33 ms·

I closed a lot of browser tabs

156 points by tjwds 5y ago

zeristor 5y ago
Is that a lot? I think I've got Firefox up to 3500, indeed I mentioned this when I went to a meetup hosted by Mozilla, and they said that few people use more than 14. I think some of the tab tools start to make it unstable, but the root issue is that it'd be good to clear down browser tabs often.
- Veen 5y ago
  When you have this many tabs, do you actively manage them or even have any idea what they contain. How do you find the information you need amongst 3000+ tabs. Isn't it annoying to have to shuffle through lots of windows with lots of tabs? I start to lose track after a dozen or so.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - zeristor 5y ago
    Because I can. Hacker News facilitates me opening scores of tabs a day, that and not being able to find the tab I need means duplicating it; although the browser now serves me up with the original one. I tend to open a new window for a new line of work, so the tabs are over 40 or so windows. The limit used to be the bowser crashing, or me forgetting to reopen history and so relinquishing the interesting things. My point is that I’d greatly appreciate keeping this down. I’m currently down to 800 or so, I think the tab history tool crashes Firefox, without it it could go a lot higher. ADHD can creep up on you
    - joekunin 5y ago
      The OneTab extension has done great things for my tab organization, might be of interest to you as well .
    - silon42 5y ago
      I've started on my own vertical tabs addon that can handle many thousands of tabs. Still work in progress...
  - detaro 5y ago
    once it gets to the thousands it breaks down, but in my experience spatial memory + pattern matching on favicons works surprisingly well to navigate a large number of tabs.
- milesvp 5y ago
  I just don’t understand how anyone could have less than 14 tabs open at any time. Just using a search engine requires at least 4 at a time, and I’ve often got four or five searches going at any time. And then there’s at least a half dozen communication tabs. Even when I declare browser bankruptcy and close whole windows dedicated to some topic, I don’t think I can get my total count below 14. I mean, I get that my workflow is unique, but I’m apparently truly out of touch with typical browser usage.
  - mattlondon 5y ago
    I regularly have only one or two at once. When I am done with a tab, I close it - this makes it very simple. Sure I might temporarily open 10 at once when searching, but many will be culled within the first 10-20 seconds of reading the page as either the info I need is not there, or I've found what I need so can close the rest. Occasionally when cross-referencing stuff I will go up to perhaps 5 or even 10 in extreme circumstances, but then - as before - I close the tab when I am done. For stuff I want to come back to "later" I just use a bookmark instead of just leaving it open. At work I tend to leave email chat and calendar open all day, but that is only an extra 3 tabs. In my experience - both at work and at home - it is better to concentrate on only a small number of things at once and try to work them through to completion (or as far as you can get) so you can just drop it from your head when you are done and not need to dedicate and brain energy on juggling all these differen "in-flight" tasks. I find it easier to concentrate and way more productive to finish a task and then move on, rather than context-switching every 2 minutes and wasting endless time hunting for "that tab with that thing I need" on it.
    - asymptosis 5y ago
      I have this approach too. When working, I might have up to 20 tabs open at a given time, but most of them are just there passively for things like monitoring and calendars. Some tips for people who are struggling with their tab count: * Always close all tabs at the end of the day. * Use different browser profiles for different types of task (eg work admin/emails/calendars/trello vs work-related documentation/search vs monitoring vs nonwork.) * If you notice you have enough tabs open that the browser needs to shrink or hide them, cycle through and cull a bunch. If needed, you can always find them again later, either just by searching for them or using your browser history.
- _tom_ 5y ago
  I had gotten up to 1000 a few times. Just never getting back to things to close them, mostly. It turned have to have huge performance impact, so I don't do it anymore. I got out of the habit a few years ago. I think since then, browser went to lazy loading of tabs on restart. If you think your system is running slow, cut the number of tabs to under 100, and try again. You may see a huge jump in performance. The one thing that helped me break the habit of not closing tabs was just installing a tab counter extension. Now, if I see it creeping up towards 100, I know it's time to clean house.
