Hi, Once in a while I try to clean up my tabs. First thing I do is use “merge all windows” to put all tabs into one window.
This often causes a memory clog and firefox get stuck in this state for 10-20 minutes
I have recorded one such instance.
I have tried using the “discard all tabs” addon, unfortunately, it is also getting frozen by the memory clog.
Sometimes I will just reboot my PC as that is faster.
Unfortunately, killing firefox this way, does not save the new tab order, so when I start firefox again, it will have 20+ windows open, which I again, merge all pages and then it clogs again !
So far the only solution I have found is just wait the 20 minutes.
Once the “memory clog” is passed, it runs just fine.
I would like better control over tab discard. and maybe some way of limitting bloat. For instance, I would rather keep a lower number of undiscarded youtube that as they seem to be insanely bloated.
In other cases, for most website I would like to never discard the contents.
In my ideal world, I would like the tabs to get frozen and saved to disk permanently, rather than assuming discard tabs can be reloaded. As if the websites were going to exist forever and discarding a tab is like cleaning a cache.
I kinda wanted to jump on a train of recommending to use bookmarks but last time I checked the bookmark implementation was dogshit in every single browser. Too many steps, too inconvenient to navigate, and breaks you out of normal browser workflow overall.
Also looking for a solution, even though I don’t do 1000+ tabs. Currently I found myself using Vivaldi with tab groups, and allowing the browser to unload unused tabs contents after some time. Not so sure it scales, but seems to be at least usable to me.
I’m sorry I don’t have an answer
1000 tabs? What for?
A small subset of the stuff I’m trying to do.
Is this your goal?
Cause I gotta say, I don’t think abusing your browser is your best bet.
I would settle for just taking over my own computer !
He just has a tab for each employee in a company
Ohh lord. I could actually believe that.
Just imagine how many tabs the NSA has
“Small”
If you need quick access to this many pages I suggest organizing bookmarks. As this is what they are meant for. Tabs are meant for active pages you are working with. So anytime you get that many tabs with any browser its gonna run like shit.
I find organizing bookmarks incredibly tedious. I have bookmarks folder with thousands of tabs in and it’s just easier to use google again to re-find the information than to pick them out of bookmarks. Also tabs just keep the title and URL so you can’t even search the text inside. So, organizing a library of tabs is like a much worse version of google without previews. I also use the session manager addon but again, when you open thousands of tabs, it clogs up the memory almost instantly. It’s taking multiple gigabytes of ram, just to display a few kilobytes of text ! I wish the browser would just render the page as a static searchable text and image and then ditch all the javascript garbage.
You can also tag your bookmarks and search for those.
I would prefer not to save and tags tabs 500 times per day. It’s easier to let them accumulate and handle them all in memory.
500 tab save and tag per day is too much labour, I would spend half my day just fiddling and sorting bookmarks !
May I ask why you have to have this level of access to thousands of pages? Even for my job I have maybe 8 active that I use Firefox keywords to jump to.
Nah, FF handles thousands of tabs just fine. I literally have just as many if not more tabs than OP and have never seen this issue. It’s either from the merge they’re doing or something else. It would be better if y’all just worked under the assumption that this does work and something is otherwise wrong with op’s setup.
The issue is parsing all that. There is no way you can keep that many tabs readily accessible like tabs are meant to be. Which is why these addons were born and are not official parts of Firefox. This is one of those just because you can doesn’t mean you should situations. I get they’ve adopted this workflow, but reading through this it sounds more like daily driving than actual work. Which makes this even more bizarre, you can’t read them all, they have to reload when you open them after a while (ie download again) so all points are moot. You aren’t saving the page, you are holding onto a shell that will request the page again when you wake it up. If the server went offline never to be seen again your tab will not hold the information.
With this workflow, it might be better to have a crawler dump everything into folder hierarchies that are content searchable, and then search that like google using specialized software. I dont see any other reason you could even have 1k tabs open efficiently, you aren’t searching through that, might as well google again and follow the purple links.
That takes too long. Organizing tab is the computer’s job !
