How bad of a tab abuser are you? I can easily reach over 450 tabs. It helps that since Firefox 4, there is an option that doesn't load all tabs when you start Firefox up, but instead only loads the tabs as you switch to them. Tabs that haven't been loaded don't seem to have much footprint at all, so I tend to build up rather a lot of them.
"To SPEED UP your Firefox, when a tab is added to TMT, it is unloaded from browser and its tab state & history are stored in TMT. When you click on a tab, the tab is opened again from disk cache, with tab state & history restored if available; (Please note that the memory freed varies and is subjected to different websites.)"
When I come back to the browser, if I haven't used it in a while, I send all the currently open tabs to a new row which unloads them from browser memory. Then, when I get a chance, I go back to the various rows and clean out the tabs I don't want to keep and the condense them down to the "real gold".
This one lets you generate, to the clipboard, any number of markup formats (including HTML) containing the details of all the tabs you have open (with configurable options for details).
I tend to paste this comment into Gmail with a special tag (myaddress+selfnote@gmail.com) which triggers a "mark as read" filter. I do this because all I need is web access, regardless of the browser, and I can get access to all my bookmarked content with the power of Google Search. In addition, on my desktop and mobile phone devices, the mail is automatically sync'd to it for me to carry around for instant access.
I do leave Firefox open for days at a time (usually start it up when I boot into Linux, and close it when I reboot for a kernel update). The Firefox team seems to have fixed most of the leaking that was occuring back in the 3.6 days. As things are right now, there is no way Firefox can use enough RAM to have any impact on my system. Using something like TMT would probably end up slowing down Firefox for me, since stuff would have to be read into RAM from a magnetic HDD instead of being in RAM already. I don't think that Linux has used more than 1MB of the swap partition since I installed it on this laptop. I guess TMT would be useful for those people who have less than 768MB of RAM (what my old laptop had), which doesn't tend to be many people nowadays.
The second add-on you have linked is interesting due to the many possibilities it opens up. I am certain that some people who read Hacker News will find it useful for their purposes.
Yes I am as bad as you are with tabs, possibly worse cause I have hit 800s once in a while.
Just like you said, for me tabs are my "volatile" bookmarks and a TODO list. The upside is that it automatically records the history of the browsing session a call/cc if you will. It is also in my face, reminding me about it. It has a tiny cost associated with keeping it open forcing me to not procrastinate on it for ever. Many a open tab graduate into being genuine bookmarks.
I have tried FF4 and without add-ons it does not do everything that I do with 3.6 with add-ons. The critical part is unloading the content of the tabs when it has not been viewed in a while. The other feature I like is the ability to search through the content of the tabs.
With the add-on set that I have, I leave my FF open for months on a 512Mb box with no issues. So I assume all the leaks have been iron out of 3.6 by now or the memory fox add-on does a good job of garbage collection.
I basically use tabs as temporary bookmarks. I don't try to look through them very often. If I want to go to website, I just open a new tab and type the name/URL into the address bar rather to look through the tabs I have open to see if it's already open somewhere. When Firefox opens a switch to an open tab, I do take the option.
I browse through the tabs I have open at leisure, finishing the business I have with them as convenient. I can easily end up closing 200 tabs during a period like that, since afterwards they're not useful to me anymore. When I am done with a website (say, opened all the interesting articles and comment pages from the hacker news frontpage) I do close the tab, instead of leaving it open and looking for it later.
