Technology

When I get to 20 or so I have to start closing some tabs to keep track of things. How do you find the tab you're looking for when you have that many open?

Literally thousands? Have you tried bookmarking things after they've sat unused for awhile?

I typically just periodically save my browser windows with a tab manager extension. I just say because thousands sounds like way too much to keep track of...

I rarely have more than 10 tabs open on my phone, and rarely more than 5 in my PC. How do people have so many tabs?

Get Sideberry for your sanity.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sidebery/

https://github.com/mbnuqw/sidebery

I literally have over a thousand tabs open in one window.

8Gb ram. Mint. 10+ year old pc.

This is the computing equivalent to hoarding.

There are some advantages macOS can have but it depends on usage patterns and user knowledge:

• You don’t have to configure swap on macOS, while on Linux you can get into a situation where e.g. at install time you set up some default 2 GB swap but then it’s not enough and you don’t know that’s a thing that can be changed.
• You don’t have to configure compression for RAM or swap on macOS; on Linux you often have to know you can set up zram/zswap if you want it. Compression can make a huge difference for users that switch between memory heavy applications as long as they don’t literally switch every 5 seconds.
• On macOS, applications generally use the same frameworks e.g. for UI (because there is not much choice), and they can be loaded once and shared between all of them. Linux can share libraries too but users can run into situations where their applications use multiple different versions of Qt, GTK, etc. at the same time, and then you have stuff like snap on top that comes with its own copies of even basic system libraries. Containers also do this. As a Linux user you can avoid library bloat to some extent but “normal” users are not aware of it in the first place.

MacOS doesn't shove the system UI components into swap when Firefox uses too much memory.

To clarify, some versions of Linux are lighter weight with resources, and macOS does tend to take up more RAM at rest to make things pull up snappier, if you have it to spare. But their compression algorithm is better, and if you are using near the limit, it will be more efficient with the use of the RAM you have available before lagging. With Windows and Linux, it feels more like if you're out of RAM you're out if RAM. It's less likely to happen at all on Linux though.