Literally isn’t, which is why you’re hitting a wall.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/Tggq4jPPZaA
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I’m really curious about the workflow you have that needs that many tabs. How does the History and Bookmark functions fall short of what you need?
It’s easier to use google than the bookmarks manager, which can’t even find text inside the pages. I do often dump all those thousands of tabs into a bookmarks folder. And it has never happened that I went back into that enormous pile to fetch something that would take hours to find again. I have no use for the history either. A gigantic, alphabetic ordered list of everything I have seen in the last 7 days. Again, easier to just use google.
The one thing that is better and faster than google, is not closing those tabs that may contain the stuff I need.
Of course, it’s not really possible to search the text body of open tabs, unless you search them one by one.
But I’m going to ask for only one computing miracle at a time !
What I’d recommend, based on the insistence that seeing to not change your workflow, is to locally download the pages you have open with httrack, wget or a similar application. This would allow you to locally search all your tabs and their contents very quickly without Google, they will load faster because of lack of needing to redownload them, which if I understand correctly Firefox is trying to do at some level.
Thanks, I didn’t know that one.
I have been experiementing with a transparent proxy like squid or something like Archive Box, to create static pages on the fly and load that.
But so far I’ve not made something seamless and pleasant to use. It would have to be at least as low friction as using google.
I am going to try using Mixtral 8x7b to perform natural language search over my archives and pull tabs from the collection of all pages I have ever seen. But that’s still a long way away from being operational !
…has Google still been giving you the same results recently? This is an extremely weak link in your setup to me. You’d be better off looking at a locally run search engine like peARs or something similar with locally downloaded and indexed files if you insist on using search, and it’ll be waaaay more reliable than an LLM here.
Google is giving me increasingly poor results, I am looking into deploying Searxng locally.
I really would like to operate my own local crawler and sorting algorithm.
I will check out the peARs you mentionned !
Maybe don’t have a THOUSAND tabs
I will, not, do that.
Then you will have software that doesn’t work. This is not a Firefox problem, or a problem of extensions, or anything but a user problem.
If your 1998 Toyota Camry is struggling to haul a cargo container up a hill it’s not the car’s fault. You’re doing it wrong. Whatever tasks you’re trying to do with 1000 tabs, a web browser is the wrong tool for the job.
I’m using the wrong tool in the wrong way and won’t stop!!!
Help me!!!
ROFL…
Well then we can’t help you
You have 64GB RAM and that’s still not enough for your browser. Wow.
I’ve come away from this with only more questions. What does your Downloads folder/Filesystem look like? Do you have notebooks or any real world allocation of information? What’s that like? What kinds of things do you keep in a junk drawer?
Absolutely fascinating.
I do not waste time sorting, emails, downloads and bookmarks
For my linux ISOs, which I have approx 60 terabyte of, I use dedicated sorting software and it does a really good job of keeping it all organized. I also make liberal use of symlinks and hardlinks to keep the original alive while also keeping things organized.
As for notes, I have notepad++ with an endless series of titled untitled text files of everything I ever want to remembered. Shared accross computers using a local git server
On my phone I have google keep which has a list of notes that has long since become far too long to scroll to the bottom off of. I am in the process of degoogling and I want to switch to a selfhosted file centric markdown note taking web app, not decided on which but this video is probably going to be one of them.
I don’t have a junk drawer, my stuff is sorted into bins, here is a glimpse of that
Why do you need 60TB of Linux Isos? Or do you mean “Linux Isos ;)”
Yes the ;) variety
Those ISOs must go back YEARS! Same with the files! What sorting software helps keep track of all that?
Notepad++ surely has some type of global search feature to help find the thought you saved for later, right? I’m utterly impressed with how much stuff you seem to have around, yet can still find and make sense of it. I would have long since buried myself under it all and given up.
Yes, files that go back to 1996 when I first got online. Much older stuff that I got afterwards
I was using Kodi and I am switching to Emby.