- bashwizard 5y ago
  I don't think I've ever had more than 10 tabs. Why on earth would anyone have more than a few open at the same time?
- e3bc54b2 5y ago
  > few people use more than 14 I can definitely say there is a selection bias at play here. Tab management as it is in major browsers by default sucks. At more than half dozen tabs, you start losing tab titles, basically playing "Where is waldo". When you go beyond a dozen tabs you can barely see the favicon. Any more and it becomes a game of "Concentration"[0]. When the experience is so horrible, no wonder people don't use more than 14 tabs at once. Give people vertical tabs with nested hierarchy and watch how quickly people go about operating 100+ tabs without losing sweat. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentration_(card_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentration_(card_game)
bellyfullofbac 5y ago
Vivaldi allows placing the tab bar vertically[1], I've used this since Opera times (an Opera founder departed the company after its Chinese takeover, and started Vivaldi), I currently have around 120 tabs open in 5 windows (actually you can also scroll on the tab bar itself), yeah too damn many. I suppose people without AppleScript can write a browser extension that iterates through all the tabs and report the count to a Grafana. It would also be interesting to also record ages of tabs (e.g. time since it was opened/time since it was last seen)... [1] https://vivaldi.com/features/tab-management/ https://vivaldi.com/features/tab-management/
- sfg 5y ago
  Tree Style Tabs in Firefox. Vertical with nesting.
  - OJFord 5y ago
    Another option is Sidebery, seemed to be the only maintained one when I last looked. It also supports 'panels' - 'tabs' to the sidebar that switch between sets of tabs. You can assign a panel to a FF container.
    - m_t 5y ago
      This looks like a good replacement of the old tab group Firefox used to have. The fact we can assign them a container is really promising, I'll give it a go!
      - Vinnl 5y ago
        For me it replaced both my tab groups extension and vertical tabs extension. It's a godsend, although a little bit buggy every now and then.
      - cmehdy 5y ago
        I found this[0] minimal style (not by me) particularly useful, with auto-folding and a thin visual footprint. [0] https://github.com/ongots/firefox-sidebery-minimal-style https://github.com/ongots/firefox-sidebery-minimal-style (screenshots further down the page)
pjmlp 5y ago
Maybe this a generation thing, I never have more than 10 open, on average. Anything worth keeping, bookmarks.
- alpaca128 5y ago
  Tabs are the better bookmarks imho. They can also be directly searched in the address bar, but are treated consistently like every other tab and stay more visible than items in some hidden list. They're also just as persistent as bookmarks; last time I reinstalled my system I just copy-pasted the Firefox profile over and instantly had the exact same session back. Of course that's based on the assumption I don't switch the browser. But Firefox is the last relevant non-Chromium browser and I dislike Chromium and its derivatives for various reasons.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    And that you are lucky with the file not being corrupted on crash.
    - silon42 5y ago
      The reason I have thousands of tabs open is that Firefox stopped losing tabs on crash/restart in recent years... a decade or more ago this would not be a "problem".
  - _Algernon_ 5y ago
    Do you use any particular workflows or extensions to manage a large number of tabs? I don't how a tab bar with 40+ tabs is useable, even if tabs persist through crashes and restarts.
    - johnny22 5y ago
      tree style tabs or something like that probably
    - rasguanabana 5y ago
      I just open more browser windows.
amelius 5y ago
What I want is a History functionality that allows me to better search through visited pages. Firefox does this, but they only show the page title, which is often not sufficiently descriptive. They should show search results like DDG/Google shows them. With a better search, I wouldn't feel the need to keep so many tabs open.
