Keeping a good “tab discipline” is essential to keep your browser from collapsing, but some users decide to throw it out the window and keep hundreds, or even thousands, of tabs open in a single session. That’s the case of Hazel, who was surprised to find Firefox refusing to restore almost 7,500 tabs. Luckily, Hazel managed to recover that content with the help of a profile cache, but the most impressive thing is that Firefox held up for two years under that condition…
I admit it: I see more than two dozen tabs open in my browser, and it gives me anxiety. Sometimes I fool myself by moving some tabs to a second monitor, but I never felt comfortable with the concept of having tabs open “just because”. At the same time, an excess of tabs can cause a memory leak (especially if it’s Chrome), but today we’re looking at something that could well be a record: a Firefox session with more than 7,000 lost tabs… that came back from the darkness.
7,470 tabs in Firefox
The software engineer Hazel said it all on her X-Twitter profile: Firefox refused to restore the previous session, and more than 7,000 tabs disappeared. Fortunately, several users jumped into the conversation and explained how to restore this lost session using the profile cache… but the real question is “why?” Hazel said it’s a matter of nostalgia, since she enjoys reviewing (and remembering) everything she’s done in recent months.
Now, something as notable as the number of tabs is Firefox’s behavior. Hazel has been opening, exploring, and collecting tabs for over two years, and reloading the entire session takes less than a minute. Unlike Chrome/Chromium (which we’ve seen devour a terabyte of RAM without hiccups), Firefox is usually much more efficient with a large number of open tabs.
Source: PCMag
