How to Manage Firefox Tabs with TooManyTabs

If you open numerous tabs in Firefox, you'll notice that your browser's performance suffers, along with your memory being hogged. Every tab you open uses up system resources, even if you aren't using the tab at the time. This is where TooManyTabs comes into play. This small plugin for both Firefox and Chrome allows you to open tabs in multiple rows. The best part - idle tabs remain idle, meaning they use no system resources until you actually bring them to the front.

Installing TooManyTabs

Open an instance of Firefox and download TooManyTabs. The add-on is free, even though the developer asks for a small contribution if you feel inclined to provide a quick thank you. The installation process is automated. You'll need to restart Firefox in most cases in order to use TooManyTabs.

Customizing

You can customize TooManyTabs. Open the TooManyTabs menu. If you do not see this, open the View menu and choose TooManyTabsToolbar. Select Options from the TooManyTabs menu. From here you can customize when to show rows of idle tabs, where to open tabs and how the toolbar displays. You can also manage each individual row, including which tabs are listed in each row. In addition, you can create shortcut keys to open specific rows so you don't have to use the TooManyTabs menu.

Pinning Tabs

Right click on TooManyTabs at the top of Firefox. Choose Pin this Tab. You can also pin multiple tabs, edit tab colors, rename a tab, view your tab history, close tabs and open tabs. By default, TooManyTabs stores your most recently used 20 tabs. You can clear this history at any point, open Recently Closed Tabs from the TooManyTabs menu and select Clear Recently Closed Tabs. You do not have to save recently closed tabs if you don't want to. Change this setting in the TooManyTabs options window.

Why Use TooManyTabs

Think of TooManyTabs as a great way of organizing your most used websites. You can store sets of tabs. For instance, if you always check email, read your favorite blog and open a few social networking sites when you first open Firefox, store all of these tabs in a single row. When you open Firefox, this row of tabs can be loaded automatically.

If you then research multiple sites on a regular basis for school or work, you could close your first set of tabs and open the next set. Instead of having all open at once, each unopened tab sits in an idle state, without using up memory. All the site's information on each tab is stored to help load the site quicker. Until you actually bring a tab up, it remains idle.

TooManyTabs is perfect for organizing tabs on a long term basis. Firefox lets you use tabs, but not necessarily keep them. TooManyTabs stores your sets of tabs for later use. Basically, TooManyTabs is bookmarks in tab form.