Various renamers
https://picard-docs.musicbrainz.org/en/config/options_filerenaming.html
https://github.com/mobeigi/filebot
and many custom bash and batch scripts
Yes, notepad has “search in all open files” which would be great in firefox, “search in all tabs” and then it shows you a tab list with the search text in context with excerpts, kind of like how google does. Then with one click you could jump to that place in the text in that tab.
Install Onetab
I’ve read this entire thread like three times and watched all the videos you’ve posted, and I still don’t understand your workflow at all.
If searching bookmarks/history is harder than using Google to just find the thing you want to get back to, why do you need to keep the things you want to get back to open rather than just using Google to find the page again later? Or when you want to get back to something you (think you?) have left open, do you find it just by scrolling through all your tabs until a title/favicon looks like what you’re looking for?
Your last paragraph makes it seem like maybe you want to keep the tabs open so if the page/content gets deleted off of the server, you don’t lose it. Is that correct? I’d imagine that doesn’t always accomplish that, though, right? (Particularly for something like YouTube.) If that’s a significant part of why you keep the tabs open, though, maybe that bit at least is a good question for a data hoarder community.
I haven’t been able to find any “discard all tabs” addon for Firefox by Googling. And I can’t guess what exactly it does. (Does it save tab states to disk and suspend - but also leave open - all tabs or something?) Are you sure that’s the name of the addon you’re using?
why do you need to keep the things you want to get back to open rather than just using Google to find the page again later?
If it’s already in memory, that’s one few step to reach it.
My tab manager can’t search google
do you find it just by scrolling through all your tabs until a title/favicon looks like what you’re looking for?
I search my live memory with Tab Manager Plus
Sadly, it can’t search tab body text, only tab titles.
if the page/content gets deleted off of the server, you don’t lose it. Is that correct?
My software should not discard data without my permission. When it runs out of RAM it should dump to disk cache, not delete. But browser have the builtin assumption that the web remembers everything, which is false. I also think bookmarks should save all tab data, all text, all images, all code, all video, and the code should remain as functional as possible. That’s a long way off, currently the only way to do that is freeze the tab with its browser and operating system inside a virtual machine live snapshot.
I haven’t been able to find any “discard all tabs
I believe this one can do, discard selected tabs, but not discard all tabs
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/discard/
Discard is the action where all tab content is deleted, keeping only URL, title and favicon
I haven’t found discard all tabs either.
I would like “stop all tabs” to work
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/stop-all-button/
But it will only work after firefox has cleared the clog, it currently freezes with the rest of the browser.
If it’s already in memory, that’s one few step to reach it.
I search my live memory with Tab Manager Plud
Oh, so you’re doing something like Googling just to find the page title and then rather than clicking the link in Google, (closing the Google results page, I hope and) searching through your tab titles with Tab Manager Plus to find and switch to the open tab where you already have the page in question open?
Though, I still don’t understand why you keep the tab open in the first place rather than juat closing the tab when you’re (at least for the moment) done with it and then Googling to find the content again and clicking the appropriate link to get that same content in a new tab when you do need it again. I asked whether the reason was so that if the content is removed from the server, you didn’t lose it, but I don’t think anything you said in your last post answered that question. You did say:
My software should not discard data without my permission. When it runs out of RAM it should dump to disk cache, not delete.
Which wasn’t quite a direct answer to my question. And you then directly admit that the browser doesn’t even keep content that’s open in a tab:
But browser have the builtin assumption that the web remembers everything, which is false.
So that must not be why you keep content open in tabs, right?
Is it maybe something like if you keep something open in a tab, the presence of that page title in your tab manager gives you confirmation when you later Google to find the page title that such-and-such particular result in the Google results is indeed the thing you’re looking for and not a different page than the one you were looking for?
Just as an aside, my web browser use is probably atypical as well. I have my browser forget all cookies, history, cache, etc (basically everything but my bookmarks) every time I fully close it. And I close it every time I switch activities to keep my online personas isolated from each other. (So I’m never logged into my Google account and my Amazon account at the same time, for instance. To reduce targeted ads and such.)
