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Comment by hnriot | Hacker News Reader

there isn't a strict limit, its just not a viable use case for current browsers.

Maybe what we need is Chrome/FF to consider the very high tab count as a use case and handle it better, when you have so many tabs it's not easy to find the 1 in 100 that you're looking for, we would need a new find tool, possible the browser should build a client side tf/idf index and make the whole working set (workspace) searchable. You see what I mean? Until the browser changes to support this usecase, the usage will be klunky and fraught with problems.

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The Firefox tab bar is naturally more usable than the Chrome tab bar with large numbers of tabs because it scrolls rather than trying to fit them all in the bar. (I sometimes wonder whether squeezing tabs to the point of absurdity was actually a conscious decision by the Chrome developers to limit the number of tabs people can open and thus memory use.) There are a lot of Firefox extensions that add additional tools to manage large numbers of tabs, of which Tree Style Tabs is perhaps the most popular. There are not as many Chrome extensions, since Chrome's UI is not as extensible.

Actually I usually set firefox to squeeze tabs. I love it. As long as the favicon is visible it works fine. Hiding the favicon in small tabs is the real sin of chrome.

I agree. I'm a tab hoarder with hundreds of tabs open in Chrome. I never do that with Firefox's scrolling tabs because I remember where things are based on their place among the other tabs. Firefox doing a min-width on each tab and hiding the rest makes it impossible to find where that other page I looked at 5 minutes ago went.

The design of Firefox makes it able to handle a lot more tabs than Google Chrome. You can easily have two hundred with no sweat.

It also features Panorama built-in, which lets you search through all the tabs. It's as simple as Ctrl+Shift+E, type your keyword.

Huh, I didn't realize you could search. That's neat.

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