so at time of writing i have 5,759 browser tabs open in Firefox.
Wait how does that even work? Surely your browser wouldn't be able to handle opening that much stuff at once...
Actually, it handles it alright. The trick is that there's a difference between having 5,759 tabs open and having 5,759 tabs loaded. A tab can be open, existing in the list of tabs, but not loaded, so it's not actually holding the content of the page in memory or running any javascript. This means that you can have 5,759 tabs open and everything runs just fine, so long as only a normal number are loaded at a time. Well, aside from the fact that the browser takes about a minute and a half to start up and restore those tabs, and starts having weird rendering issues after it's been running for about 8 hours, and crashes about once every two days. Aside from that it's fine. It's even able to restore all of the tabs after crashing (at least, now I've removed the "Simple Tab Groups" extension, which did not like having this many tabs open at all).
How did you end up in this sutuation?
I open things in new tabs whenever I see something I vaguely want to check out but don't want to shift away from what I'm currently doing. I close tabs once I'm sure I'm absolutely done with a page and won't want to return to it. That second threshold is much higher than the first, and I also have a problem with forgetting to activate it - leaving "cohost! - home" scattered all throughout the list of tabs, for example.
How do you find anything? This sounds like a nightmare.
Firefox's ability to jump to tabs by name is very convenient here. Mainly I have the "Tree of Tabs" extension to give a more convenient visible list of tabs and "UnloadTabs" to switch between things I'm actively doing. In a given browsing session I will often have stuff I'm looking at in completely separate parts of the tab list, but UnloadTabs provides shortcuts to jump between loaded tabs, so I can go back and forth between things I'm actually doing, ignoring the huge unloaded segments of the list that I'm not using.
...
Anyway I'm making a more concerted effort now to go through all these tabs and reduce the size of the list. I find it's all too easy to browse a few social media sites without super paying attention and simply open anything that looks like it'll take a minimum of effort in a new tab, which I will not end up looking at within the rest of the day, after which point I restart Firefox, everything is unloaded, and it fades into the endless ocean of tabs. A lot of these things are actually really interesting and take less effort to appreciate than I expect. So if you see me interacting on an extremely old post of yours, that's probably what's going on. Sorry it took me so long to get around to it!