Also, I’m wondering if something more like a caching proxy with maybe page searching capabilities and finegrained control of what is cached and what isn’t might fill part of your use case, but I still don’t have a firm grasp on your use case.
I came in here knowing exactly what the comments would look like, and I’m still disappointed. “Just don’t use so many tabs” is not an answer. If you don’t have anything constructive to say, just move on instead of getting uppity about…not using browsers very heavily or understanding other use cases.
Yeah, thousands of tabs seems extreme. But “you should dedicate a larger amount of time and effort all day, every day to make the computer’s job easier” is a bad take. That’s obviously worse than OP’s existing workflow.
Sorry OP, I don’t have a real answer either. You might find Arc Browser’s tab system to suit you better, but since it’s chromium-based I suspect performance might be worse.
Edit: out of curiosity, how much memory does your PC have, and how much is Firefox using during these freezes? I wonder how much of the delay is caused by swapping.
Yeah, thousands of tabs seems extreme. But “you should dedicate a larger amount of time and effort all day, every day to make the computer’s job easier” is a bad take.
Computers don’t magically make things easier, it just does as it is told(as instructed by code). Computers don’t come out as a self-made human assistant that adapts to your personal needs and can magically do anything you want.
If it’s so much of a burden that smarter people haven’t figured it out, go at it. You might just fix it.
But “to make computer’s job easier” is the dumbest shit I’ve heard in a while.
I am going to keep beating that drum until firefox gets better It’s already improving, I used to struggle at 700 tabs now I almost make it to 2000. Of course it is mostly artifice as most tabs get fully discarded and what I want is all tab texts in live memory and the ability to search all tab text. Maybe even text search in all pictures in all tabs using object recognition, but clearly we’re not anywhere near that yet !
Frankly the answer is to not use so many tabs.
I think it’s crazy to need more than 10 active tabs open, let along thousands. I’m a software developer who will regularly go down rabbit holes and I’d never dream of opening so many tabs.
The fact is OP isn’t using the browser in a way that it was designed for. Plus they’re being unreceptive and rude in some of their replies.
Ff literally was designed for this. It has had a significant number of bug reports over the years that improved this exact thing, opening thousands of tabs. That’s not the problem (I also have thousands of tabs open). If instead you had operated under the assumption that that wasn’t the problem maybe you could have helped OP find the actual problem, which I bet is probably that they disabled swap mem or the extension they’re using isn’t written well.
I have to ask, how does one even manage thousands of open tabs?
Like how do you find the 1 in 1756 tabs that you are looking for?
Excuse me for thinking that that is an insane way to work and there is no way it can be productive. Like if you have a thousand open at any given moment, what are they all. What are you doing that warrants this? What’s wrong with bookmarks.
I think the consensus here has been clear in that you guys are in the minority of people. And that’s on Lemmy where we skew tech literate and would mostly be power users. I just can’t see how it can be productive.
Not calling you out here. Like I really need to know your workflow with some examples of the why?
You have different windows, different Multi-account containers. And if you type in something into your address bar it will just automatically jump to an open tab if you already have it open. No need to perform another search and find it. It’s not hard to maintain this many tabs. Just like it’s not hard to know where stuff is in your house. You keep the tools and cars in the garage, the yard equipment in the shed etc. You have thousands of items in your house or apartment, you don’t have trouble keeping those separated do you? Unless you’re one of those people that just tosses stuff as soon as they don’t need it anymore, but I don’t think that’s the majority of people, at least not from talking to my therapist it isn’t.
And it’s not about being productive. Like, if I have one window open it might be for the research for a thing I want to buy, for example we’re thinking about getting starlink for camping. So I have a window open with like 50 fucking tabs because choosing a powersupply, figuring out the calculations for how much wattage I’m going to be using, etc. I need all those open. I mean I could move that into an obsidian doc, but that’s a hell of a lot of stuff to write down for something I only need to research and buy once. And then it gets left open because I already did the research and it’s much easier to find if I have to step away to do something else, or I put off the research for a week since we’re not camping yet.
