Firefox user loses 7,470 opened tabs saved over two years after they can’t restore browsing session
cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/12299180
https://www.tomshardware.com/software/mozilla-firefox/firefox-user-loses-7470-opened-tabs-saved-over-two-years-after-they-cant-restore-browsing-sessionOpen linkView original on lemmy.dbzer0.com234
Comments117
who does that?!
How can it be in any way useful to keep 7000 open tabs?
Has she not heard of bookmarks?
I am thoroughly confused
The article explains that she likes to look at tabs in the past as a reminder of something she was interested in.
It’s sort of a snapshot in time. I get it. But hell no I’m closing tabs.
"Look, just add in an option to re-enable spacebar heating."
https://xkcd.com/1172/
Meanwhile no one considers whatever happened to DenverCoder9
You can bookmark a whole window full of tabs all into a single bookmark folder. It's called "bookmark all tabs" or something like that. Then later you can open all of them again into a new window using a single button again.
I know the average person isn't tech savvy, but this loss is almost entirely on themself. If you have 7000 tabs open and it's important to you that they stay saved, then it's on you to simply ASK someone if keeping them open is an ok way to do it
This is hoarder behaviour, so I wouldn’t expect it to make sense as a general statement
See my other comment reply above. I don't know how to get a direct link to a comment on lemmy
Why do you need to “save” a tab? If you’re never going to look at it again what is the point?
I can understand someone who has 20-30 tabs. They’ll probably go back to at least one of them. But 7000???? There is nothing to save it’s an impossible rats nest with zero organization so the likelihood of reopening even one of those tabs is virtually zero. So in this case what’s the purposing of “saving” these tabs?
Sometimes you actually do go back to those saved tabs. There's no way to know ahead of time which tabs you're actually gonna go back to and which you won't, so it's perfectly reasonable to save groups of tabs if there was a topic you were researching or whatever. Just save the tabs into a new bookmark folder with a descriptive name so you can find it later.
But with that said, 7000 is way beyond including just the things a person might ever actually want to go back to later.
I... Just search the history. It's there for a reason
I have 4 virtual desktops, usually each with their own Firefox instance. I still have less than 10 tabs open.
YOU DON'T NEED THAT MANY TABS
How do you deal with Firefox updates?
I type
yayMan if only firefox had some kinda feature that you could see your previous activity. Something akin to a history of what you did in the browser.
I get what you mean, but not that long ago wepages used to hijack your back button by forcing redirects to fill up the history, it is less common today, but endless scrolling sites love filling up your history.
At that point, just use archivebox instead.
Or maybe her browser history
True, but my understanding is that she wanted to save the pages how they were when she found them.
firefox just remembers the url, or not? when my system crashes and firefox recovers my tabs it needs to load them all from their respective servers first, so it seems like it's not "saving" the page on exit
Yeah, I'm talking about archivebox, not necessarily Firefox alone.
Self-hosted Archive.org? Neat
There's a tool I use at work for administrating Apple devices and it opens about four tabs for every profile you look at. You can quickly stack up to about 50 tabs. Utterly stupid programming.
But I'm not using it I have maybe 12 tabs open at a time.
Yeah I don't really get it but it seems like it's not that uncommon to have heaps of tabs open. More than 7,000 is obviously exceptional but it checks out - there's a few users like this in mozilla's telemetry.
I think it's basically just concern that you might not be able to find your way back to something you were looking at before. To me that seems irrational but everyone needs to sail their own ship I guess.
I'll say it again - anyone who needs (or let's be honest, thinks they need) hundreds of thousands of open tabs has something wrong with their brain and should probably see a professional about it.
Isn't it just hoarding but in digital space?
I don’t understand people who use a million tabs. Most I’ll have is like ten. And that’s if I’m deep in a problem in a project. I hate clutter
some people visit many different sites, continuously throughout the day, and it doesn't make sense to keep reopening tabs, plus then you forget about it
That is fine, open as many tabs as you want, but don't keep a shitload of tabs open between sessions
Then you're really not doing that much research. I can easily open 20 to 50 tabs for just one project. I'm not defending leaving them open. I've finally started to address the problem by learning how to take notes. I chose Joplin for this.
