A Mozilla Firefox Power User Kept 7,470 Tabs Open On The Browser For Two Years

For most people, having more than a couple dozen browser tabs open at once is already an 'achievement'. But for those who work with the web, and that a web browser is often at the forefront of all apps they have to open, chances are, they open a lot more tabs.

But nothing compares to a software engineer who calls herself, Hazel.

The Mozilla Firefox fangirl literally went hardcore, when she manages having nearly 7,500 active open tabs at once.

The self-proclaimed "tab hoarder" showed the mind-boggling number of tabs she managed to open in the browser in two years of activity, and doesn't plan on closing them anytime soon.

She shared this after finding that the browser initially unable to restore all the tabs.

This happened because at first, Firefox had some trouble restoring the gargantuan tab load.

But fortunately for Hazel, she managed to revive her vast digital collection via the browser's profile cache functionality.

Hazel said that she keeps all those tabs open because she likes "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."

So, when she recovered her 7,000+ tab browsing session, she said, "I feel like a part of me is restored."

But what amazes people on X is the amount of memory Firefox had to have to maintain the whole tabs open.

Surprisingly, all those tabs Hazel has, didn't impact her computer's performance, even by a bit.

Hazel said that the session file containing all 7,470 tabs is only around 70MB in size.

So, even with thousands of tabs on her browser, her computer still runs normally and not hogging all the RAM on her system.

This is made possible because Firefox optimizes things by only loading tabs into memory if they've been opened recently.

And to her amazement, she said that the whole process only took "no more than a minute."

"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 said.

This aligns with what Mozilla's claim, which boasts the browser's ability to handle extreme tab hoarding.

At the time, a Mozilla representative confirmed that having countless tabs open consumes "practically no memory whatsoever" in Firefox.

"We're working hard to provide people with even better tools for managing dozens to thousands of tabs," the Mozilla spokesperson said. "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."

"We’ve been working hard on the performance of Firefox over the last several years, and we’re glad to see the results of those efforts paying off," Mozilla added.

By comparison, Google Chrome, a rival that is also the most-popular web browser, has historically used up more than its fair share of computer memory, though Google has taken some steps to combat that.

A quick test by anyone can shows that just a handful of Chrome tabs on a Microsoft Windows computer can take gigabytes of memory.

"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 representative said

"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."