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TIL that on Firefox you can unload tabs from memory without closing them (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by AlmightySnoo@lemmy.world to c/firefox@lemmy.ml
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The feature is called Tab Unloading, and weirdly enough they made it not easy to access despite its usefulness.

You basically have to type about:unloads in the address bar and hit enter. If you then click on "Unload", it will put the least used tabs to sleep. If you keep clicking that button until it's greyed out, you'll have unloaded all your tabs from memory.

This feature is handy if you want to temporarily switch to something that is memory hungry without having to close your 100 tabs.

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[-] charonn0@startrek.website 5 points 1 year ago

Where does it get unloaded to?

[-] AlmightySnoo@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago

From what I understand it basically just saves the minimal state possible (URL, form inputs), which is lighter than keeping all the rendering details in memory, so maybe that minimal representation still stays in RAM as its footprint would be negligible.

[-] Belazor@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

It doesn’t save form inputs because when you click a suspended/unloaded tab, it reloads the whole page. Everything unsaved on that page is lost.

I really hope some day Firefox will work the way you say, though.

[-] AlmightySnoo@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

That's weird then, because this says:

The tab’s scroll position and form data are restored just like when the browser is restarted with the restore previous windows browser option.

If it doesn't do that then I'd say it's a bug?

[-] Sebbe@lemmy.sebbem.se 5 points 1 year ago

/dev/null

[-] kevincox@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 year ago

It gets thrown away. When you go back to the tab it will effectively reload.

(It will attempt to save some extra information such as scroll position and form inputs but this isn't 100% reliable so I would treat it as a nice-to-have not something to rely on.)

this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2023
268 points (97.2% liked)

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