Most people I looked at, had this habit.
I do not. I hardly ever get more than 10, and they get closed soon. I usually only get more when browsing a certain huge resource, (like Quora btw), but always close at the end of session.

It comes from the olden times when you could easily run out of memory if you didn't keep browsers in check (browsers are and always were huge memory hogs due to diverse nature of content open in it -- numerous videos, pictures, text, scripts, etc etc)

I treat open browser tabs like holes in the wall. It's OK to have a few, windows, doors, air vents. It's not OK to have entire wall covered with holes -- I feel physically less secure if I have lots of tabs open.

Imagine the stack of open tabs is in your throat, how would you feel with 50 ice cubes down there?

So, the rules are --

Generally you should just Read and close each tab,
Always close tabs the very moment you don't need it,
Try not to open too many until you read some others and processed them.

IF the content is too much to read quickly, THEN

-- if it's unique and came not as simple google search result, add it to Read Later or Favourites. Read Later is for time-limited info. Which you should review every day and deal with the information. Favourites for something you want to refer several times later, quickly, no more searching. Usually the information strikes you in a way if you must add it to Favourites.

-- if it's also time-limited (e.g. trial page of newspaper with paywall, or news item), copy the hardly replaceable items to your note taking app (mine is OneNote, but also Evernote or Apple Notes, or whatever yours is), to special notebook e.g. "Web Content".

That's it, really.
If you adopt the habit, you much more rarely will find yourself in a situation where hardly a few windows are open, yet the CPU fan is madly hissing and everything is slow -- typical "low on memory" symptoms.

Good luck.
(This tab will close in 5 seconds... 4... 3... :))

By snoozing them! Almost every tab is something you want to do - read article, buy flight ticket, complete research, watch show, check out app etc.

I didn't find a solution like this, so I'm building Tab-Z. Check out the video and signup if you like what you see!

OK,

this could be a major essay in time management, self control, etc ... So to keep this simple, swift and useful (I hope) – just some simple bullets of conscious usage. There are loads of great bookmarklets, browser extensions and software. Now it's time to use some and make your information vaults more valuable. As well as valuing your own time and PC processors :)

Use a bookmark service or pocket (my personal favourite), then consciously decide:

• Will I read this now, yes open and read
• Will I read this another time - pocket it
• Will I read this someday - leave alone as you can always google it
• Will I refer to this often - use your browser bookmarks, evernote link or evernote snippet/article store

Just be conscious in your action and decisive with your time.

Hope that helps

I have this habit also. The main reason that I keep my tabs open is that I think that the website will serve as a reminder for something. Like for example, if I heard a song that I really like on youtube, I will leave the youtube page on so that next time if I were to forget the name of the singer or song I can still find it among my tabs. In a way I treat it like a mini-diary also. But I know this is probably not that good a habit.

What I will suggest is that use the bookmark option. Save your webpage there. And in the bookmarks, you can further categorize them so that it looks neater. Hope this helps.

The OS is not fully responsible for the number of tabs that can be opened in Chrome or Firefox. This is almost dependent on computer’s CPU performance and moreover, RAM.

Google Chrome takes up a lot of physical memory, more than that used by Firefox (of course of Mozilla 😁). That doesn’t mean that Firefox uses less memory(SADDEN music plays😂😂). It uses a fairly large amount of memory. But not enough to eat up a whole of a RAM stick (minimum of 2 GB RAM, fairly low,huh?).

If too many tabs are opened, and the system doesn’t have too much RAM, then the system is likely to become less responsive or even unresponsive. So choose your RAM wisely, according to your work.

CPU performance is also responsible for this (just to remind you, if you thought that it’s all about the RAM). If you have fairly large physical memory, but doesn’t have a CPU that would go accordingly with the RAM, then your system will again be struck. Here I am not talking about 8–10 tabs, it’s about more than 40–50 tabs.

Here a video how the ‘number of tabs’ is dependent on RAM, and even how it’s not.

This video show how many tabs can be opened in 2 TB of RAM (unbelievable, isn’t it?😮😮) You might think it will be a luxury, even it will be, but still the CPU is not yet enough to work with so much of physical memory (that’s even more than a random PC’s secondary memory, hehe.)

Windows or other OS have not much to do with this. Its all about Performance.

