I agree on your principle, but not with the 500MB comment.
You don't know how people use their browsers.
For example, I have 8 tab groups open right now, each with 5 - 20 tabs. Let's say that's about 75 tabs. That's only 6.67MB each to fill 500MB. I'm regularly over a 1GB. I'm sure a significant part of that is actually memory leaks, but that's beside the point.
Wait, you have 75 tabs open? Doesn't the time it takes to locate the tab you are looking for exceed the time it would take to launch a new tab, and load the desired page?
The firefox awesome bar has an awesome (haha) feature for that: if you type an address, it will detect wether you have matching tabs open and give you the option to switch instead. It works over multiple tab groups and windows. So: locating a tab is quicker and it keeps the state of the page.
I presume that most people who have lots of tabs open, like I do, use addons that make finding tabs fast. I use Tab Kit to organize the tabs in trees, and Pentadactyl to give me fast search that is activated by pressing b. I can't imagine using a browser which doesn't have either or both of these features.
There's really no reason why browsers couldn't have an option to make tabs which aren't currently active (ie. being viewed) be treated as bookmarks, which take up virtually no memory, since all they are are a URL and a bit of metadata.
This would, of course, slow down browsing when switching from tab to tab, since the entire page would need to be reloaded. But I would gladly give up some speed for memory on my old machine with only 3.7 gigs of RAM.
Before anyone asks why don't I just use bookmarks in the first place, let me say that I prefer the organization that tabs give me for pages I am currently working on. I do move those tabs to bookmarks if I use them long enough. But in the relatively short term I prefer tabs.
Another option that would be a compromise between the solution proposed above and keeping all tabs in memory would be to keep only the N most recently accessed tabs in memory, and treat the rest as bookmarks. That would make switching between those N tabs relatively responsive, but still use a lot less memory than having every page for every tab reside in memory. Especially for people like me, who regularly have over 100 tabs open.
Of course, the value of N should be user-configurable. With a N=1, the second proposed solution would be equivalent to the first.
Comments
I agree on your principle, but not with the 500MB comment.
You don't know how people use their browsers.
For example, I have 8 tab groups open right now, each with 5 - 20 tabs. Let's say that's about 75 tabs. That's only 6.67MB each to fill 500MB. I'm regularly over a 1GB. I'm sure a significant part of that is actually memory leaks, but that's beside the point.
Wait, you have 75 tabs open? Doesn't the time it takes to locate the tab you are looking for exceed the time it would take to launch a new tab, and load the desired page?
The firefox awesome bar has an awesome (haha) feature for that: if you type an address, it will detect wether you have matching tabs open and give you the option to switch instead. It works over multiple tab groups and windows. So: locating a tab is quicker and it keeps the state of the page.
I presume that most people who have lots of tabs open, like I do, use addons that make finding tabs fast. I use Tab Kit to organize the tabs in trees, and Pentadactyl to give me fast search that is activated by pressing b. I can't imagine using a browser which doesn't have either or both of these features.
There's really no reason why browsers couldn't have an option to make tabs which aren't currently active (ie. being viewed) be treated as bookmarks, which take up virtually no memory, since all they are are a URL and a bit of metadata.
This would, of course, slow down browsing when switching from tab to tab, since the entire page would need to be reloaded. But I would gladly give up some speed for memory on my old machine with only 3.7 gigs of RAM.
Before anyone asks why don't I just use bookmarks in the first place, let me say that I prefer the organization that tabs give me for pages I am currently working on. I do move those tabs to bookmarks if I use them long enough. But in the relatively short term I prefer tabs.
Another option that would be a compromise between the solution proposed above and keeping all tabs in memory would be to keep only the N most recently accessed tabs in memory, and treat the rest as bookmarks. That would make switching between those N tabs relatively responsive, but still use a lot less memory than having every page for every tab reside in memory. Especially for people like me, who regularly have over 100 tabs open.
Of course, the value of N should be user-configurable. With a N=1, the second proposed solution would be equivalent to the first.