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.
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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.