What do you think of someone who opens 50 tabs in any browser and just keep them and still adds more?

And then they wonder why Chrome swallows so much RAM

My friend saying his firefox has a memory leak. Yes.. it's you.

i want to beat them up because they have the audacity to ask for help making the computer faster

I mean I have ADHD so I find it impossible to keep my tabs under control. Currently have over 1700 tabs open and it's about time for another purge.

@cafecortado in their defense chrome swallows a lot of ram anyway :P

@EmberQuill woah hold on, in what timespan where these 1700 tabs opened?

@jonas-w Months, probably. I tend to open a bunch of tabs for things I intend to read/watch and then never get around to it. I usually let it grow to the point of absurdity and then either dump them in my bookmarks or close a big chunk of them at once to bring it back down.

1700 is far past absurd though. Should've purged them weeks ago.

Firefox doesn't load inactive tabs on a restart so at least they don't lag my browser to hell. If they did I'd be a lot more aggressive in closing them.

@EmberQuill i always close everything in Firefox, delete cookies/site data etc. So everytime I start my PC i don't have tabs open and i'm glad about it.

I’d call them overworked, honestly.

I have 68 tabs open currently, over 10 different tasks. I want to get to them. I just don’t have the energy.

Though, I can probably close 20 of them, as they’re related to updating my resume.

i'm one of those people.
i accumulate the tabs slowly: "this is something i want to watch/read, but not right now" - > open in new tab

If only someone showed them how bookmarks work.

Tab hoarders!

"put it on my tab"

sounds like me, but at some point in life i decided to set browser settings that tabs are always deleted after exiting the browser, as well as cookies etc. it was a good choice. every day feels like a new day, and if i didn't set a bookmark and forgot what a tab was about, then it wasn't that important.

They have issues

Add more ram 😂

455 right now, my record is 3700 at the end of Covid because during the pandemic I didn't really ever have spare spoons to clean it up.

@Nanos if the site is good enough it would store the position on the page in history and scroll to it with autoscroll option

@Nanos You won't look through that many tabs, either because with that many of them, you'll have three new ones open before you have actually read one.

When I read an article and there's an interesting side link, I also open that in a new tab for later, but I finish the article first. Then I read the auxialiary links. Typically, the tab count first increases, then decreases again. I only bookmark if I think I'll need that for later reference.

adding to what people said there's also browser history
That brought my tab count down since I can close stuff for the moment and just come back that week to look what I missed
(got it sorted by date an site)

I put what I want to read later in 'getpocket'. It has extension

'Productive' 😎

In my defense... tab suspender extensions are the best

I also have tabs in few hundreds, even around thousand sometimes.

The main idea behind it is, that it's easier to see important tabs in recent history. I leave tabs open, if they could be useful.

You could say: "but you have browser history for that". Not really, since you can't differentiate between trash and important tabs in your history.

For example, if I want to find a new keyboard to buy. I open a new window, and I search for potential candidates. If keyboard seems ok, I leave a tab open for it. And I can them swap between tabs to compare between keyboards. When I find the keyboard, I close whole window.

The problem is I sometimes run out of time, or don't feel like searching anymore and I leave window open for later date. That's when tabs start pilling up.

Also worth mentioning, that this kind of use wouldn't be possible without Tree Style Tab and Auto Tab Discard plugin.

I don’t understand them, I have an impossible urge to close everything I don’t use

@Fast-Nop I wish it worked that way (mind, that is, mine version at least). Bookmark -> never open it again. Open as a new tab and leave it open -> maybe read it by latest at purge time if it’s still of interest. This is why I don’t use Chrome or Firefox anymore, tho. Edge and Vivaldi enable my tab hoarding without slowing my machine down noticeably. And when they do, it’s purge time.

Must be the person who watches porn all the time.

@lbfalvy What? how much Ram do you need for that?

@johnmelodyme hahahaha

@dIREsTRAITS I have 8GB in my lappy, but the number of tabs is unbounded in theory because Firefox loads tabs when you click on them after restoring a session.

Also there's some nice trickery in Linux where processes waiting on IPC such as unused browser tabs are eventually swapped in favour of whatever the OS uses uncommitted memory for such as extending the block cache. The OOM killer is so awful most distros are configured to never invoke it, as a result many clever techniques have been developed to make use of swap space without completely locking up the system. This is in contrast to Windows which will prefer to kill background processes and is quite robust against the effects of that but if it really needs to swap something 9/10 times you'll end up with a foreground process running from disk so you might as well pull the plug.

Anyway since I do tend to shut the computer down every once in a while in practice I'm relying more on the browser's lazy loading capabilities.

@lbfalvy Ubuntu OOM killer is so nonexistent that I can easily hang the whole system by spawning too many compiler processes which use a lot of memory

@iiii To be fair, a compiler is usually a single process directly connected to a terminal (I think that counts as a VT?) which means that a lot of things can go to shit before it would be a reasonable victim. You know that it's not mission critical but the OS doesn't, all it sees is that this program is definitely not a worker process and also not something that could ever be restarted seamlessly such as a browser window because you're looking at its STDERR.

@lbfalvy well, I've had gcc stopping before because of OOM. So when it just hanged everything I was quite surprised

@iiii I have heard of compilers getting killed when they're started by an IDE or a build system, they usually have multiprocessing models that place it within the realm of possibility for the compilers to be expendable workers and when they start eating all the ram the kernel sometimes deems them runaway processes. I have never heard of it in a sequential scenario but I guess it's not impossible.

There's also EarlyOOM, but I imagine you'd know if you were running something like that, it's not something distro or metapackage authors just add without a big red ribbon warning.

I have colleagues that just keep opening tabs without closing them (accumulating during the day before being purged at the end, I guess) and every time I'm asked for help I look at the tab containing their work (we do webdev), I open some docs in a new tab and we talk about the issue. And then I need them to take the mouse to go back to the work-tab because I cannot for the life of me find it again.

It mostly just amuses me, would find that difficult to work with.
Tabs I need to keep, I pin. If I have more than a few (like ten) others tabs open, I just close the one's I'm not using at that time. If I closed something I need again, I just regoogle or open my browser history...