- m_93 5y ago
  That’s what was “to be native” in Cliqz. They were indexing url, title and I’m not sure about content was in plan or implemented - forgot my trials. But they approached exactly that issue in their browser (Firefox fork). There was something like internal index which was pre-fetched and updated next to user data which were added while using. All that was 1 search, 2nd was going to internet. That was really cool idea.
cookiengineer 5y ago
Isn't this tab fatigue of every user not more a hint that bookmarking is broken? I mean, no matter how I bookmark a website, omnibar is absolutely useless in every browser when it comes to re-discovering your bookmarks via keywords that you remember. Sometimes I bookmark the same URL multiple times, because the Browser is too stupid to realize that a #generated-hashbang or a ?utm_source is a generated tracking parameter; and that it's actually the same URL with the identical content. In my opinion, bookmarks as implementations are seriously broken. If we solve bookmarks _locally_, there ain't gonna be a "too many tabs" problem anymore.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- bodge5000 5y ago
  The solution for me is to use the great suspender (pre kerfuffle version) which makes tabs act kind of like temporary bookmarks, but you're right in that something better is needed. I guess the problem is that a lot of people, myself included, use tabs as a kind of todo list of things to look at (whether thats effective or not is another point), whereas bookmarks hide themselves out of sight and out of mind
  - wintermutestwin 5y ago
    >pre kerfuffle version What does that mean? I am using Total Suspender
    - bodge5000 5y ago
      The Great Suspender was sold to an unknown party which made some less than trustworthy changes, forcing google to eventually take it down for containing malware.
- detaro 5y ago
  Yes, a good bookmarking/archiving/... solution would likely solve this for many people.
hawski 5y ago
On Firefox for a lots of tabs management solution I recommend Simple Tab Groups [0]. It is how built-in tab groups should have always worked instead of the manual panorama. It does periodical backups, that I have never needed to use and it even integrates with tab containers. [0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/simple-tab-groups/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/simple-tab-gr...
b0rsuk 5y ago
TabFS lets you mount Firefox tabs as a filesystem. You can then use regular scripting to operate on them.
- avnigo 5y ago
  This looks brilliant, thanks for the recommendation. https://omar.website/tabfs/ https://omar.website/tabfs/
DrSiemer 5y ago
The new Chrome tab group is not great, but it does help. One group for things that are being processed (handle asap), one group for "stuff to check", one for each project I'm working on and one for entertainment. All with short names and their own color, so it takes up a minimum of space. The remaining space is for temporary tabs. Larger temporary side quests get their own window and will be either closed or moved into a new group before closing the browser. It's still not as good as Firefox's nested Tree Style Tab once was (and might be again?) but I'm kind of locked into Chrome at this point. Bookmarks only work for tools and resources I need on a regular basis, and even then it's usually easier to just google them when they are needed. Who has the time to actually study all those bookmarks saved for later? Maybe some kind of organizational bookmark extension, that would help you go through it all, could help with this.
- unicornporn 5y ago
  » It's still not as good as Firefox's nested Tree Style Tab once was (and might be again?) but I'm kind of locked into Chrome at this point. What terrible being is locking people into Chrome?
  - TchoBeer 5y ago
    Google
  - wintermutestwin 5y ago
    Web devs who don't give a shit about FF.
  - DrSiemer 5y ago
    If it's where your passwords and addons live, switching takes effort. Besides, what is the big advantage of Firefox? Chrome has 65% of the worldwide market share. Firefox does not even have 4 [1]. About half of the stuff I build will literally only ever run in Chrome anyway. [1] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share
    - 5y ago
lol768 5y ago
Interesting choice to use some sort of proprietary OS scripting language instead of just writing a standard WebExtension, I thought. Presumably chrome.tabs.query would have returned all tabs and a native manifest would've allowed comms with the outside world to build a HTTP server. Still, I suppose the approach taken by the author worked at the end of the day - just not very portable.
- somehnacct3757 5y ago
  Yeah I think the web extension approach is the best one. Shame they ruled it out. Extension background scripts can push data wherever you want. You can sideload the extension and talk to localhost ports or anyone on the internet. Use ajax or native events to talk to a local process. There's even an event system that tells you when tabs are opened, closed, activated, deactivated, etc.