Autism/ADHD is a bitch for some things and note taking and writing up research has never just "come to me".
I’m autistic as well and having that many tabs open gives me anxiety. I mainly code, and when I find a solution I either bookmark it until I can use it, it I use it and then close it. Maybe not immediately, but I try not to have so many open the broader can’t show them in the tab bar. Because it gets really disorganized after that
The satisfaction of solving an issue, making a note in comments where the fix/solution/documentation came from, then closing the 20 odd browser tabs and being able to move on is great.
Bookmarking is great- I never use them again though!
That is fine, the issue is not having 500+ tabs open, but having 500+ tabs persistantly open between sessions
I'm going to read it later, really! If I make it a bookmark I'd have to organize it now, which is effort.
ADHD and easier to type a url than open a new tab. People that can maintain a curated tab list.. I wish my brain would allow it.
Once a day I close browsers to make sure there’s not some work item I forgot to hit post on.
In AuDHD and I hate tabs. I'm worse at work but I don't go over 5 or 6 tabs
I set my important links in the bookmarks tab, and if I need anything else, I hit Ctrl+t, type the first letter, and I'm there 90% of the time faster than sifting for the right tab
Unchecked "Show search suggestions ahead of browsing history in address bar results" in Firefox and made this easier for me :)
Do people not know about browsing history?
Or bookmarks?
Or Notepad, if the links are really that important?
Is this a new mental illness I haven't heard of?
Actually that's kinda cool. I shouldn't be a hater.
But... Firefox has a history feature that would serve her purpose much better?
No it's probably s mental illness or something. If she like the tabs as a memoir thing, she should do what people have done on vacations for decades - take pictures (aka here as screenshots or saved pages).
So not archiving these memories in the way you would determines whether or not it is a mental illness? How is taking photos any mpre or less of a mental illness than leaving the tabs open?
Seems like quite the jump to conclusion to assume it is a mental illness.
You're literally describing windows recall
No, literally describing pressing the "print screen" button
Firefox is not the right Tool for the job. And so many Tabs open? That doesn't make sense in any concievable way.
That just means they haven't updated Firefox in years.
What would be the right tool for the job of keeping 7k tabs open?
Commas, like tabs, are free and convenient.
How does someone have half a tab open?
What?
7,470 is just under 7½ in a lot of languages, the , is used the same way as a . in English number writing so 7,470 = 7.470 in English.
And this was written in English, so using English conventions.
It was a joke, ever heard of those?
Nope, according to the article, someone told her how to restore the tabs from the session file.
Did you know that Firefox has this cool new option (spoiler: it's not new), that lets you bookmark websites into folders and when you click on that folder from your toolbar it says "Open All in Tabs" at the bottom of the list. BAM! Tabs restored.
You could also tie this folder and command into a Terminal command in Linux, so you could just type "psychosis" and it will open Firefox with 7,470 tabs open if you'd like.
I'm sure this will cause your laptop to explode, but that's a downstream issue.
How is that person's Firefox not crashing with that many tabs opening. These people are knob heads!
BROWSING HISTORY, nuff said lmao
How did they get a reporter into my house
I seem to remember a post on Lemmy from a user asking about how to keep a browser responsive with about 10,000 tabs open so it's certainly a usage pattern for some.
What’s the point tho? It’s not like you’re actively using the 10k tabs.
It’s an impossible amount of tabs to manage so the only explanation is they are opened, looked at once, and then thrown into an abyss for another tab to be opened in a continuous cycle.
The post is here: https://lemmy.ml/post/16965449
In short, they wanted to keep the tabs bookmarked but didn't like working with the bookmarks implementations in conventional browsers
Oh. Well you can’t fix stupid
Good.
This has been a thing since at least 2012.
And there's literally dedicated extensions to tracking open tabs for you
Tab Stash people, its the perfect extension for tab hoarders like me. It saves and closes all your opened tabs as bookmarks with a single click, and gives you a neat view of everything you saved.
if you want to keep something forever, you gotta make backups
Just screenshot your tabs. 😇
Get some help.
