, FF handles thousands of tabs just fine. I literally have just as many if not more tabs than OP and have never seen this issue. It’s either from the merge they’re doing or something else. It would be better if y’all just worked under the assumption that this _does _ work and something is otherwise wrong with op’s setup.
The issue is parsing all that. There is no way you can keep that many tabs readily accessible like tabs are meant to be. Which is why these addons were born and are not official parts of Firefox. This is one of those just because you can doesn’t mean you should situations. I get they’ve adopted this workflow, but reading through this it sounds more like daily driving than actual work. Which makes this even more bizarre, you can’t read them all, they have to reload when you open them after a while (ie download again) so all points are moot. You aren’t saving the page, you are holding onto a shell that will request the page again when you wake it up. If the server went offline never to be seen again your tab will not hold the information.
With this workflow, it might be better to have a crawler dump everything into folder hierarchies that are content searchable, and then search that like google using specialized software. I dont see any other reason you could even have 1k tabs open efficiently, you aren’t searching through that, might as well google again and follow the purple links.
Yeah I think that everyone here is latching onto the workflow part of this, when I don’t think that’s the problem here at all. OP mentioned that they search these, etc. but the real problem is the merging of windows, correct? So why can’t these windows merge properly? Well it’s probably the extension sucks (because I can drag hundreds of tabs around in sidebery just fine) or that they have disabled swap mem.
I understand everyone is freaking out about the workflow, but this is the reverse of the XY problem, like what happens on SO. Everyone tells them they’re doing it wrong rather than just telling them how to do what they’re trying to do. If OP had said “I have 2gb of ram and I have 30 tabs open in different windows and I use this extension to merge them and FF freezes” no one would be batting an eye about helping them.
RimuI'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?
It’s easier to use google than the bookmarks manager, which can’t even find text inside the pages. I do often dump all those thousands of tabs into a bookmarks folder. And it has never happened that I went back into that enormous pile to fetch something that would take hours to find again. I have no use for the history either. A gigantic, alphabetic ordered list of everything I have seen in the last 7 days. Again, easier to just use google.
The one thing that is better and faster than google, is not closing those tabs that may contain the stuff I need.
Of course, it’s not really possible to search the text body of open tabs, unless you search them one by one.
But I’m going to ask for only one computing miracle at a time !
What I’d recommend, based on the insistence that seeing to not change your workflow, is to locally download the pages you have open with httrack, wget or a similar application. This would allow you to locally search all your tabs and their contents very quickly without Google, they will load faster because of lack of needing to redownload them, which if I understand correctly Firefox is trying to do at some level.
Thanks, I didn’t know that one.
I have been experiementing with a transparent proxy like squid or something like Archive Box, to create static pages on the fly and load that.
But so far I’ve not made something seamless and pleasant to use. It would have to be at least as low friction as using google.
I am going to try using Mixtral 8x7b to perform natural language search over my archives and pull tabs from the collection of all pages I have ever seen. But that’s still a long way away from being operational !
…has Google still been giving you the same results recently? This is an extremely weak link in your setup to me. You’d be better off looking at a locally run search engine like peARs or something similar with locally downloaded and indexed files if you insist on using search, and it’ll be waaaay more reliable than an LLM here.
Google is giving me increasingly poor results, I am looking into deploying Searxng locally.
I really would like to operate my own local crawler and sorting algorithm.
I will check out the peARs you mentionned !
Lee DunaIf you need offline version of the sites you can save them with SingleFileZ
1000 tabs? What for?
A small subset of the stuff I’m trying to do.
Is this your goal?
Cause I gotta say, I don’t think abusing your browser is your best bet.
I would settle for just taking over my own computer !
Possibly linuxHe just has a tab for each employee in a company
Ohh lord. I could actually believe that.
Just imagine how many tabs the NSA has
Ahh, so that’s what the super computers are for. Would be a shame if Chrome couldn’t restore them all after a crash.
“Small”
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.
What? Even 500 tabs? I don’t understand this. I get about 10 open and I can’t read what they are. Please share a pic of what it has to look like with that many tabs open because I totally do not get this? I feel like this would be akin to asking “I can’t see out of my car windshield because I have completely covered it with sticky notes. How can I get to where I need to go?” This is not how browsers were designed to work.
I often have 100+, so I set a fixed width for tabs so I can see more and they don’t get too small. To find tabs, I use the drop down to see a scrollable list. But honestly, the biggest win is the “switch to tab” feature when typing in the URL bar.
I see about 20 at a time, and they’re usually all related to the same topic because I opened them around the same time.
When I’m done with a project, I “close tabs to the right” and it’s clean again.
Interesting. I still don’t think I could use that workflow. I use bookmarks, and the dropdowns in the bookmark toolbar when I need to organize links into groupings. And even then I only keep the necessary dropdowns in my list. Everything else I organize by bookmark folders and subfolders.
Bookmarks take work, especially when my projects run for a couple weeks at a time. I rarely need to reference stuff after those weeks, so I’d constantly be adding and removing bookmarks.
But everyone’s workflow is different.
