If you have over 1000 tabs... learn how to use bookmarks instead. I don't understand how you think 1000+ tabs is a feasible way of organizing.

The solution to write your own application that does what you want because your workflow is not a use case that browsers are designed for. It's not bad to wish for features but your workflow is never going to be catered for in a browser and it's both unreasonable and unrealistic to expect otherwise - hence you need to do it yourself.

If you can't or don't know how to do that yourself, I suggest you listen to the advice everyone else is giving you. Organisation does require ongoing work and given your comments it will likely require a lot of upfront effort to change your browser hygiene habits but once you are more organised it becomes a lot easier and a lot less work to stay on top of things.

It's none of my business but I wonder why you feel it's so important to open 500+ tabs just to buy something small online. Doing research and being informed is good but it seems disproportionate and perhaps talking to a professional might help you with that.

Have you tried increasing the size of your swap memory in windows? Otherwise known as "virtual memory". Depending on the speed of your drive and available space, you might be able to increase the vertual memory size to get more performance.

But what about using a page archiving service, even a self-hosted one, like Shiori. Shiori has an extension that can allow for single click page archiving right from the browser. The pages are saved as html files or txt files and it will create a readability version of the file which is just the text and images. You could then search the files and their contents using something like VS Code to search the whole directory where the files are stored. There are plenty of other ways to do that search once you have those archives, though. I think even Windows File Search will search the contents of a txt or html file stored on the device.

Shiori also has its own search, which is pretty fast, and searches the contents of the archives as well.

I have no direct solution to you exact problem but your usage of tabs sounds like a nightmare.

A while back I found Omnivore which works like a charm if you want to "freeze" the contents of a website to read them later. You can also self host it if you like.

I took it a step further because I love Obsidian as personal knowledge management and I want to have everything in one place. There's a plugin to sync all your saved pages from Omnivore to Obsidian. In the template for it I then have my marked highlights, the links to the version in Omnivore and the original URL and also the whole content. So I have all of that in markdown which is really nice to work with.

Maybe that's a solution you too could be happy with.

I came in here knowing exactly what the comments would look like, and I'm still disappointed. "Just don't use so many tabs" is not an answer. If you don't have anything constructive to say, just move on instead of getting uppity about...not using browsers very heavily or understanding other use cases.

Yeah, thousands of tabs seems extreme. But "you should dedicate a larger amount of time and effort all day, every day to make the computer's job easier" is a bad take. That's obviously worse than OP's existing workflow.

Sorry OP, I don't have a real answer either. You might find Arc Browser's tab system to suit you better, but since it's chromium-based I suspect performance might be worse.

Edit: out of curiosity, how much memory does your PC have, and how much is Firefox using during these freezes? I wonder how much of the delay is caused by swapping.

I am not sure what you’re working on but from your answers I’ve read you seems to need access to a lot of information with a few keystrokes, like searching for a keyword or tag.

In my opinion you are using the wrong tool for that. Ditch the browser and learn about the Zettelkasten way of working. It is really powerful for plenty of applications like science, studies, dev, or even the way I use it, author repository of ideas/concepts/stuff I need when writing a book.

You can do that with several software but I like obsidian for that (and because of all its plugins you could probably find something to automatically copy webpage content)

On the downside side :

• You’ll have to learn Zettelkasten, Obsidian etc
• Obviously do the work of writing (or copy pasting) your vault.

But on the plus size :

• You’ll have all the information you need at your fingertips, searchable with keywords, tags, associations etc.
• Everything is basic text MD files so it will still be readable by any text editor or terminal in the next century.
• You can have images, run code, do some mathlib, jupyter etc inside.
• Text is light, easy to store, backup and retrieve.
• If you do good enough you can have a satisfying visual representation of your new brain, kinda mindmap (which is also possible)

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I tend to have ~10,000 tabs because I obsessively fail to clean up. But it never takes much memory or cpu, my PC isn't amazing yet Firefox is always lightning quick.

I've never used the discard or merge windows features though, I can see why those might cause issues. I assume these two functions just aren't optimised for so many tabs.

One addon I might recommend to help keep numbers down is Duplicate Tab Closer, which has options to specify how similar tabs can be to be considered duplicates, and also will detect across all open windows if desired.

Install Onetab

Oh, hmm, interesting. I would simply not bother trying to clean up your tabs (it's what I do, 6476 baby!).

Perhaps consider also getting more RAM. 128 is good, 256 is better. Thanks to ddr5, ddr4 isn't all that expensive now (and 5000 series can't use ddr5 anyways).

I'm really curious about the workflow you have that needs that many tabs. How does the History and Bookmark functions fall short of what you need?

Maybe don’t have a THOUSAND tabs