Zero regrets: Firefox power user kept 7,500 tabs open for two years

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Scale of Tab Hoarding & Use Cases

  • Several commenters report thousands of tabs (up to 10k) across many windows; others are amazed or disturbed by this.
  • Common pattern: each window corresponds to a project, with tabs for docs, datasheets, research, plus “pollution” from news and social sites.
  • Open tabs often act as a persistent workspace and context for switching between projects.

Tabs vs Bookmarks, History, and To‑Do Lists

  • Many explicitly use tabs as:
    • To‑do items (“unfinished business” stays open).
    • Lightweight, transient bookmarks.
    • Context containers (what else was being read at the time).
  • Bookmarks are frequently criticized as:
    • Hard to organize at scale, flat/primitive UI, and “graveyards” never revisited.
    • Lacking tab history, scroll state, or playback position.
  • Some advocate structured alternatives: digital notebooks (Obsidian/OneNote), custom “new tab” note pages, or exporting tab lists.

Firefox Features, Add‑ons, and Tab Management

  • Firefox session handling is praised: tabs mostly unload, session file stays small, and startup restores frozen tabs.
  • Popular add‑ons mentioned:
    • Simple Tab Groups, Tree Style Tab, Sidebery for grouping/tree structures.
    • OneTab and Winger for dumping/archiving windows or sessions.
    • Tab Session Manager for multi-session backups and named sessions.
    • Auto Tab Discard and similar for unloading inactive tabs.
  • Some want native features like:
    • about:tabs listing all URLs.
    • Merging tabs/history/bookmarks into a single, searchable system.
    • Better tab groups; current lack is called a major Firefox gap.

Performance, Stability, and Browser Differences

  • Resource use varies: some run thousands of unloaded tabs “fine”; others hit crashes around a few hundred, especially on low-RAM systems.
  • LinkedIn and certain sites are repeatedly cited as CPU hogs; Firefox’s task manager helps identify them.
  • Chrome and Firefox are seen as better at freezing/unloading old tabs than Safari, which is criticized for reloading many tabs and stressing RAM/SSD.
  • Mobile Firefox and Android Chrome struggle with many tabs (navigation glitches, reloads, missing counts).

Attitudes, Risk, and Criticism

  • Some view extreme tab counts as “digital hoarding” or poor UX; others see it as rational adaptation to weak bookmark/history tools.
  • There is concern about lost sessions, OneTab data loss, and questions about long-lived sessions for sensitive sites (email, banking).
  • A few reject calling such users “power users,” seeing it instead as misuse of the system design.