Try this addon …mozilla.org/…/tab-manager-plus-for-firefox/
It’s really great, but the default settings are unusable
set open in own tab set to vertical view set to darkmode
Here is a quick scroll through my “tab manager plus” view, zoomed out hopefully this doesn’t contain doxxing information
many open tabs
Thanks for sharing. That was wild… You probably have more tabs than I have bookmarks.
Just buying one little dodad on ali express has me opening 500-1000 tabs, for just one search !
I really wish the computer could keep up with me !
I needed to buy 15x CH9121 and that was the difference between 15$ each to 4.5$ each.
I have over a thousand just like OP and it works fine. Use a tree style tab browser and it’s much more usable than chrome or anything like that. OP’s problem is not having too many tabs.
You could just set Firefox to clear everything on close.
Eager Eaglegeez, 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.
I tried closing tabs, I have to finish reading them, make sure I got everything and that whatever reason I had for opening that tab was done. The result is that I spend all most all my time trying to close and sort and order tabs instead of doing what I was trying to do in the first place. And then the browser freezes for 10 minutes.
Something is very wrong that 64GB is nowhere near enough to handle a few megabytes of text. And searching text inside of all tabs is an unthinkably difficult operation ?
Where did the web go wrong !?
It’s not the web it’s you dude. You’re not using the software the way it’s intended to be used. There is no reason at all to ever need 1000+ tabs open.
It’s not the web. It seems to me you might have an attention deficit issue. Try improving your workflow.
My computer should bend to my will, not the other way around.
Say these problems are fixed for now. How many tabs is enough? How do you see this tab hoarding progression being sustainable at all?
I would put the full text, image and video of every tab I have ever opened into the context memory of an open source LLM if I could. I would only consciously delete stuff that needs to stop existing immediately, like doxxing data or illegal data or malicious code.
This is like asking, how many email should you keep.
Well at work we auto delete all emails after 60 days.
But my personal email has every email going back to 2006, the last storage failure before backup, and it’s all quickly searchable.
The other limit would be storage space, but my cluster has still 180 terabyte empty space, I don’t see that getting filled up from plain browser data any time soon.
Of course, I would like better automated data catalogging tools. I would like to ask my local open source LLM to “pull up all tabs regarding 7 megahertz maser project” and it should should open a browser window that contains every tab I have ever come accross on that topic. Including now-dead websites. It should all be sorted by date, it should know to put the more basic tabs to the left and the cutting edge stuff on the right. All this without me tagging a single thing, without wasting a minute of my time doing sorting busywork.
It is the job of the computer to organize my data, in an offline, private, reliable, open source-based, enshittification-proof manner with infinite memory and perfect recall. So that I can get on with doing the stuff that I want to do and not fiddle with browser settings.
Mozilla foundation has revenues in the 500 million range and a 7 million a year CEO, I expect nothing less.
I applaud their initiative with llamafile, however I hope that was just an appetizer.
That’s fair, maybe you’re using the wrong tool though, something like an internet archive sounds more like what you need.
Take every tab you open and save a PDF, all the text, and all the images, then put a timestamp on them before deleting the tab. That’s not the point of a browser though, that’s an entirely different product.
You’re welcome to build it though, or ask Microsoft if they can make Recall work for tabs.
d-RLY?I was going to also say that OP might be wanting something like Recall (which might be one of the few instances where it constantly saving shit would be perfect). But they would need like the most extreme version that isn’t just saving searchable screenshots.
I also think that one major issue for OP is more about how the actual sites are coded these days. As even if a single tab is being used, the shit can just decide to force it to update the contents at any time (like how just having Gmail open you will see new messages just show up even without refreshing your browser).
It seems like the perfect situation for OP would be if the web still worked like it did pre-web 2.0, but with using the current version of FF. Outside of that, it really seems like they need to just start having sites be auto-completely downloaded for full offline use.
I am still shocked that the main issues being had seems to be that it taking 10s of mins to allow FF to process that much stuff is the frustration. Which does seem to mean FF is holding up pretty well given the situation. Their complaint about tab isolation being too much overhead seems odd though. As it would seem that going back to not having that would mean a much higher chance of just everything just being yeet-ed out of nowhere.
I am not sure how their headspace of using virtual machines approach would be much better as shit would still have the issues of sites still self-updating and loading up in the first place. Though given they seem to have dramatically more coding experience, I am much more ignorant of this shit.
yeah mate - you need a knowledge management software, not a browser.
tabs were always ephemeral and that’s unlikely to change because they’re much more than text and images.
that’s simply an unreasonable expectation for a browser.
I’m honestly surprised Firefox even handles more than a few hundred open tabs.
Maybe don’t have a THOUSAND tabs
I will, not, do that.
Then you will have software that doesn’t work. This is not a Firefox problem, or a problem of extensions, or anything but a user problem.
If your 1998 Toyota Camry is struggling to haul a cargo container up a hill it’s not the car’s fault. You’re doing it wrong. Whatever tasks you’re trying to do with 1000 tabs a web browser is the wrong tool for the task.