  - rjbs 5y ago
    Thanks, I'll have a look at writing a web extension, sometime. It sounds like they might not be such a pain, after all. Here, I just forged forward with what I already knew I could get done while goofing off on the weekend.
nephrite 5y ago
I open almost all links in new tabs because the sites became too large. Simple pressing "Back" in the browser takes too much time, but I can quickly switch to the previous tab.
apples_oranges 5y ago
I discovered that many tabs for me are indicative of my own laziness and lack of discipline and an unhealthy tendency to multitask. Now I pay attention (not just about tabs but also about my desktop files, and the cleanness of my actual desk) and I am happier for it. Optimal number of tabs: < 5, with 1 being Youtube playing some ambient music, 1 being JIRA, one being Github.
Joeri 5y ago
What is the value in keeping all this stuff around in tabs to look at later? If it is important, you will see it again and it is not necessary to put it on a todo list of tabs to read later. If it is not important it is just more busy work. I would also argue that reading all these random things on the internet does not build knowledge. We learn by doing or by repeating, not by reading something once. Isn’t keeping that many tabs around just an example of FOMO? To be clear, I’m all for todo lists, but tabs are a terrible UI for having a todo list in. If you’re going to keep a todo list, use a proper todo software, and be mindful of what you put on the list.
lewisjoe 5y ago
I built https://closetab.email https://closetab.email specifically for this problem. I set a timer within which I'd like to read the tab, and immediately close it. The extension emails me a digest of all these tabs, once a week - until I either finish reading it or the timeout is reached. Works like charm for me.
sharmi 5y ago
I use firefox. I open ridiculous amount of tabs. I have had atleast 600+ that I have counted. There is a good chance I have exceeded 1000 more than once, maybe often. One of the reasons is I keep tabs from previous sessions open through "Recover tabs". I found that having too many tabs also affects my ability to concentrate, as I get distracted often. To keep the tab count low, I use Two extensions together: Open Tab Count Resurrected (gives me the count of tabs in current window and across windows, current count: 44/147) Lean Tab Limiter: Limits the number of tabs you can open. This gives me the wakeup call I need when I exceed the number of tabs I have set.
mFixman 5y ago
I normally have 2–3 browser windows open with at most 5 tabs each. I find that the window → tab hierarchy works very well with my workflow and it allows me to close tabs aggressively when I don't need them without being complex like TreeStyleTabs. For example, if I'm looking for reference on a particular function I open a new window, open tabs for a couple of relevant results, do some research, and when I'm done I just close the window with all the tabs in it. I just don't understand people who have a million tabs open in a single window. You clearly don't remember what's on each tab, so it's just screen and mental real estate being used for nothing. For a Mac, I found that Hyperswitch works really great for letting Command+tab choose the correct window instead of doing the unexplainable mess of OSX application and window switching.
- Angostura 5y ago
  I’m glad I’m not the only person who works like this. I was beginning to think there was something wrong with me. I use Safari on MacOS as my daily driver and find the search history functionality really handy
timvisee 5y ago
What do you use to visualize these tabs? Just the tab bar? I also like to open a lot of tabs, but sometimes find it hard to manage them. I use Tree Style Tab, in a sidebar, wich collapsible groups. I like that a lot but am always wondering what others use.
nathias 5y ago
Too many tabs is a problem of browser UX, I have fixed it for myself by using Tree Style Tab extension with vimium.
theshrike79 5y ago
This is a type of FOMO. You start collecting Absolutely Essential Reading in tabs, stuff that you'll for sure read later, no joke, seriously. You never will. But you can't close the tab or you can't find the content again and bookmarking is mostly useless if you use multiple computers and browsers daily. I got over my tab-itis with Pinboard[0]. If stuff seems to sit in my tabs for too long, I can send the link easily to Pinboard, slap on a few tags if it's an unique one or grab a few of the suggested ones if it's a common bookmark. With the Archiving feature it'll even mirror the content for me so it doesn't get lost in the tides of time. I'll never look at most of the stuff I pin, but my mind is at ease because the precious stuff is stored =) [0] https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/
- pjmlp 5y ago
  > But you can't close the tab or you can't find the content again and bookmarking is mostly useless if you use multiple computers and browsers daily. Tabs are hardly any different.