When a confessed degenerate says that, you have a problem.
Meanwhile there's me who wipes his cache and data after every browser session...
I usually save neither the browsing history neither the opened tabs. I add interesting pages in bookmarks, but rarely check them again.
Is it this person?
My dad does this, he allways restores his tabs and hardly ever use bookmarks.
I had to help him migrate this shitshow to his new computer, and whenever it breaks he gets really upset.
He likes being able to have access to the history of every tab.
I may be an IT guy but I could not stand doing this.
AKA User was so stupid, he or she should better not use a computer in the first place.
It's not stupid if it works (also user is satisfied). But it's just another bug that can wipe user data, so it better gets fixed.
Just because it works it is not "not stupid". I can accellerate my car to about 100km/h and drive it into a wall - yes, that works, but it would not exactly be smart. Having >100 tabs open in a browser is in the same category.
How so? As seen from article it works fine. It doesn't require terabytes of RAM. The car example is irrelevant and stupid, also will kill the car and you.
As the article shows, it exactly doesn't. Would that person have complained about the loss of the stupid many tabs if firefox had been able to recover them?
Sorry what? The user was able to recover them. Such complains are valid because data was in a state where user couldn't access it as usual at some point.
I have around 100 tabs open. If they remain opened, I can ctrl+tab in chronologic history. That's otherwise not possible.
// Edit: Also, this order remains across reboots I never had any issue with this. They can easily be recovered after an update and the ordering still exists. It is simply more powerful then bookmarks. Also from these tabs may only be a low percentage bookmark worthy.
At some commenters: just because you are not grasping my workflow doesn't mean that I am missusing my tool. In fact I am able to fully navigate my entire session with the keyboard across multiple tasks spanning multiple months. If you simply dump all of these in the bookmarks I am lowering my bookmark quality, which results in wrong suggestions in my urlbar. And I do not even use any plugin.
Type
^followed by space in the search bar. You can now simply search through your history by text. Far more efficient.That does not aid my use case of most recently used visiting. It does also imply I know the title or url of the tab. It may be obscure like e835bdk83o4nt0s.
Your history is already sorted by most recently used. If you just open the history search drop-down without typing anything, you can tab through your most recent pages.
History search works with more than just the title, it's also can match words in the description, keywords in the page, or I believe just about any piece of HTML metadata. After using this feature for years as a software engineer viewing plenty of obscure or obfuscated webpages, I've never had it fail to find me the page I want. I simply type a word associated with the thing I want to view, and every time I can easily find the page I'm looking for.
Thanks.
I will put your input and that of [email protected] into use the day after tomorrow and come back here to report back.
Much love, Sirs or Madams.
Save bookmarks, sort them by date accessed, maybe?
These are temporary tabs which are revisited and closed in a specific manner. Saving them implies I need them in the long-term. I would also need to explore them again.
How short term are you actively using all 100 tabs?
My workflow is also primarily keyboard-based. I don't even use many bookmarks. Hotkeys to open new tabs or move the cursor to the address bar, and type like 3 letters of the site I want to go to before autocomplete knows what I want. Easier to me than having to maintain/remember the order of tabs.
This session is almost one year old and on my private laptop. At work I used to juggle three projects so sometimes I had three windows with up to 30-40 tabs. Effectively they remain about 5 workdays project wise. I use it as a short-term memory: While on call, open tab with workload, write it down on paper and queue it.
Best thing is to finally close all that crap and get to a tab I wanted to read for my own.
Me neither. Had to tweak the urlbar in about:config though.
That's ctrl_G right? I tend to close + open the tab to get to the address bar and then restore the closed tab. Is there a more quicker way to get into the address bar than said binding?
It's reliable and muscle memory. Its perfect for short interruptions and and then resume where I have left.
You have heard the word "bookmarks", no?
Yes. And I know how to work with them. Your point beeing?
If you know how to use bookmarks, why do you still use many tabs?
My bookmarks shall be my first suggestions in my urlbar, so a bookmark is either frequently used or something I want to refer to specifically because of its content and quality.
