Specifically, when you open a reasonable number of tabs in any browser, the tabs look like this. However, as my friend has just imported all of his tabs and bookmarks over from Chrome to Firefox, he has an immense number of tabs open right now; in Chrome, he can see all the tabs at once with its UI. On Firefox, however, it keeps things actually legible by not squashing the tabs so obscenely.
“Okay, so I need some help. I’ve noticed Firefox doesn’t show all tabs like Chrome does. Instead it shows a few, and makes me press a button to see more. Please, tell me there’s a way to fix that.”
I pointed out that this was an accessibility thing (being able to actually see and read the tabs is a useful feature) and they said it was “not good enough”. Further explanation of basic things such as using their scroll wheel to scroll through their tabs, or double/triple clicking on the left/right arrows to jump by page or start/end, or using the Ctrl+# shortcuts, are all tools at their arsenal, but that also was not good enough. Personally I’m a 1,000-2,000 tabs kinda person and manage just fine with those instead of having each tab be literally a pixel wide, so I’ve never looked for an addon to crush all the tabs together like Chrome does, and my attempts at searching the extensions and themes has come up with nothing.
Is there something like this in the about:config page perhaps, or a convenient theme/extension/addon/plugin/etc that my friend can install to feel comfy using Firefox again?
For someone like this, it probably makes sense to just throw some more CPU/RAM at it. You have to want to make a change like this to some degree.
They’re using my previous PC which I sent to them as a gift when building my current PC. It’s got decent specs and 16GB ram but they are the sort to have anywhere from a few dozen to a few hundred Chrome tabs open across a handful of windows plus BlueStacks (an Android VM/emulator tool) open with a few instances of mobile gacha games plus whatever actual PC game he’s playing. The other day his computer “couldn’t open youtube” so after some troubleshooting it turned out he’d filled up his entire ram (16GB) and his entire swapdisk (set to 32GB on the main C: drive, which was an SSD) but it overflowed and continued going until the C drive itself was full, somewhere around like 75GB of ram being used because he left everything running for over 9 days without ever closing anything.
So long as they continue to insist on using Chrome and leaving half a dozen emulators/virtual machines spun up 24/7 while also leaving things like final fantasy running “in the background”, no amount of tossing more CPU/RAM at the problem will fix it; Chrome itself shouldn’t be using up 50+GB of ram but it’s Chrome, so it has memory leaks every other day, and he’s fixing the crux of the issue by ditching Chrome (also has had some security issues recently and we JUST did a malware cleanup this week as well due to a Chrome issue so just another reason he’s trying to ditch it in favor of Firefox)
I really do appreciate the input though. It can be frustrating (as an autism myself) to ask “Hey how do I do A” and everyone responds with “don’t do A, do B or C instead” but I have to do A for a very specific set of reasons. Even still, it’s nice to see that everyone is at least pitching in with extra info and advice, just in case.