When using Firefox on her computer, my wife opens a new tab when starting a new search, and opens links in a new tab when she may want to use the linking page later.
However she never closes tabs, effectively using them instead of bookmarks, which causes memory usage to keep growing, then swap use to keep increasing as tab count goes into the hundreds. Later as memory usage becomes too high it is no longer possible to hibernate, and we eventually reach a state where the whole computer becomes unusable (for instance bringing Thunderbird to front and clicking on a mail will take several minutes during which the whole computer is unresponsive). At that point we need to either close firefox entirely (which may take up to ten minutes and may lose unsaved data) or reboot (same).
I added memory to her laptop (now 2G in total - it's an old model, that's the highest capacity I could find that was compatible) but it just means she is now able to open more tabs before things start breaking.
My question: is there a way to extend or modify Firefox in a way to let her follow this usage pattern without memory usage exploding? I imagine merging the concepts of tabs and bookmarks, e.g. so that tabs that have not been opened for several days be automatically bookmarked and closed (going into the filesystem where it won't take precious resources).
Ideally, some pages such as the GMail web interface and currently playing YouTube videos (they can be recognised by the initial "▶") should never be auto-closed.
55 Answers
This extension might be what I'm looking for:
1As someone who has the same kind of net usage, where I just keep tabs that I'm busy with open until done with their topic, I would recommend using UnloadTab.
It will unload the tab from memory after a few minutes (that one can set) while it stays 'open' - a tab can also be unloaded manually. You can also exclude some address from being unloaded and pinned tabs are also never unloaded.
2It would be better to "educate" your wife, since this seems to be a problem. The max tabs extension allows you to set a maximum number of tabs and display a warning when trying to create more:
Go to Add-ons > Extensions and click on preference to set the limit.
2I also open a lot of tabs - to the point that Firefox becomes unstable (and don't like Chrome - which seems to do the unloading thing by itself without any add-on). Although the maximum was 100, usually not more than 30-40. But - I always close the tabs as well when I'm finished. I use the tabmix session save/restore to save a collection of tabs usually on a certain topic. Then I close them all. And be fresh to start again. I would never ever tolerate such a slow computer. Hopefully sometimes i get back, restore the session, finish the research and delete all tabs and the session.
You could try to implement this. Plus an unload add on - to speed things up at the 50-100 mark.
The OneTab Add On is nice. You press a button and it closes all your tabs and creates a persistent new tab with links to all the urls of the tabs you closed so you can open them again later.