- dionidium 5y ago
  One way to combat this FOMO is to remember that the subset of web pages you'll never read that also just happen to have caught your attention is dwarfed by the billions of web sites you don't know about and won't ever read. There's no particular reason to privilege this former set in your mind based solely on the randomness of having noticed the items within it. They're just more pages in the set of billions of pages that you won't ever read. The water that splashes into your boat is the same as the rest of the water in the ocean.
- elsurudo 5y ago
  I do the same thing, especially the "not reading later" part. but it's a kind of hack that works for me. By posting this, you just prompted me to do my routine of "evaluate, add, close". Problem is some of the short-term ones that I "really want to read" – well, I'm not closing those. So it's a partial solution.
- shalmanese 5y ago
  Chiming in to say this was one of my checks notes currently 508 tabs that I saved to read later which I did eventually come back to read and engage in so tab hoarding isn't entirely always fruitless.
somehnacct3757 5y ago
There's a couple guys at work who are the hundred-tabs type and when I pair with them I notice their dev environment is much slower to build and run. I think it considerably reduces their output. Imagine another 15 seconds on your development loop that you do dozens of times a day. In fact it probably reinforces the problem because I know when I have long rebuild times, I open a tab to read the news!
agent327 5y ago
Here's something I'd love to have. Let's you are reading hacker news. Clicking a link gives you two options: open in a new tab, or open, replacing the current tab. Opening in a new tab works, but leaves you with a lot of tabs open that are cognitively hard to deal with ("why did I think this would be interesting?"). Replacing the current tab removes the context. When you return to the front page, it may have changed, and you may not remember where you left of. So why can't I have the front page on the left of the window, and anything I click on on the right (replacing whatever is already there)? The front page would remain in place, so I'm not losing my context. I can click on something, quickly determine if it is worth reading in depth, and go on to the next thing if it's not. I would never have a thousand tabs open; just the one would be enough. Why isn't this a thing in browsers? It would make so many websites so much easier to deal with...
- kace91 5y ago
  On iOS you've got link previews on long press which might be similar to what your looking for. There's probably a way to do it on osx as well. That wouldn't solve my problem though, for me tabs are a way to queue other paths to take in a way of reading that's naturally branching. For example, reading an article in Wikipedia might lead to 3-4 more I want to check out, but the preview system doesn't work because visiting each of those will probably give me 3-4 branches more. I'm basically doing recursive reading over a potentially infinite-depth structure, so there is no guarantee that I'll ever resurface to the upper node.
  - agent327 5y ago
    No offense, but that's something entirely different. I'm looking for a way to utilize my 27" monitor to see an entire article without falling into the doomscroll trap, not a tiny popup containing a lousy summary on an even tinier screen.
- tigerlily 5y ago
  So like a left and right pane? That would be extremely useful, especially for search engine results, you could click on results in the left pane and quickly view them in succession in the right side pane.
jessikat 5y ago
I had a co-worker that would have over 300 tabs open. Except, unlike some, in a single window, so the tabs barely had enough room to click on. Yet he could still find the tab he wanted, I think it was down to spatial awareness of what was where. It still boggles my mind.
thefr0g 5y ago
I don't get why people litter their browser with tabs. I pretty sure I never used more than 30 at the same time. I just close them if I don't need them anymore. At the latest when I can't read the titles anymore the garbage collection runs. If I might still need it I just bookmark the page. (It helps to sort your bookmarks and have proper syncing)
- lifthrasiir 5y ago
  Because I'll be never sure when I need this tab next time. I can't use bookmarks because bookmarks don't record the exact context (the history leading to that tab and neighbor tabs).
