On 03/06/2023 18:37, The Wanderer wrote:
On 2023-06-03 at 07:18, Max Nikulin wrote:
On 03/06/2023 17:40, The Wanderer wrote:
Hey, now. I once had a Firefox session (with "restore tabs from
previous session" enabled, and about six-to-eight windows) with
5,190 open tabs, and that computer only had 24GB of RAM.
Modern browsers supports "unloaded" tabs, so most of your tabs likely
were similar to bookmarks with page resources not loaded to RAM.
That feature was, AFAIK, first introduced in the BarTab addon which I
mentioned. So, yes, and although in hindsight I didn't state it
explicitly, I intended to convey that by mentioning that addon.
Sorry, I never used BarTab, so I was unaware that tab unloading appeared
in this add-on earlier than in Firefox. For me an "open tab" is the one
that is rendered, has DOM tree in memory and perhaps running JS, webasm,
animated images and styles, so some pages may be really hungry for RAM.
Most of your tabs are just some records and will load resources from net
when you really open them.
I appreciate that browsers limit consumed resources by unloading page
content when a tab is not accessed for some period of time. It is great
that users may have hundreds of tabs despite I mostly have no more than
a couple of dozens.
I just would not call a tab "open" because I consider it as a synonym to
"loaded". Anyway add-ons for advanced tab management hides most of them.
I believe, web site creators should be blamed more aggressively than
browser developers for RAM requirements of contemporary web applications.
P.S. Perhaps in future tabs as UI element in browsers will be merged
with bookmarks and browsing history. The only prerequisite to better
save state of scroll position and partially filled forms.
I'm not sure quite what you're envisioning, but one reason why I keep so
many open tabs rather than using e.g. bookmarks instead is because I
want to be able to preserve forward/back history within each tab; I
don't know of any other feature that enables doing that.
Thanks, I have never considered such use case, but it is not against of
fusing of tabs, bookmarks, and history. Your tabs are a kind of advanced
bookmarks, a favorite nodes in browsing history graph. Current bookmark
UI is just too limited in browsers, so tabs are more flexible and more
convenient for you.
I mostly open new tabs to follow links (actually it is more close to
enqueue a page for reading). That is why usefulness of forward-backward
history is quite limited for me. Unfortunately opener is not saved for
tabs. (I consider annotating of visited pages is more important, but it
is another story.)
"Pure" tabs are hot cache of rendered pages where current DOM state is
important for following interaction. Everything else are just records in
some database. For me, tabs UI is a kind of L1 cache, a subset of pages
closely related to the current or planned soon activity.
Of course, I do not insist that everybody should think of browser UI in
my terms, it is just a point of view.
