pretty sure if you don't visit a tab for a while or reopen your browser with the "keep previous tabs" setting thingy on, those tabs are not all loaded in memory. even if I have 100 tabs open, most of them take up negligible space in ram and only load in once I click on it.
also I'm lazy and creating/deleting bookmarks is more work than closing/opening tabs.
I believe they do use just as much RAM as current tabs, it's just computers are better at handling it now.
Mozilla makes reference to them eating RAM, but I'm not 100% sure.
Use fewer tabs
Each tab requires Firefox to store a web page in memory. If you frequently have more than 100 tabs open, consider using a more lightweight mechanism to keep track of pages to read and things to do, such as:
Bookmarks. Hint: "Bookmark All Tabs" will bookmark a set of tabs.
Save web pages for later with Pocket for Firefox.
To-do list applications.
In general, yes more tabs = more RAM used, but Firefox does have a neat trick compared to Chrome that helps lower memory usage for those of us with hundreds of tabs. When you launch Chrome with a bunch of tabs open from a previous session, it actually loads them all into RAM at launch, with Firefox, it doesn't actually load the pages of tabs from previous sessions, until you switch to them. The page titles and icons get loaded into RAM, obviously, but if you have lots of old tabs that you almost never open, the memory usage impact of lots of tabs is minimized.
pretty sure if you don't visit a tab for a while or reopen your browser with the "keep previous tabs" setting thingy on, those tabs are not all loaded in memory. even if I have 100 tabs open, most of them take up negligible space in ram and only load in once I click on it. also I'm lazy and creating/deleting bookmarks is more work than closing/opening tabs.
I believe they do use just as much RAM as current tabs, it's just computers are better at handling it now.
Mozilla makes reference to them eating RAM, but I'm not 100% sure.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-uses-too-much-memory-or-cpu-resources
In general, yes more tabs = more RAM used, but Firefox does have a neat trick compared to Chrome that helps lower memory usage for those of us with hundreds of tabs. When you launch Chrome with a bunch of tabs open from a previous session, it actually loads them all into RAM at launch, with Firefox, it doesn't actually load the pages of tabs from previous sessions, until you switch to them. The page titles and icons get loaded into RAM, obviously, but if you have lots of old tabs that you almost never open, the memory usage impact of lots of tabs is minimized.