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    Better never let the process die or corrupt the session cache.
- anewone 5y ago
  One problem for me is opening more interesting links than I have time to get to. Bookmarks don't really solve the core problem of not properly managing my time. When I used to use RSS, I would have many feeds racking up dozens of unread and potentially interesting posts as a sort of todo list which I never got around to clearing. So I decided to forget about RSS and try not to worry about catching every single item out there.
- mrweasel 5y ago
  I normally just exit the browser if I reach 20 tabs. Mentally I can’t/won’t deal with it and just declare tab bankrupcy and exists everything. Browsers like Safari have excellent time based history, should I need a page within the next few days. On problem with this method is that is has made me hate webapps, including PWAs, as it they incompatible with the browser being closed down a few times a day.
  - thefr0g 5y ago
    > On problem with this method is that is has made me hate webapps, including PWAs Javascript is the new Flash...
mackrevinack 5y ago
tab stash for firefox is the best solution I've found so far. i still end up with tab creep every now and again, but when it happens it's really quick to stash them into different groups, give it an optional name of needed, then when you open the that group of the later on, the stash is deleted. the other thing i love about it is that is just uses plain bookmarks and folders for each stash, so i means that you can sync your bookmarks to mobile and still access them there. a few other extensions ive tried in the past store they bookmarks in a database, so you can only access on another device if you use the same extension
brongondwana 5y ago
I am very much the opposite! I close my entire browser at least once per day - every tab closed. I have about 10 sites in my bookmarks toolbar - which are basically the key sites I use for work, and that's it. If I have too many tabs open, I lose context. Ditto with terminals - they ALL get shut down multiple times per day. Reset to zero, spin up state, do task, reset back to zero. I treat it like a commercial kitchen - you clean the whole place and then you cook the session's meals, and then you clean it all down again.
- Freak_NL 5y ago
  Same. I usually open our company's MatterMost in the first tab when I start (the only one I leave open all day), and will clear out anything else if I'm done with some task that required them. If I want to read something later I'll find it with DuckDuckGo or just the browser history. If I use it often the address bar will prioritize it so even just the first letter of the URL will show it at the top of the list. For sites that I search frequently I use DuckDuckGo's bangs directly in the address bar: https://duckduckgo.com/bang https://duckduckgo.com/bang.
- tsjq 5y ago
  Nice. I am able to relate this with the book : organize your mind organize your life . https://www.amazon.in/Organize-your-Mind-Life/dp/9351060640 https://www.amazon.in/Organize-your-Mind-Life/dp/9351060640
- travisjungroth 5y ago
  My most ranty and deservedly downvoted HN comment was expressing this same opinion. The kitchen cleaning analogy is great. What's amazing to me is clean-up takes less than a second. I view all my left over tabs like food scraps, and sweep them off the counter in a single click.
wazoox 5y ago
Tree style tab for me. Makes it easy to keep hundreds of tabs open and organised. I generally have about 40 open on my laptop, and between 50 and 100 on my work PC (various documentation websites, applications, etc). Not a generational thing, I'm 50.
globular-toast 5y ago
I have a strong tendency for things to disappear if they are kept around for too long. This happens in real life too. When my girlfriend and I moved house last year we started describing things as "gone" because we kept finding that whole boxes or pieces of furniture became completely invisible to us if they had been in one place too long. The same thing happens with browser tabs. Sometimes I'll leave one open "for later" and then I'll realise sometimes a week later that the tab is still open. I wonder, do these loads of tabs people have the same problem as me, or can they see the tabs and "later" really just hasn't arrived yet? In emacs I have a completely different approach to "tabs". I actually don't have visible tabs at all and "midnight-mode" automatically garbage collects unused buffers in the middle of the night. That way I only ever have stuff open that I am actually using. And, think about it, you only need to know what "tabs" are available at the moment you are switching, why are they visible at all other times? I wonder if such an approach could work for web browsers too?