Everything I want to read later is placed as leftmost of my top-level tabs. Opening tabs is right to my current tab without visiting them immediately. I visit them by closing the first and immediately get the next unvisited. My previous tab is still my top-level.
If I do not have the time to read everything leftmost, I may open a new window. If there is something really worth it to be saved, it gets elected a bookmark.
// after reading my own answer: My bookmarks are curated across years, my session might life 1 hour to multiple months. Firefox allows me to even transfer my tabs across new devices. Each time i finished a task and close tabs, I am able to read on of the tabs to the left. This is work time.
It's stupid if what the person use tabs for is what bookmarks exist for without running the risk of losing all of them.
Either browser saves your tabs on exit or it doesn't. There should not be such a risk, plain and simple. If you insist there is then please provide an exact number of tabs where it starts to happen, and/or when it becomes acceptable for it to happen.
Anytime you use a program in a way that you can't reasonably expect to have been tested you should accept that you run the risk of hitting bugs. Ex.: no one should reasonably expect devs to test having 7k tabs from different websites open when there's an existing feature for this type of usage that is 100% safe (bookmarks).
When your usage is out of the norm it's not unusual for programs to start acting weird and more often than not it's not intended and can even come from an issue with how the hardware and software work together and it might not even be possible to fix the issue.
70 mb is not excessive for a session file and therefore 7k tabs is not excessive. 7 million tabs would be insane I imagine. But not 7k. User proved herself by using it for years that it performs adequately.
My point stands. If browser can lose 7k tabs it can lose as few as 7 and such bugs should be fixed.
If you can't name exact point between 7 and 7k where "reason" ends you have to learn more about proper programming. So you could realize that the actual limit is far from that, and there are still a lot of things to improve so all users could get benefits, not just a few.
Somebody teach the new boys what a bookmark is pls.
Locking this post. Pretty sure everything that's needed to be said has been said so threads are devolving.
How do you even navigate that many tabs?
People can keep 5-10 things in their short term memory. Anything beyond that you can't feasibly multitask with so it should be a bookmark instead of a tab.
Maybe browsers should merge the two functions. (We already have pinned tabs too)
You can search through your open tabs by typing
%followed by space in the search bar. I often do that since I tend to reference a lot of documentation/merge requests/admin interfaces/etc. and end up with quite a few tabs in a working session (usually clear them out the next day). Nowhere near 7000, though. Maybe 50.Should make that a feature
Been there, done that. 😓
(Though a couple times I was able to recover them or a sufficiently close session.)
Tab session manager that difficult to install? 😮💨
There are some judgmental assholes here. Worse than the political communities.
🎻
Frankly I think even the people with 25+ tabs open have a problem.
It's amazing how many people think having tons of tabs is insane. How about all browsers start limiting how many tabs can be opened at a time (to accommodate proper, sane usage rules)?
Firefox Focus on Android is there and it doesn't have a button to add a new tab. You can only create one by clicking a link from those already existing. Also, just four shortcuts for some reason and no bookmarks.
It's a great default browser to open random links from your apps: no cookies, no logins, always a private tab experience. But when you need a bit more (like translating a word in an article you are reading) it's restricted. Because Moz decided that's the way it should be.
Yeah I meant desktop browsers.
Doesn't matter if we talk about said concept in reality and how arbitrary limitations are weird. Although mobile internet usage is a little less incompatible with that idea.
It matters. When I say browser I mean an application where user can design their own workspace and have it saved for further adjustments. Mobile browser concept for opening URLs from other apps is very far from that.
I can easily do that in a day of work because I often have to reference documentation from many different sources.
I'll probably have 1-3 tabs for jira boards/tickets, a couple for gitlab merge requests, at least a few for the documentation of different third-party libraries I'm using, a few confluence pages, a few for different specs, 1-2 for Figma designs, a handful for different admin panels I need access to, a couple production dashboards/logs, in addition to whatever searching I need to do. I usually clear them out at the start of the next day, but they can add up pretty quickly.
Work in IT and have many different tickets and projects. 25 is nothing.
It's really not a big deal if you use tab groups or similar. Not all are loaded at all times but ephemeral enough that i wouldn't want to save down to bookmarks.