NOTE: I am not advertising the YouTube Channel (Linus Tech Tips), whose video I have given above (👇👇, 😁). I just used it as a reference for understanding things and stuffs better.

I hope it went with you.😊😊

I have opened 2001 using Ctrl+T and I am tired of keeping the key stroke pressed.

Demonstrates the robustness of 1 of the best browsers I have used and the importance of multi-tasking in an operating system (I was able to comfortably type this message on the 2001st tab:) )

Very little difference. Tabbed browsing is more convenient, so that's what I would suggest.

Using a different browser wouldn’t make a lot of difference either. Try it and see for yourself.

People like to call Chrome a memory hog, but it actually optimizes it's RAM use to give you the best possible experience. Unused RAM is wasted RAM! Other browsers do the same, they just have different rules and priorities for the optimization. But when all is said and done, if you open too many things at the same time you're going to start using virtual memory, no matter which browser you use.

If you have an HDD, using swap file (virtual memory) is super slow. There's no fixing that without changing the hardware.

If you are experiencing lag, slow, poor performance… and if your OS is clean, no malware etc… there are only two places left to look for real improvement. Your network, and your device hardware.

If you're not able to make changes to either one, then lower your expectations. Run only one thing at a time. Open fewer tabs.

Thanks for A2A.

There are various factors that add up to the total memory consumption by Firefox. This includes installed addons and themes etc.

You can try following minor trick to see if it works for you:

In your Firefox address bar, type about:memory and hit Enter key.

Now you will see a few sections/boxes on the screen. On this screen, under the section Free memory, click on Minimize memory usage. This will free-up some memory for you and will smoothen the functioning.

You can also try disabling some addons and observe the memory usage changes.

Try this and let me know how it goes for you.

Thanks!

Browsers generally do their own memory management, and most have some sort of garbage collection (GC) mechanism, in which memory “freed” (by closing tabs and other related actions) isn’t immediately returned to the operating system. Instead, that memory is marked for later collection, then a GC phase runs through all this “garbage” and frees it for real. This phase may be triggered on a regular basis, or if enough “garbage” has accumulated to make it worthwhile to clean up, or some other opportune moment. Some GC mechanisms are even smart enough to unmark and reuse “garbage” regions, if the browser later needs more memory.

For instance, I sometimes open a new window for a question I’m answering, so that I can open more tabs in that window to do additional research—this question, for instance, is being answered in a Firefox window with 16 tabs. When I’m done, I simply close the entire window, and the memory used by all these tabs is usually returned immediately, probably because closing an entire window involves cleaning up significantly more stuff than simply closing a tab, so the browser might as well GC at the same time.

Q: Why when I open a lot of tabs in Chrome or Firefox it uses a lot of memory but when I close some the usage does not diminish?

The problem, at least in the form in which I have it, is simply that tabs are open; and then, suddenly, they close. This problem does not affect pinned tabs. Pinned tabs remain open. Only unpinned tabs are closed. This happens without any user intervention, within a few minutes after opening.

Lost tabs are recoverable in history (i.e., open a new tab and hit Ctrl-H). But then they close again without user intervention.

The short answer seems to be that something is broken. Accompanying symptoms are as follows: (1) Chrome synchronizes a few (but not all) open tabs even though the Open Tabs option is specifically turned off in Manage Sync on all devices. (2) The tabs that are synced are not closed, even though not pinned.

This behavior could be due to an extension. I am in the process of testing extensions.

There are a variety of different reasons why this could happen. There may have been issues with Chrome not installing properly, or maybe you have some third-party apps that are causing Chrome to act erratically. You could have inadvertently downloaded something, and now there’s malware running behind the scenes somewhere that’s causing the issue. But don’t worry, there are several methods you can adopt:

Method 1: Reinstall Chrome

It’s possible that either Chrome has been corrupted or it was never installed properly. So, to resolve this issue completely, reinstall Chrome:

• Press Win + X and choose Apps and Features.
• Select Chrome on the list, and click Uninstall.

• Wait for the process to finish and then install Chrome again.

Method 2: Removing Unwanted Extensions

There might be certain extensions on your Chrome browser that might be problematic. In this step, we are going to be removing unwanted extensions.

