I previously mentioned a month ago that I came back to Firefox because of its far better memory management. In the process of doing so, I set it up to automatically reopen the previous session each time I close it, making it remember each open tabs I previously had. In doing so, what happens is some kind of “tab creep”, where opened tabs I ought to have closed remain there, and too lazy to clean them up, the tab bar becomes cramped with old tabs.
The reason why I tend to not want to indiscriminately close all tabs is because some of them should remain open, others should not, and without much grouping it’s difficult to tell which ones matter. Yes, most modern web browsers allow you to reorder tabs, but being stuck in one dimension isn’t a great way to organize things.
Well, in Firefox there was a feature that long ago I removed from the toolbar because I thought it was “gimmicky”, but nowadays find indispensable. The Firefox tab groups work amazingly well, especially with automatically saved sessions. For example, if I have to do some research on something, I open a new tab group for it, and when I know I’m done the day after or so, I just close the entire group altogether. If I accidentally open a new link in a group it shouldn’t be, going to the tab group view and dropping it elsewhere is easily done.
And, does it scale well to dozens of tabs, or even more? Well, actually it does. When running short of memory, Firefox clears up from memory the least recently used tabs, and when you click on them later the page will just refresh again. While Firefox doesn’t use one process per tab like Google Chrome to prevent a page from crashing everything, its automatic saving of sessions will make it recover everything if something makes it crash, or if you have to reboot the computer.
Published on November 1, 2012 at 21:33 EDT
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