The same goes for work stuff. We’re testing stuff in salesforce and I have 10 tabs open for every test because you have to verify every single field of data I’m pushing from the backend into salesforce.
But it’s not like I’m even noticing the 950+ tabs that are open. I don’t have that window open. I use sidebery so I can see all the tabs in my window with their full names at a glance (here’s an example of the current window where I’ve been responding to lemmy comments.
And a lot of the times I open an article to read, then someone messages me to help them, I jump over to help them, and then I come back to the article in a week. Or two weeks. Or three months. And then after I’m finished with it I close it. But I’m not gonna bookmark that. Bookmarks are for stuff you keep coming back to. Managing bookmarks in a browser isn’t like managing a bookmark in a book you’re reading. Deleting them is harder, filing them is harder, etc.
Anything more than 10 and titles become illegible
Just don’t use so many tabs" is not an answer.
Yes it is. If somone is holding a knife upside down and complaining it doesn’t cut their steak, are you rude and ignore them? or comment that they’re doing it wrong? OP has the knife upside down.
FF (or any browser AFAIK) is not designed to do this , OP is doing it wrong is a valid answer.
On the flip side OP wants FF to change so it can do what they want, which is also valid. After all, a sensible person adapts to the environment around them, an insane person expects the environment to adapt to them, therefore all progess is made by insane people. Have at it OP :)
FF was designed to do this. There have been hundreds of bug reports that have been fixed over the years to literally make FF handle thousands of tabs just fine. If instead you had operated under the assumption that something was wrong you literally could help OP resolve the issue which is most likely something like their swap mem or the extension itself being written badly.
Yes it is.
It is worse than OP’s existing workflow, even though the existing workflow sucks. “Do this thing that sucks even more” is not an answer. “I don’t have this problem, so you must be mentally ill” is also not an answer.
an insane person expects the environment to adapt to them, therefore all progess is made by insane people
LOL. I love this.
Why do you need so many open tabs to begin with? What is your usecase?
I terminate Firefox and reopen it any time it’s chewing up my RAM, but I usually don’t have more than 500 tabs open at any one time. My tabs persist when Firefox starts again, but tabs don’t fully load until I click on them again. This saves my memory from getting chewed up immediately, and can usually go a week or so before I need to do it again.
What? Even 500 tabs? I don’t understand this. I get about 10 open and I can’t read what they are. Please share a pic of what it has to look like with that many tabs open because I totally do not get this? I feel like this would be akin to asking “I can’t see out of my car windshield because I have completely covered it with sticky notes. How can I get to where I need to go?” This is not how browsers were designed to work.
Here is a quick scroll through my “tab manager plus” view, zoomed out hopefully this doesn’t contain doxxing information
Thanks for sharing. That was wild… You probably have more tabs than I have bookmarks.
Just buying one little dodad on ali express has me opening 500-1000 tabs, for just one search ! I really wish the computer could keep up with me !
…
I needed to buy 15x CH9121 and that was the difference between 15$ each to 4.5$ each.
I have over a thousand just like OP and it works fine. Use a tree style tab browser and it’s much more usable than chrome or anything like that. OP’s problem is not having too many tabs.
I often have 100+, so I set a fixed width for tabs so I can see more and they don’t get too small. To find tabs, I use the drop down to see a scrollable list. But honestly, the biggest win is the “switch to tab” feature when typing in the URL bar.
I see about 20 at a time, and they’re usually all related to the same topic because I opened them around the same time.
When I’m done with a project, I “close tabs to the right” and it’s clean again.
Interesting. I still don’t think I could use that workflow. I use bookmarks, and the dropdowns in the bookmark toolbar when I need to organize links into groupings. And even then I only keep the necessary dropdowns in my list. Everything else I organize by bookmark folders and subfolders.
Bookmarks take work, especially when my projects run for a couple weeks at a time. I rarely need to reference stuff after those weeks, so I’d constantly be adding and removing bookmarks.
But everyone’s workflow is different.