• Open up your Chrome Browser and in the address bar type: http://chrome://extensions/”
• This will open up the extensions that have been applied to your chrome browser. If you find an extension that you did not add yourself, click on Remove.

• Also, make sure to remove any VPN or Proxy extensions as they are mostly the cause of the issue.

Method 3: Check for Malware

• Enter defender in the search box and select Windows Security.
• Go to Virus and threat protection, then select Scan options.
• Select the type of scan and click on Scan now.

We recommend you look into the best antivirus software options and pick one that fits your system resources and your budget. You can find plenty of budget-friendly or even free well-performing antivirus software.

Method 4: Disable Popups and Redirects

Some websites send traffic to a landing page or a promotional offer, while others could send you into a never-ending loop of unwanted pop-up windows. Follow the steps below to configure your Chrome browser to block this type of activity:

• Navigate to Chrome Settings, and click on Privacy and Security.
• Select Site Settings, then scroll down to Pop-ups and Redirects.
• Select Don’t allow sites to send pop-ups or use redirects.

A simple change to your Chrome settings could be all you need to do to stop additional tabs from opening.

Method 5: Reset Chrome to Default Settings

• Click the More options icon and click Settings to open the Chrome settings page.
• Then select the Advanced option on the left pane, and finally select the Reset and clean up option.
• Select the Restore settings to their original defaults option.
• When the Reset settings window pops up, select Reset settings to reset Chrome.

• If you do not want to share your current Chrome settings, you can uncheck the Help make Chrome better by reporting the current settings option.

In addition to what others have said, notice things.

Does your internet drop out whenever the microwave oven is running? Then you need to change your location, relative to the oven, or switch to 5GHz WiFi.

Does it drop out whenever you use a particular Bluetooth device? Same thing - use 5GHz WiFi.

Does it drop out when anything else is happening? That something else can be causing it to drop out.

Is it happening when you have a large number of tabs open in Chrome? Maybe you don’t have enough RAM to handle both that number of tabs (each tab requires more RAM) and the internet (which requires RAM) at the same time.

I have tried keeping around 400 tabs open on Google Chrome on Android OS for substantially long periods of time, that too on a device with just 2GB of RAM and the operation was still smooth. I even tried multitasking capability by opening some high resource-hogging apps and it still didn’t reset/reboot.

So that suggests that it must be an issue particular to your devices or perhaps a lower RAM capacity.

PS./Trivia: The Tab Count changes into emoji once you cross 99 open tabs.

It is generally fine to have more than several tabs open in Chrome. One of the security strategies of Chrome is called sandbagging. Each tab is a discrete instance of Chrome with no shared code or resources with another tab. So a security problem encountered in one tab will not “leak” over to other tabs. However this causes more RAM to be used the more tabs that are open. So, there is a theoretical point where you can have too many tabs open. That limit is rarely reached.

I am not one who keeps an excessive number of tabs open, but I have read of researchers who keep over 100 tabs open at a time. Chrome open without other running programs reportedly has no issue with that. Of course, YMMV depending on the amount of RAM in your device and what else is running in the background.

Original question: Why does Mozilla Firefox crash if it’s overloaded with Windows and tabs? How do I fix it?

If you have a lot of tabs open in Firefox (or any other browser, for that matter), the best way to fix the problem of the browser crashing is to close some of the tabs that you are not using at the moment. Closing the tabs will free up RAM so a browser crash can be prevented. Another solution is to upgrade the amount of RAM in your system so you can keep more tabs open.

This is a problem that I seldom encounter, because I generally will keep at most five or fewer tabs open at once. I have plenty of RAM available for both browsing and other tasks that I am running at that time.

At 100 tabs the tab number changes to a Smiley.

Here it is at 99 tabs:

And here it is when we add more tabs:

Hope you liked it. Do not forget to upvote. : D

The other answers for this question are absolutely appalling, with people offering their own opinions, editorializing, and promoting products for companies they work for rather than answering your question — if this is what Quora has come to, I’m not long for this platform.

Anyway, I wanted to drop by and leave a better answer. No, Chrome does not have any feature like container tabs (not even in the latest development version), while Firefox Stable does now have container tabs. Sure, it took a few months for this feature to propagate up to Firefox stable, but this is distinctly a feature that Firefox has over Chrome.

