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Firefox user loses 7,470 opened tabs saved over two years after they can’t restore browsing session
(www.tomshardware.com)
this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2024
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In Firefox (and Chrome, I think?) Ctrl+L is what gets you into the address bar.
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.
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.
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.