Your OS should do this automatically, your programs shouldn't worry about cold memory.

Nope! Not happening or at least not soon enough. Neither on macOS or Linux (can't speak for the stupid platform).

Firefox will happily keep tabs open, even if macOS reports major memory pressure or Linux needs to invoke the OOM killer because it's Gigabytes into swap.
Not to speak of what happens before memory pressure is reached; Firefox will also happily use all of your memory even if you'd rather have it free for something else you're going to do next.

There are reasons, and there are addons that allow you to unload tabs via their right click menu.

For me it is a way to keep tabs in a window for organization without them using cpu. In some sense it's like replacing tabs with bookmarks that integrate into the browser like tabs.

That's fine, do what works for you. I usually have 50+ tabs open, sometimes >100. I'm a software dev, so I'll typically have the following:

• a dozen or so JIRA tickets
• a dozen or so GitHub PR tabs
• a dozen or so documentation tabs
• several background tabs with stuff in listening to (usually music or streams)
• several SM or news pages (for breaks)

When I finish a project, I'll close everything and start it all over again. I basically use tabs as a mixture of to-dos and bookmarks, but only for things I need in the short term.

My personal computer usually only has 20 tabs or so, mostly with gaming wikis or shopping pages.

It works well for me.

Especially for school, I would have 10 to 15 tabs open per research rabbit hole. With lots of different assignments due, I'd have maybe 3 or 4 of these going at a time. It's much easier to keep them open than to bookmark them and try to find them later.

Personally I use simple tab group that allow you to separate tabs into groups that you can open in different windows. It's extremely useful but it means sometimes if you switch between multiple tab groups you might have a lot of tabs open, but using this would allow you to majorly mitigate that problem.

I just say eh this one is important but I can't rn so I'll deal with it later. Anyway, 60 tabs waiting for me on FF Android. Idk how much I tabs are stashed on PC lol. ADHD struggles are real

(i had over 2000 earlier)

Or use oneTab.

They cannot juggle 100 tabs.

Simple as that

Its not possible to manage for anyone.

Theyre just too dumb to close them

This one?

Bump

I find pinning my WhatsApp tab sorts that out, it seems to autoload pinned tabs into memory on launch.

From what I understand it basically just saves the minimal state possible (URL, form inputs), which is lighter than keeping all the rendering details in memory, so maybe that minimal representation still stays in RAM as its footprint would be negligible.

/dev/null

It gets thrown away. When you go back to the tab it will effectively reload.

(It will attempt to save some extra information such as scroll position and form inputs but this isn't 100% reliable so I would treat it as a nice-to-have not something to rely on.)

What the hell are you working?

Firefox also does this automatically, and you're not supposed to mess with it.