Hazel, who prefers to keep her last name under wraps, presumably because of the shame of being an engineer and an Apple user, posted a screenshot showing 7,470 tabs open earlier this week after finding the browser initially unable to restore all the tabs. Hazel wasn't beaten; she managed to resurrect the tabs via a Firefox profile cache and told PCMag that reloading the full session took "no more than a minute."
"I feel like a part of me is restored," Hazel wrote on X once the Firefox tabs had returned triumphantly.
The Firefox fanatic tells PCMag she keeps so many tabs open for nostalgia reasons. "I like to scroll back and see clusters of tabs from months ago—it's like a trip down memory lane on whatever I was doing/learning about/thinking about," she says.
Surprisingly, all those tabs haven't affected the computer's performance. "Firefox is quite memory efficient and isn't actually loading the websites unless I click on the tab—so it's not very resource intensive," Hazel says.
A Mozilla rep confirms to PCMag that having tons of Firefox tabs open consumes "practically no memory whatsoever."
Mozilla adds, "We’ve been working hard on Firefox's performance over the last several years, and we’re glad to see the results of those efforts paying off."
By comparison, rival browser Google Chrome has historically gobbled up more than its fair share of computer memory, though Google has taken some steps to combat that. Surprisingly no one is talking about Safari either.
A quick PCMag test shows that 10 Chrome tabs on a Windows 11 PC with 32GB of RAM and 2TB of NVMe SSD storage take up over 2,000MB, or 12.5 per cent of PC memory, so there's still room for improvement (Hazel's massive Firefox session file is just 70MB).
Mozilla also shared that new features are on the horizon to help tab-saving enthusiasts. "We’re working hard to provide people with even better tools for managing dozens to thousands of tabs. While we think it’s amazing that anyone has 7,000 active tabs, it also shows the degree to which tab management is a common problem," the Mozilla rep said.
While Firefox users can already create different user profiles, Mozilla says it plans to roll out a new profiles feature and a new tab organisation feature later this year; Google is also testing the latter on Chrome. In the meantime, some third-party Firefox add-ons can help manage tons of tabs.