felipeerias 5y ago
Ultimately, how you use tabs is very related to how your thought process operates. Some people need to have their tabs always visible as an aid for thought, so they can quickly see all the little tasks that are needed for the goal that they are trying to fulfil. In some cases, tabs that go away from view will literally go away from the user’s mind as well. Web browsers need to get a lot better at supporting different thinking styles. After all, it is easier to change how our software operates that how people’s brains work.
bhaak 5y ago
"I want to clean up my tabs so I setup Grafana." What a turn of events. And the most surprising thing is that it seemed to have actually helped to get the number of tabs down.
mountainb 5y ago
Use notetaking software instead. Just as searchable, can add context. But also most web content is not worth bookmarking and will be link rotted in an eyeblink anyway. If you are serious about organizing your knowledge do not externalize it to the flighty whims of the web.
lazyweb 5y ago
I've been looking for platform-independent bookmark keeper and like to selfhost things, so I've set up a wallabag instance [1] hosted behind my TLD. There's an Android app via F-Droid as well. Can recommend this a lot. Using it to either save websites (wallabag downloads all HTML content) or catch up on longer articles during train rides etc. [1] https://github.com/wallabag/wallabag https://github.com/wallabag/wallabag
- gwbrooks 5y ago
  +1 for Wallabag, which cut my open-tab problem in half. I found it a persnickety installation and eventually went with the Docker image, which was fast and painless.
mrkramer 5y ago
Tabs, bookmarks and browser history are productivity nightmare; there is just no good way to organize all of it and search through it. Navigation is pain. Imo the greatest problem of the modern internet is search; there is so much information and in particular unstructured information and no internet search engine even comes close to efficiently searching through all that trove of information. Personal analytics and better internet search solutions should be the next big focus of web development in order to increase productivity. Metadata and semantic web dream should never be forsaken.
enobrev 5y ago
Interesting solution for tracking open tabs. Every so often I like to dump all my open tabs into pocket just to make absolutely sure I will never see them again.
reportgunner 5y ago
Max 8 tabs per window. If you need more, open another browser window. If you 'lose' a tab you can always find it the way you found it in the first place. You should remember how you found things instead of remembering which tab they were in - this way you can reproduce the process and "find" the content on any other device.
nicholasjarr 5y ago
I use Firefox and I have too many tabs open. Tab Stash helped a lot though, great extension. Firefox container Tabs puts a color border on tabs and also helps with work stuff.
jbverschoor 5y ago
Bookmarks are notes. The problem is there is no proper contexting anymore. Everything is mixed up. Personal, work, development, everything scattered around in applications, files. A good solution is to have multiple machines with something like synergy. I'd still love a multi-user environment (multi-context actually), with separate file systems, application instances etc.
