Is Betterfox good for someone having thousands of tabs opened (discarded) over multiple windows?

[matru]

My workflow consists of a lot tabs being opened, albeit discarded (unloaded), but there can be 200-400 tabs active at any point of time.

Would Betterfox work for me?

[yokoffing]

If Firefox works for you, then the Betterfox tweaks would also work for you.

also #302 (comment)

[Feejus]

Dear Matru,

I just wanted to expand on this. The BetterFox user.js optimizes the standard Firefox by turning off things like Telemetry and reducing loading times. However, I must admit that having 200-400 tabs open is quite a lot to keep track of.

[matru]

@yokoffing thanks!

@Feejus very aware of it, but with systems I got in place, including treestyle tree tabs and various grouping methods, and various binds it's something I really find myself using productively, and since context switching is something I do every so often, permanent bookmarking does not work well in my workflow. The cost of this is lots of RAM usage, which is a big negative, but macOS handles things well, and incomparably so compared to linux and windows.

[yokoffing]

Firefox on macOS is almost like a different browser. Performance-wise, it works very well out of the box (for me).

Until Mozilla develops a more concerted effort towards memory management, I’d use Auto tab discard or similar extension for resource management, with that many tabs open.

[matru]

is there no real benefit in terms of performance then on macos by using Betterfox?

[philg-dev]

I'm using the "Simple Tab Groups" addon and I've got 800+ tabs open at all times with generally no big issues with RAM.

I have some specific tab groups configured to be automatically discarded (i.e. unload tab from memory, while not closing it), which works great for me.

In some cases when I have a bunch of really memory intensive tabs loaded in-memory, I use about:processes to manually discard the ones that use the most memory (again without closing them).

Another thing: If you happen to use a bunch of pinned tabs - those love to eat memory by default, because they will always be loaded into memory, even when restarting Firefox. This behavior can be changed to on-demand loading with:

browser.sessionstore.restore_pinned_tabs_on_demand = true

Maybe some of this helps.