The feature is called Tab Unloading, and weirdly enough they made it not easy to access despite its usefulness.
You basically have to type about:unloads in the address bar and hit enter. If you then click on āUnloadā, it will put the least used tabs to sleep. If you keep clicking that button until itās greyed out, youāll have unloaded all your tabs from memory.
This feature is handy if you want to temporarily switch to something that is memory hungry without having to close your 100 tabs.
Your Firefox should be doing this automatically when it detects the system needs more memory. You shouldnāt need to do it manually in almost any case
Your OS should do this automatically, your programs shouldnāt worry about cold memory.
Your OS canāt decide when a tab is inactive though, given that they can run code, play media, etc. at arbitrary times.
Firefox canāt either, because pretty much any page today will have JavaScript running.
The only way it works is to force tabs that havenāt been opened in some time to unload regardless of activityā¦ but thatās something that the vast majority of users would not appreciate. For power users there are a ton of ātab unloaderā add-ons that do this.
maybe @Eggymatrix ment swapping.
The OS tracks which memory-pages are used least and will swap them out when active programs need more ram than available.
Swapping anonymous pages is an extremely poor āsolutionā to cold memory. Itās the big hammer approach that technically always works but isnāt optimal for ā¦anything really. Thatās the best the kernel can easily and quickly know however which is why itās done at all.
Itād be much better if the process could shave off memory usage using its own domain knowledge. In the example of firefox, itās much faster and less jarring to the user to have 10 tabs reloaded from the web (browser shows a spinner as usual, doesnāt lag) rather than swapped back in from disk (entire browser lags and it probably even takes longer).
Thereās no reliable mechanism to signal any of this to me knowledge however, so processes must guess the right time to do discard memory pre-emtively.
I believe you are mistaken, there is no way that reloading a tab from the web is faster than it being read from the disk.
Nope! Not happening or at least not soon enough. Neither on macOS or Linux (canāt speak for the stupid platform).
Firefox will happily keep tabs open, even if macOS reports major memory pressure or Linux needs to invoke the OOM killer because itās Gigabytes into swap.
Not to speak of what happens before memory pressure is reached; Firefox will also happily use all of your memory even if youād rather have it free for something else youāre going to do next.
Firefox does this automatically to prevent crashing. Thereās no real reason to unload tabs manually. If your operating system or Firefox needs more memory, then it will unload the tabs automatically. Unused ram is wasted ram, donāt be scared by ram usage going up. It gets freed on demand.
There are reasons, and there are addons that allow you to unload tabs via their right click menu.
For me it is a way to keep tabs in a window for organization without them using cpu. In some sense itās like replacing tabs with bookmarks that integrate into the browser like tabs.
Just close unused tabs smh
Canāt understand people whoāre juggling 100s of tabs
Thatās fine, do what works for you. I usually have 50+ tabs open, sometimes >100. Iām a software dev, so Iāll typically have the following:
- a dozen or so JIRA tickets
- a dozen or so GitHub PR tabs
- a dozen or so documentation tabs
- several background tabs with stuff in listening to (usually music or streams)
- several SM or news pages (for breaks)
When I finish a project, Iāll close everything and start it all over again. I basically use tabs as a mixture of to-dos and bookmarks, but only for things I need in the short term.
My personal computer usually only has 20 tabs or so, mostly with gaming wikis or shopping pages.
It works well for me.
Personally I use simple tab group that allow you to separate tabs into groups that you can open in different windows. Itās extremely useful but it means sometimes if you switch between multiple tab groups you might have a lot of tabs open, but using this would allow you to majorly mitigate that problem.
They cannot juggle 100 tabs.
Simple as that
Its not possible to manage for anyone.
Theyre just too dumb to close them
This, if you want to act on something later, just create a bookmark and set a reminder, act on what you need, then close and move on, donāt clutter your browser and your head.
Usually, i open one window for each task, so i donāt get a lot of unrelated content mixed up and loose focus. I rarely need more than 1~5 tabs.
I use this extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/discard/ which provides an option in the context menu for tabs to discard them. I donāt use it often but it can be helpful if your browser is slowing down.
addon Tab Suspender does this automatically
