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thetimpotter comments on Who Wants To Start An Important Startup? - Less Wrong
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active browser history
I've noticed that more than a few people will have 20+ tabs open in their browser, for weeks at a time, while actively using only two or three tabs. These websites will occupy significant portions of the flash memory, using several gigabytes.
I call it active history because this is a management tool for tabs that you're not yet ready to search through your history for.
The browser plug-in would allow ' x ' recent tabs (or a memory limit), and kill the page for any older tabs. The url would be saved, the tab would still be there, and when the user opens the tab again the page reloads.
The point is that only the URL must be saved, and the system memory could be used for better tasks.
bits not gigabytes
Firefox already does this. Options> General> Only load tabs when selected. It's just as good as you suggest it would be, particularly on slower computers.
Does the function perform as imagined, or does it lead to new issues?
Romeo brought up a great point, that it may have been a psychological barrier.
It leads to annoyance for me. Whenever you switch into a tab, it starts loading (from the point of view of someone who wasn't aware the page hadn't loaded, it seemed to be reloading). As soon as I saw BrassLion's post, I went into the options and disabled it.
It doesn't reduce the number of tabs I have open - in fact, it probably increases it by removing th technical barrier. Everyone once in a while I go though my open tabs and either read them, bookmark them, or close them. I believe there's an extension that will actually automatically close your oldest tab when you open a new one if you have more than n tabs open, but I don't much see the point of it - if I need a fresh, uncluttered tab bar for some project I use tab groups. Comittment devices are cool and all, but sometimes the technical issue is the real issue, not tht psychological one.
The barrier seems to be psychological rather than technical.
It would be hard to know which tabs just represent a URL to remember, and which ones have important state information. One way of preserving a particular version of a web page is often to keep it open in a tab; this potentially removes that ability.