The more tabs you open in your browser, the more memory it will ultimately consume, especially if the tabs you open are resource-heavy, such as videos. While a computer’s hardware clearly and obviously plays a role in how many tabs can be handled, development of the browser’s software also matters as it needs to be optimized to be as memory efficient as possible.
For those of you out there who have dozens of tabs open at the same time, if you aren’t using Firefox then perhaps you should because thanks to Mozilla developer Dietrich Ayala, he put the latest Firefox builds to the test and found out that Firefox 55 and 56 have no issues handling as many as 1,691 tabs (via ZDNet).
According to his testing, he found that older builds of Firefox, such as Firefox 51 took almost 8 minutes to startup with a whopping 1,691 tabs opened. However in Firefox 55 and 56, it took a mere 15 seconds, which is still 15 seconds of waiting around, but considering the number of tabs, it’s pretty damn impressive.
Memory wise Ayala also found that the later builds of Firefox are better optimized for memory, and that with 1,691 tabs open, Firefox 55 and 56 used under 500MB of RAM. While we’re pretty sure no one will ever need to open that many tabs, basically the idea is that if you are something of a tab hoarder, Firefox will be able to handle your tabs without breaking a sweat.