You might be one of those power users who deal with too many tabs in your web browser. But for how long have you kept your browser tabs alive? Maybe a day, a week, or a month? A software engineer tested the very limits of the Firefox browser by keeping a whopping 7,400+ tabs alive for more than two years.
firefox refused to restore my session that i”ve had going for 2+ years….
over 7k tabs down the drain….
— hazel☀️ (@sodiumPen) April 30, 2024
The Mac user, with the pseudonym “Hazel,” posted earlier this week that Firefox didn”t restore her browsing session, which had over seven thousand tabs (7,470, to be exact) at the time. Following help from fellow users, she restored the old Firefox session from the profiles cache and said, “I feel like a part of me is restored.”
thank you to everyone who provided info on how to restore an old session from the profiles cache… i feel like a part of me is restored pic.twitter.com/IGNGIrNfHB
— hazel☀️ (@sodiumPen) April 30, 2024
Hazel commented on Firefox”s performance and added that “the memory impact is marginal; the session file which contains the tab information is only about 70mb, and Firefox only loads a tab in memory if I”ve opened it recently.”
A Mozilla representative echoed a similar stance and confirmed to PCMag that having countless tabs opened in the Firefox browser eats “practically no memory whatsoever,” adding that some profile and tab group features are on the way.
“While we think it’s amazing that anyone has 7,000 active tabs, it also shows the degree to which tab management is a common problem,” the representative said.
With that said, the engineer doesn”t have plans to say goodbye to those browser tabs anytime soon, mostly for nostalgia reasons. She told the publication that she likes to scroll back through the old tabs, and “it”s like a trip down memory lane.”
Source: PCMag