I average over a hundred tabs regularly.

Although once the favicons disappear, I usually open a new window, or group windows by subject matter. I've tried to alter my browsing habits over the years to ease the load on my computer, but I've just come to accept that I am just one of those people.

This tool is either the best thing that's ever happened, or it's about to exacerbate my problem 10 fold.

You should try the tree tab plugin. Works like a charm.

How is using this tool significantly different than bookmarking then closing all your currently open tabs, which you can easily do now?

Good point, we'll have to see. I have the same problem as the GP (though up to 50 tabs usually) and indeed "bookmark all"+"close all" doesn't really help because if you never review those bookmarks, you tend not to take the step either.

As someone else itt already said, a better solution would be some improved bookmarking system that I can use to just file away a tab, knowing that it'll be there when I need it, as well as offering the option of, I dunno popping up for review in a couple of days or a specific time maybe.

One thing I do not understand is why modern browsers, apart from bookmark-folders do not offer tags as well. They were a hugely successful way of ordering things back in the day and they have all but disappeared for some reason. And they would be tremendously useful in bookmarks (to me). And del.icio.us is dead, plus I don't want a web service to keep my bookmarks, it's too slow.

I'm not sure if I understand your comment. Firefox does allow you to organize bookmarks by tag, and it even lets you use the tag collection as a bookmark folder (meaning that you can add the tag to the bookmark bar and it behaves like a normal bookmark folder.) You can even add different links to different bookmark folders and give them the same tag, so that they appear under the original bookmark folder and under the same tag category, or tag folder if you drag the tag to the bookmark bar. If you decide to remove the tag folder from the bookmark bar, the tag will still exist.

Really? I have to admit never trying FF's bookmark system in depth, just Chrome and Opera. Well then. Thanks for the tip, I will try! (though my zillions-of-tabs problem mostly resides in Opera)

if you have a 100 tabs open, you're using it wrong.

Well, if you have 100 tabs open, you might be using the wrong browser. Chrome is obviously not designed to work with that many tabs, either from a UI standpoint or, apparently, a memory use standpoint.

However, I don't really see why there needs to be a strict limit on the number of tabs you can have open before your browser starts trashing all your memory. This is a problem that can be solved by designing your software to deal with that use scenario, either by pausing unused pages and serializing the resources to disk or by disposing of the unused pages entirely without removing the tabs. You'd want a pref for this, but it seems entirely reasonable to me.

there isn't a strict limit, its just not a viable use case for current browsers.

Maybe what we need is Chrome/FF to consider the very high tab count as a use case and handle it better, when you have so many tabs it's not easy to find the 1 in 100 that you're looking for, we would need a new find tool, possible the browser should build a client side tf/idf index and make the whole working set (workspace) searchable. You see what I mean? Until the browser changes to support this usecase, the usage will be klunky and fraught with problems.

The Firefox tab bar is naturally more usable than the Chrome tab bar with large numbers of tabs because it scrolls rather than trying to fit them all in the bar. (I sometimes wonder whether squeezing tabs to the point of absurdity was actually a conscious decision by the Chrome developers to limit the number of tabs people can open and thus memory use.) There are a lot of Firefox extensions that add additional tools to manage large numbers of tabs, of which Tree Style Tabs is perhaps the most popular. There are not as many Chrome extensions, since Chrome's UI is not as extensible.

Actually I usually set firefox to squeeze tabs. I love it. As long as the favicon is visible it works fine. Hiding the favicon in small tabs is the real sin of chrome.

I agree. I'm a tab hoarder with hundreds of tabs open in Chrome. I never do that with Firefox's scrolling tabs because I remember where things are based on their place among the other tabs. Firefox doing a min-width on each tab and hiding the rest makes it impossible to find where that other page I looked at 5 minutes ago went.

The design of Firefox makes it able to handle a lot more tabs than Google Chrome. You can easily have two hundred with no sweat.

It also features Panorama built-in, which lets you search through all the tabs. It's as simple as Ctrl+Shift+E, type your keyword.

Huh, I didn't realize you could search. That's neat.

How do you suggest to handle the fact that there are many websites which break the "back" button these days? I've gotten to the point where I open a new tab practically every time I follow a link. Not to mention news sites where you need to open all of the interesting articles that you see before the page updates and they go away.

Or, as Apple says, "You're holding it wrong."