Try this addon https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/tab-manager-plus-for-firefox/
It’s really great, but the default settings are unusable
set open in own tab set to vertical view set to darkmode
geez, just press Ctrl+W when you’re done with a tab, or if the tab is older than a couple hours
I don’t understand why some are so attached to tabs. Search your history if you need it again.
I tried closing tabs, I have to finish reading them, make sure I got everything and that whatever reason I had for opening that tab was done. The result is that I spend all most all my time trying to close and sort and order tabs instead of doing what I was trying to do in the first place. And then the browser freezes for 10 minutes.
Something is very wrong that 64GB is nowhere near enough to handle a few megabytes of text. And searching text inside of all tabs is an unthinkably difficult operation ?
Where did the web go wrong !?
It’s not the web. It seems to me you might have an attention deficit issue. Try improving your workflow.
My computer should bend to my will, not the other way around.
Then invent the technology that makes what you want to do reasonable, otherwise don’t blame a drill for being incapable of hammering nails fast enough for you.
Say these problems are fixed for now. How many tabs is enough? How do you see this tab hoarding progression being sustainable at all?
I would put the full text, image and video of every tab I have ever opened into the context memory of an open source LLM if I could. I would only consciously delete stuff that needs to stop existing immediately, like doxxing data or illegal data or malicious code.
This is like asking, how many email should you keep.
Well at work we auto delete all emails after 60 days.
But my personal email has every email going back to 2006, the last storage failure before backup, and it’s all quickly searchable.
The other limit would be storage space, but my cluster has still 180 terabyte empty space, I don’t see that getting filled up from plain browser data any time soon.
Of course, I would like better automated data catalogging tools. I would like to ask my local open source LLM to “pull up all tabs regarding 7 megahertz maser project” and it should should open a browser window that contains every tab I have ever come accross on that topic. Including now-dead websites. It should all be sorted by date, it should know to put the more basic tabs to the left and the cutting edge stuff on the right. All this without me tagging a single thing, without wasting a minute of my time doing sorting busywork.
It is the job of the computer to organize my data, in an offline, private, reliable, open source-based, enshittification-proof manner with infinite memory and perfect recall. So that I can get on with doing the stuff that I want to do and not fiddle with browser settings.
Mozilla foundation has revenues in the 500 million range and a 7 million a year CEO, I expect nothing less.
I applaud their initiative with llamafile, however I hope that was just an appetizer.
That’s fair, maybe you’re using the wrong tool though, something like an internet archive sounds more like what you need.
Take every tab you open and save a PDF, all the text, and all the images, then put a timestamp on them before deleting the tab. That’s not the point of a browser though, that’s an entirely different product.
You’re welcome to build it though, or ask Microsoft if they can make Recall work for tabs.
I was going to also say that OP might be wanting something like Recall (which might be one of the few instances where it constantly saving shit would be perfect). But they would need like the most extreme version that isn’t just saving searchable screenshots.
I also think that one major issue for OP is more about how the actual sites are coded these days. As even if a single tab is being used, the shit can just decide to force it to update the contents at any time (like how just having Gmail open you will see new messages just show up even without refreshing your browser).
It seems like the perfect situation for OP would be if the web still worked like it did pre-web 2.0, but with using the current version of FF. Outside of that, it really seems like they need to just start having sites be auto-completely downloaded for full offline use.
I am still shocked that the main issues being had seems to be that it taking 10s of mins to allow FF to process that much stuff is the frustration. Which does seem to mean FF is holding up pretty well given the situation. Their complaint about tab isolation being too much overhead seems odd though. As it would seem that going back to not having that would mean a much higher chance of just everything just being yeet-ed out of nowhere.
I am not sure how their headspace of using virtual machines approach would be much better as shit would still have the issues of sites still self-updating and loading up in the first place. Though given they seem to have dramatically more coding experience, I am much more ignorant of this shit.
yeah mate - you need a knowledge management software, not a browser.
tabs were always ephemeral and that’s unlikely to change because they’re much more than text and images.
that’s simply an unreasonable expectation for a browser.
I’m honestly surprised Firefox even handles more than a few hundred open tabs.
