Firefox user loses 7,470 opened tabs saved over two years after they can’t restore browsing session

Firefox browser
(Image credit: Shutterstock)

A recent post by X user Hazel complained that a browsing session with over 7,000 open tabs, maintained for the last two years, had been totally cleared. While this might seem like a horror story for those who value their browsing tabs and history (and for systems with Chrome browsers), Hazel retrieved those tabs-of-treasure thanks to the X community explaining how to restore an old Firefox browsing session from the profiles cache.

In an interview with PCMag, Hazel said 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.”

Other X users were concerned about her computer’s performance with all those open tabs. However, Hazel replied, “The memory impact is marginal; the session file which contains the tab information is only about 70MB, and Firefox only loads a tab in memory if I’ve opened it recently.”

So, even with thousands of tabs on her browser, her computer still runs normally and not hogging all the RAM on her system. Furthermore, Hazel told PCMag that the session took less than a minute to reload, meaning it wasn’t a drag on her system.

This instance demonstrates Firefox’s memory management capabilities, which put unused tabs to sleep to save memory via Tab Unloading. Mozilla released this feature with Firefox 93 in October 2021. Chrome and Edge followed suit one year later, in 2022, and introduced a similar feature called Sleeping Tabs. However, Edge is taking this further with a RAM limiter feature added to the browser’s 125 Beta release. 

Mozilla also told PCMag that it will roll out a new tab organization feature to make managing hundreds or thousands of tabs easier. While we don’t have specific news on these planned changes, Chrome and Edge recently released AI-powered tab organization features, allowing you to group your open tabs based on their content with just a few clicks, so Mozilla Firefox might soon follow suit.

Jowi Morales
Contributing Writer

Jowi Morales is a tech enthusiast with years of experience working in the industry. He’s been writing with several tech publications since 2021, where he’s been interested in tech hardware and consumer electronics.

  • USAFRet
    "Losing two years' worth of browsing tabs is no laughing matter."

    Yes it is.
    I can, and will, laugh mightily
    Reply
  • Notton
    I, on the other hand, like to keep open tabs to a minimum.
    Instead, I put pages I want to read later into a bookmark folder.
    Reply
  • hotaru251
    +1 for firefox

    but for real I will never understand people who have that many tabs...like just bookmark stuff x_x....
    Reply
  • peachpuff
    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.”
    I don't think i have enough free time to do that.
    Reply
  • USAFRet
    2 years

    Never updated her FF browser
    Never updated the OS
    Never powered off or rebooted the system
    Zero backups
    7,000+ tabs open!!

    Sorry, but this is 100% self inflicted.


    But wait...."Hazel retrieved those tabs-of-treasure thanks to the X community explaining how to restore an old Firefox browsing session from the profiles cache."
    Reply
  • zanessepp
    I mean that's a novel way of combining history and bookmarks! Very clever (or not so clever).

    I personally use the workspaces feature in Vivaldi and I can still bookmark sets of tabs into specific tasks/research/funnies in both.

    But if someone were to wipe out my bookmarks in all of the places then I'd be sorely pissed off.
    Reply
  • USAFRet
    So, apparently ignoring this for 2 years?
    Reply
  • slurmsmckenzie
    I have 4-5 tabs I keep open all of the time and I update as normal, Firefox is set to auto-restore the session when it restarts. I assumed that was the case with this story also, and they got lost when it failed to restore eventually. I'd be impressed if Firefox was running for 2+ years with over 7,000 tabs and didn't crash!
    Reply
  • Alvar "Miles" Udell
    USAFRet said:
    So, apparently ignoring this for 2 years?
    Maybe she didn't want to be "forced to use" a Firefox account?
    Reply
  • USAFRet
    slurmsmckenzie said:
    I have 4-5 tabs I keep open all of the time and I update as normal, Firefox is set to auto-restore the session when it restarts. I assumed that was the case with this story also, and they got lost when it failed to restore eventually. I'd be impressed if Firefox was running for 2+ years with over 7,000 tabs and didn't crash!
    Right.

    It will usually auto-restore.
    Usually.

    Not something I'd trust for "years".
    Reply