Not really, especially if you're doing a lot of research, or for whatever reason the page is particularly complex and it causes the process that tab is running under to consume a lot of memory.

No, a hundred tabs is still far beyond a lot.

If a hundred tabs is not really a lot, what would be? 250? 1,000?

Whatever the brightline test for "a lot" is, there's no compelling reason each tab should be consuming about 70MB. Under Chrome, each tab runs in its own process, which is certainly a contributing factor. I appreciate this is for stability and security, but it's not the best solution for the problem and has some serious drawbacks, i.e. horrible memory usage.

As I said in another reply to one of your comments, I don't think 70MB is a lot per tab. I'm fairly certain that if you run Firefox 2 for instance it'll use close to that amount for one tab.

The fact that it is its own process is a very small contributor to per-tab memory usage.

I end up with quite a few tabs open myself. I find if I bookmark a tab, add it to Pocket, or copy the URL into my notes that I'm far more likely to go back and actually read it. Before I would keep tabs open for weeks "just in case".

I can relate, I do the same to keep the tabs open so to read them later. Most of them end of not reading them weeks later. Never use Pocket. Presumably, it's similar to ReadItLater or Instapaper? Perhaps indeed that's better approach.

tabs are not a replacement for bookmarks, the idea is not to open an ever increasing number of tabs, but rather bookmark and folder things if you need 100 concurrent research tabs. It's just the wrong way to use the browser.

It would be like me arguing that driving my car with the parking brake on makes it get hot, of course it does, it's user error.

Well, no. If you've got all those tabs open and you're flitting between their contents, it's appropriate. It's not the wrong way to use the tool, it's a way to use it that's perfectly appropriate in some cases.

There's no reason I should be fighting against my browser because my optimal workflow causes it to chew through memory!

no. when number of open tabs < 10-20, yes sure, but when that number reaches 100, your doing it all wrong. Its not about how much memory it consumes, that's irrelevant, if you need more memory just go to crucial.com, it's dirt cheap. Its about using the tools properly.

I can't argue the position for this workflow better than I already have. I refute the idea that I'm "doing it all wrong". No, I'm not and this was the only efficient way to get what I needed to do done.

My laptop's motherboard can't handle more than 8GB, so I don't even have the option of putting more RAM in it as it already has 8GB. Also, I shouldn't have to keep throwing in memory to handle applications whose coders feel it is fine and dandy to gobble memory with reckless abandon. Why should I bear the financial cost of a poorly designed application?

I'm most certainly using my tools properly whether you agree or not. I'm not bitching about 5,000 tabs causing excessive memory usage, I'm complaining about 100 which is not that many during research that requires going from page to page, or opening lots of links without having to remember where I was at in each part of my stack; I've got less working memory than my computer!

It wasn't the only efficient way to get what you were doing done. It's ridiculous to say that a hundred tabs is a reasonable use case. The very fact that you ran out of memory tells you that. If you really need 100 concurrent tabs (which you don't) then you need a different computer for your research. However, you're using the browser incorrectly. Why not save the text you want to a document, or out it into a spreadsheet?

10 tabs yes, 100 tabs no!! Stop arguing, even your computer's telling you the same thing :) you're just bent belligerent snd acting like a spoiler child. You're browser can't do, so you maybe should find a different way. As I've suggested.

I also regularly have over 100 tabs open and I find your suggestion that my workflow is wrong is insulting.

Maybe you don't need to have 100 tabs open. Maybe you lack imagination to see scenario where having that many tabs open.

It is also possible that you are aware of some great/better way to solve similar scenarios than me, but I guess you are keeping it a secret, since I regularly evaluate new plugins and extensions, and also search google for tips and tricks, how to do it better. (And to date haven't found a way)

Sure I could work with less tabs. Hell Everything could be done with only 1 tab in 1 window (and I used to in the 90s), but it's not as efficient as what I do now.

Edit: major spelling errors.

"Maybe you lack imagination" - maybe you lack computer skills, it certainly seems so. There are plenty of ways you could avoid having 100 tabs open. However, if you feel like that's something you need then stop whining and buy a machine with enough RAM for your usual use case.

the ideal number of tabs roughly corresponds to the human stack size, plus a couple for on-going apps like gmail. If you need more than that, you should consider a better mechanism than the browser. Since you haven't found any, I posit that its you who lacks imagination. If you found my comment insulting then I am sorry.

Probably but it's still 70MB per tab.