It’s not the web it’s you dude. You’re not using the software the way it’s intended to be used. There is no reason at all to ever need 1000+ tabs open.
The solution to write your own application that does what you want because your workflow is not a use case that browsers are designed for. It’s not bad to wish for features but your workflow is never going to be catered for in a browser and it’s both unreasonable and unrealistic to expect otherwise - hence you need to do it yourself.
If you can’t or don’t know how to do that yourself, I suggest you listen to the advice everyone else is giving you. Organisation does require ongoing work and given your comments it will likely require a lot of upfront effort to change your browser hygiene habits but once you are more organised it becomes a lot easier and a lot less work to stay on top of things.
It’s none of my business but I wonder why you feel it’s so important to open 500+ tabs just to buy something small online. Doing research and being informed is good but it seems disproportionate and perhaps talking to a professional might help you with that.
browser hygiene habits
You used that term, and frankly I recoil a bit a this term because of the implication that it’s not a deficiency of the software but that it’s the users who are wrong.
Still, I typed in the phrase into chatgpt
And I see “reading lists” as an alternative to bookmarks (that I find to be, straight up unusable)
So I found this reading list addon give a try.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/reading_list/
I have a very specific use for a “reading list”, which I take to be something like a FIFO stack of links. And that would be going through youtube videos.
Putting this in case someone else is reading this thread looking for answers.
However, it’s a side bar thing, and you have to add links one at a time, can’t select multiple tabs and add them
As for opening 500+ tabs to buy a thing.
You do know that sellers now use algorithmic pricing and often there will be hundreds of sellers for the same thing.
Plus the price will be obfuscated with various artifices that all have to be overcome to find the best seller with the best price.
Defeating all of that means openning a shit-ton of tabs.
Here’s an example of the process I’ve designed for aliexpress
https://github.com/igorlogius/gather-from-tabs/discussions/8
You used that term, and frankly I recoil a bit a this term because of the implication that it’s not a deficiency of the software but that it’s the users who are wrong.
I wouldn’t say FF is deficient in this case - not being designed for your exact use case doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with it.
As for opening 500+ tabs to buy a thing.
You do know that sellers now use algorithmic pricing and often there will be hundreds of sellers for the same thing.
Plus the price will be obfuscated with various artifices that all have to be overcome to find the best seller with the best price.
Defeating all of that means openning a shit-ton of tabs.
I usually only buy things if I agree with the price it’s being sold at. If I don’t I will look elsewhere but ultimately I value my time more than money. Extra money can be earned, time cannot 🤷♂️ If you have to drive 100 miles to a fuel station to save 2 cent per gallon, are you actually saving money?
Here’s an example of the process I’ve designed for aliexpress
https://github.com/igorlogius/gather-from-tabs/discussions/8
So it’s a script generating all the tabs?
No, I have to setup all the tabs in just the right way. Then for each tabs it gets the price and shipping information I paste that into excel Combine the total together and sort with ascending price Then I repeat that for every quantity value for 1,2,3,4,5,7,10,15,20,25,50,75,100 Then I find the minimum quantity to get the best price.
This is because if you go to the website and just ask “order by price” it either hides most results, or straight up lies and still place them out of order. It also lies about the shipping cost. But it can’t lie on the last page before clicking buy.
I expect the internet to continue becoming more deceptive and manipulative in this manner, my method is almost not good enough. If my tools don’t continue to evolve it will simply become impossible to find the best price for anything. It will all become an endless maze where they measure how much mental stamina you’re willing to waste to save another dollar. At that point the price of things will become whatever the maximum you individually will bear.
Not sure what your coding level is but you could interact with and scrape the sites with python. I’m sure other languages have similar frameworks.
Even if you aren’t very familiar and don’t know any pythons, it’s a good one to learn and though it could take a while to learn enough to do what you want, you would be more motivated to figure things out and it would save you a lot of time (and money) in the long term.
https://realpython.com/modern-web-automation-with-python-and-selenium/.
https://www.projectpro.io/article/python-libraries-for-web-scraping/625