I wonder how much Google paid these “LambdaTest” employees to shill for Chrome in here…

A2A: Is it good or bad when Google Chrome opens several tabs during browsing? Can you have too many tabs open?

Both Firefox and Chrome spawn a process per tab and each process takes memory. However, the memory management is quite clever and open but inactive tabs are stored in the on-disk cache or use paging. I don’t use Chrome much as I prefer Firefox and in my experience Chrome is noticeably more resource intensive than Firefox but a lot depends on the payloads being delivered.

It’s not generally a bad thing (I usually have two windows open with 5–6 tabs in each) but it’s good to be aware of how active pages are affecting resource use.

I’ve been having the same issues. it used to happen every few times, now every 1 or 2 days. I’ve multiple window with tabs open, which might be a reason. if I’m using 1 window with a few tabs, I usually minimize the others, until I use them. I’m busy in 1 of the windows, things work very slowly, even tho my internet connection is fine. at some point, nothing moves, few seconds later everything closes. I open a google window to see if the window tabs are still in my history, in that case I can re-open everything again. if not, I’ve to close my pc & re-start it & then it is in my history again, so I can re-open it. I do this every day now, since nothing works properly for more than an hour. I started using something different than Google but since everything I’ve done is on Google, I need to put everything in the other app that I’m starting to use now. it’s a lot of work, but at least this works (for now).

Faster browsing often means faster and better thinking about browsing. I usually end up using two web browsers - Firefox and Chrome (can throw Opera in too on demand) - at the same time, with different functional load e.g. one more for work and the other more for leisure related stuff. My primary browser is Mozilla Firefox, and I have to say that your choice of add-ons/extensions has significant impact on your productitity if you have many tabs open.

For example I

• use TabMixPlus option such that with many tabs they arrange multi-row and I can 'pretty much' see them all on top of my screen (instead of scrolling one 'infinite' row.
• Also I use Tab Grouping feature in FF (look into it) - it's a little bit like having multilple desktops, ot spatial organization of your tabs.

That's what it's coming to in the end - how well you can support your thought/research/having fun process in your head with parallel easily accessible (UI-handy) tabs organisations. Browsers, their features (often overlooked), add-ons/extenstions are meant to ease your approach to massive tabbing. In the end you'll find yourself closing more tabs earlier and saving time on retrieving information about a tab location (human rather than hardware/software constraint, the one which you can relax.) Better mind mapping is the short answer to your question.

This is like asking how many bowls of cereal in a box of Cheerios. Depends on the size of the bowl and how far you fill it.

memory usage per tab divided by the total memory = the number of tabs you can open

I am on a R-Pi4 with 8 gigs RAM. When I hover over the open tab in Chrome the system shows me in MB how much memory that single tab is using. This tab where I am typing is using 98MB of memory. A plain Google search tab is only using 17MB. You see how the variable in the memory usage as well as what page you open comes in play when calculating total number of tabs you can open.

I have not opened FF to see how much memory each tab uses there.

TImeline: 17-May-2023

I’ve experienced this issue on a DELL XPS-17 PC.

Not just Chrome though. Also had it occur on MS Edge and MS Teams.

It looks like malware, but I’m not sure of that after some of the remediation performed on my PC so far.

Splotches appear on the screen. Similar to what you see when you touch the screen to select and open/execute a link. The only issue is its doing it randomly and with no human intervention.

They can occur on any open app foreground or background.

At one stage I left the machine on for an hour. 10–15 TABS had been opened on both Chrome and Edge each. Also Teams had initiated a phonecall on the last chat session I had opened.

The number of other apps that are opened depends on the random nature and position of where the splotches (Selects) appear.

-I run full nortons - it did not detect anything, also installed Gaurdio - no difference. Also looked at some of the keyboard related remediations promoted.

I’m currently in the process of doing a Windows 11 reinstall. Got halfway through before any browsers or apps were installed, and I’m getting the same splotches appear. I even have a short vid of them.

So I’m thinking it may be driver related to touchscreens and introduced through an update.

First started appearing for me in Feb/April.

I’ve currently escalated to Tech Support within DELL, so we’ll see whether it still continues after the reinstall.

My experience shows that this happens no matter how much RAM you have. I had the same issue on a 32GB i7 Surface Studio Laptop. However, I saw a vast improvement when adjusting the performance options in Windows 11 like in the attached image: