There isn’t much of a compromise when it comes to having tabs open while surfing the internet; you’re either someone who hates the mess of having several websites open simultaneously or prefers to accumulate countless browser windows just in case they come in handy later.
A software engineer, however, has taken her fascination with keeping tabs open to an extreme. For more than two years, she gathered almost 7,500 open websites on Firefox and has no plans of shutting them anytime soon.
A Firefox enthusiast named Hazel took to X that her extensively tab-filled surfing experience had completely disappeared.
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
Although this may sound like a terrifying tale for those who cherish their browsing history and tabs, she, fortunately, retrieved those tabs owing to the X community, who taught her how to recover an old Firefox browsing session.
Hazel said in an interview that she safeguards all those tabs open out of nostalgia, saying, “I like to scroll back and see clusters of tabs from months ago—it’s like a trip down memory lane on whatever I was doing/learning about/thinking about.”
With so many tabs open, some X users were worried about how Hazel’s device could perform. Interestingly enough, it hasn’t been affected by all those tabs. “Firefox is quite memory efficient and isn’t actually loading the websites unless I click on the tab—so it’s not very resource intensive,” she explains.
Meanwhile, a Mozilla representative affirmed that keeping an excessive number of Firefox tabs running uses “practically no memory whatsoever.”
“We’ve been working hard on the performance of Firefox over the last several years, and we’re glad to see the results of those efforts paying off,” they stated.
They also mentioned that tab-saving fans will soon get access to fresh features. “We’re working hard to provide people with even better tools for managing dozens to thousands of tabs. 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 Mozilla rep said.
Hence, despite having thousands of tabs open in her browser, Hazel’s device manages to function normally and doesn’t take up all of the RAM on her system.
On April 30, Hazel finally closed the thousands of tabs after discovering how to restore an old session from the profiles cache. “I feel like a part of me is restored,” she wrote.
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
This instance illustrates how Firefox utilizes Tab Unloading to put unused tabs to sleep to save storage. In October 2021, Mozilla brought this feature to consumers, and a similar feature called Sleeping Tabs was launched by Chrome and Edge a year later.
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