I wonder if having less RAM would compel you to read, commit to long term memory, and then close those 80 tabs you have open.

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magicalhippo 15 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The issue for me is that bookmarks suck. They don't store the state (where I was reading) and they reload the webpage so I might get something else entirely when I come back. They also kinda just disappear from sight.

If instead bookmarks worked like tab saving does, I would be happy to get rid of a few hundred tabs. Have them save the page and state like the tab saving mechanism does. Have some way to remind me of them after a week or month or so.

Combine that with a search function that can search in contents as well as the title, and I'm changing habbits ASAP.

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bananadonkey 14 hours ago | parent [-]

Regarding wanting to preserve the current version of a page: I use Karakeep to archive those pages. I am sure there are other similar solutions such as downloading an offline version, but this works well for me.

I do this mostly for blog posts etc I might not get around to reading for weeks or months from now, and don't want them to disappear in the meantime.

Everything else is either a pinned tab (<5) or a bookmark (themselves shared when necessary on e.g a Slack canvas so the whole team has easy access, not just me).

While browsing the rest of my tabs are transient and don't really grow. I even mostly use private browsing for research, and only bookmark (or otherwise save) pages I deem to be of high quality. I might have a private window with multiple tabs for a given task, but it is quickly reduced to the minimum necessary pages and the the whole private window is thrown away once the initial source material gathering is done. This lets me turn off address bar search engines and instead search only saved history and bookmarks.

I often see colleagues with the same many browser windows of many tabs each open struggling to find what they need, and ponder their methods.

	▲	magicalhippo 13 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I've started using Karakeep as well, however I don't find its built-in viewer as seamless as a plain browser page. It's also runs afoul of pages which combats bots due to its headless chrome. Anyway, just strikes me as odd that the browsers have the functionality right there, it's just not used to its full potential.

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pdpi 18 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If I'm doing work than involves three different libraries, I'm not reading and committing to memory the whole documentation for each of those libraries. I might well have a few tabs with some of those libraries' source files too. I can easily end up with tens of tabs open as a form of breadcrumb trail for an issue I'm tracking down.

Then there's all the basic stuff — email and calendar are tabs in my browser, not standalone applications. Ditto the the ticket I'm working on.

I think the real issue is that browsers need to some lightweight "sleep" mechanism that sits somewhere between a live tab and just keeping the source in cache.

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transcriptase 18 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I wonder if a good public flogging would compel chrome and web devs to have 80 tabs take up far less than a gigabyte of memory like they should in a world where optimization wasn’t wholesale abandoned under the assumption that hardware improvements would compensate for their laziness and incompetence.

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m-schuetz 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The high memory usage is due to the optimization. Responsiveness, robustness and performance was improved by making each tab independent processes. And that's good. Nobody needs 80 tabs, that's what bookmarks are for.

	▲	lukan 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		"that's what bookmarks are for" And if you are lucky, the content will still be there the next time.

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abenga 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Is there a straightforward way to have one-process-per tab in browsers without using significant amounts (O(n_tabs)) of memory?

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samus 12 hours ago | parent [-]

There is no justification for that IMHO. The program text only needs to be in memory once. However, each process probably has its own instance of the JS engine, together with the website's heap data and the JIT-compiled code objects. That adds up.

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abenga 11 hours ago | parent [-]

I'd very much like a crash in one tab not to kill other tabs. And having per tab sandboxing would be more secure, no?

	▲	samus 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		What do you mean? All these features are provided by process per tab.

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refulgentis 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

They do this stuff.

I’m honestly amazed OP is managing 30 GB regularly. I’d wager it’s a tall tale. It’s sort of perfect troll bait on a forum because you end up with people sounding nuts, defending web browser ram usage, against the common position, that browsers are RAM hogs.

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fastasucan 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Thats a weird assumption to make.