I must begin this post by admitting that I am an addict. I am addicted to Firefox and its ability to open multiple windows.

As a testimony to that addiction, I looked down at the task bar last week and noticed that I had 165 windows open in Firefox.

How common is this sort of addiction? I have no idea. I do know that it definitely stresses Firefox, so I’d like to document my experiences.

To the creators of Firefox I would like to be clear: I love you all. Firefox is an amazing browser and an integral part of my life. Please don’t take any of this as being critical. I am simply documenting my experiences.

So how does it happen that I have 165 windows open? I tend to do a lot of reading on the Internet. Let’s say I am reading a page and I see a link that is interesting. If it is related to the current page, I will open it in a tab. If it is a “new train of thought,” I will open it in a new window and then finish what I had been reading.

Through this process, over the course of a few days, I can open dozens of windows and dozens of tabs. Many of these windows and tabs get closed each night when I create the “Interesting Reading” post. But on some windows I will think, “I could make a post about that”, or “that’s interesting, but I need to do more research”, so it won’t go into “Interesting Reading” and instead will remain as an open window until tomorrow. The open window is essentially a bookmark. After I do this for several days, I look down and realize that I have a LOT of windows open.

Firefox handles this situation fairly well up until I have about 90 or 100 windows open. Once I get above 100, Firefox becomes less happy, and will crash about once a day. The great thing about Firefox is that it has the “Restore” option. It remembers the URLs of all 100 open windows and all the tabs in each window. After crashing, there is a dialog box that opens to ask, “Do you want to restore your previous session?” If you do, Firefox will re-open every URL you previously had open.

I am sure Time Warner and YouTube are both aware of every Firefox crash because of this restore process. After clicking “Restore” it takes about 10 seconds for all 100 windows to reappear on the screen. Then all 100 (plus their tabs) start to refresh themselves. That would be relatively fine except that, on my desktop, typically 15% to 20% of the windows are from YouTube.

So all 15 or 20 of those YouTube windows immediately begin reloading their entire YouTube video (giant network load) , and also start playing all of them simultaneously (giant CPU load). This is a huge waste of bandwidth and also brings my machine to its knees. So the only thing to do is take a bathroom break or get a snack or listen to voice mail for 10 minutes as this reloading process runs its course. Then it is possible to resume work.

Other problems that occur above 100 windows:

1) If you open a window that needs a Java VM, usually you get a dialog telling you that a new Java VM can’t be created. The work-around is to open an IE window, copy-paste the URL from Firefox to IE and run it there.

2) Ditto on YouTube. Sometimes the sound on YouTube videos will stop working when a lot of windows are open. At that point the easiest thing to do is wait until I need a break, kill Firefox in the task manager, restart Firefox, restore the previous session and come back in 10 minutes. But if I can’t do that, IE becomes the YouTube browser.

3) It can be pain in the butt when Firefox restores 100 windows/tabs and one of them starts playing sound. You have that one window playing sound, but no idea which one it is. CERNLand is the most recent page to do this to me. Try it: CERNLand. What is that thing, a koala? I can’t understand what it is saying, and for a day and a half I had to turn off the speakers to keep from listening to it. If I needed to listen to a video, I would turn on the speakers and that Koala (with musical accompaniment) would be talking underneath the video’s audio. When I finally found that CERNLand tab, my impression of CERN fell by several notches.

4) On very rare occasions, perhaps once every 3 months or so, Firefox will crash while it is restoring the previous session. When that happens, Firefox loses all the URLs. Those days are filled with mourning. If you are a URL addict like me, losing your collection of URLs is tragic.

Once you get about 150 to 160 windows open, Firefox gets stretched to the breaking point. It will now crash every hour or two, and this is my clue that it is time to solve the problem. The only way to solve the problem is to go through all 160 windows, saving all the URLs in drafts of blog posts or in text files. Which is something that I ended up doing this past weekend. Currently I have 59 windows left open. Firefox is completely happy at this level.

One question would be, “when recovering from a crash with a hundred windows open, is it necessary to load and play all 15 YouTube videos simultaneously?” Perhaps there is a way around that, like a button to click to say that you want to start buffering/playing? Because it does create a lot of load on the network connection and the CPU, basically bringing my decently-endowed desktop machine to its knees.

Also, might there be a way to “dump all the URLs to a text file?” Maybe this feature is already in there and I simply haven’t found it. But if there was a way to have Firefox dump all 100 or 150 open URLs, along with the title of the page, to a text file, it would mean that I could save the current state and close all the open windows. Being able to reload one of those text files later (and reopen all 100 windows) would also be great, but I don’t want to sound greedy.

Thanks again to everyone who has contributed to Firefox. It is an amazing tool, and it is amazing how stable and lightweight it is up to 100 open windows. It truly is an integral part of my life.

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