masto 5y ago
Lots of discussion of tabs and bookmarks and how to solve them once and for all with a new ontological hierarchy or server or service.. I get that, we’re nerds, that’s what we do. But if, like me, your tab clutter is more a problem of psychology: not being ready to close things because you might need them later (even though you won’t), plus a distinct lack of interest in spending hours trying to perfectly curate a museum of links, here’s a trick I picked up years ago that has continued to work reasonably well for me. I have a bookmark folder named after the current year and month (e.g. “2021-08 Bookmarks”). I keep it in my favorites/bookmarks bar. As I realize my tabs are starting to build up again, I fairly ruthlessly dump them all into the current month’s folder (it’s a pretty quick process of Cmd-D, Enter, Cmd-W). I don’t spend time trying to name them, organize them, or think about whether they deserve pride of place. I just put them there and close the tab, knowing I haven’t thrown any information away, and should I choose to get back to it, I at least have it somewhere. This is all my brain needs to let go of the need to have the tab open. This isn’t a chore I need to do every day (that would make me stop doing it), it’s an escape hatch I can use when I start to feel like my browser is a mess. When I notice it’s a new month, I put the old one into an “Archives” folder and make a new one. Practically this doesn’t do much, but it does keep it from feeling like one giant trash pile. While I’m doing this, I’ll usually make a smaller collection or two for things that I do actively need at the moment. E.g. if I’m working on a project and have opened a dozen tabs to research how to do part of it, or components I might want to buy, I’ll put them into a sub-folder of my top-level “Projects” or “Shopping” folders. These are the only other things that live in the favorites bar. The main motivation for this is, again, to allow me to feel ok closing the tab. It might seem today that the information I looked up about hot-wire anemometers is super valuable because I’m thinking about measuring the delta-P in my air conditioning ducts to figure out if I can buy higher MERV filters without compromising evaporator performance. And then next week when I’m no longer as interested in doing that, I still invested that time in finding those articles and Amazon links and might get back to it.. the reality is that if I still care to do this in a year I could easily look it up again, but it doesn’t feel that way. So save it in Projects > Air Filters and get back to Tab Zero.
ninkendo 5y ago
My solution is simple: When I feel like I have a lot of tabs [0], I close all of them. What happens when I close a tab I wanted open? I use browser history. Browser history is one of those things that I feel most people don’t use enough. It’s easy to search, it contains everything you visited, and (for the macOS/iOS ecosystem at least) is synced across devices. A quick cmd-Y and search makes for a very efficient user experience for me. [0] A “lot” is typically 10-20. I close all of my tabs probably 5-10 times during a typical work day.
- automatic6131 5y ago
  This is the way
- dgellow 5y ago
  It took me a very long time to learn this. I always had multiple hundred of tabs open, until the day I decided to stop caring about it and let them all go. I almost never actually used old open tabs, just refused to close them, by fear of missing something. That’s in fact not true, I now close all of them at the end of the day and start fresh every morning. Anything I have to keep from one day to the other is written down in my daily notes, but it’s really a small amount. Or I just use the history, as you said. People say it’s a bookmarking issue, I personally think it’s driven by fear of missing out, which isn’t really something solved by tools.
  - djKianoosh 5y ago
    how does one learn this power and enlightenment? I easily have over a thousand tabs open across several browsers. Sometimes I go back to review them and am gladly surprised. Or sometimes I don't remember why I was looking at a thing, but it's still interesting.
    - q3k 5y ago
      > how does one learn this power and enlightenment? Right click the tab you're on right now, left click 'close other tabs'. Exhale.
rjmunro 5y ago
I now can't decide whether to leave this tab open as a reminder for me to implement open tabs vs time graph. Rather than run a server on my machine, I'd prefer a tiny extension that sent an updated count to a service every time I open or close a tab. The easiest service to use would probably be a google sheet. I use https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/quick-tabs/jnjfeinjfmenlddahdjdmgpbokiacbbb https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/quick-tabs/jnjfein... to let me search through my tabs across different windows etc. and it tells me I have 320 open at the moment in my work profile and 56 in my personal profile.
- solairephantom 5y ago
  Cool extension, thanks! I added it to Brave, to only realize that Brave has something similar built-in. It looks like a "play" button in upper right corner, and can be activated by "CTRL-SHIFT-A", lets you search through tabs and switch to one quickly. I was wondering what that "play" button was for about a month, lol. Unfortunate choice of icon on their part, IMO.
jccalhoun 5y ago
I'm not a tons of tabs open person. I am a multiple browser person. Right now I am writing this in firefox on my main window with this tab and the tab for my custom homepage. I just opened Edge for work-related stuff. On my secondary monitor I have chrome with my more entertainment-based stuff: twitch (currently multitwitch with two streams), a tab for the video stream of the radio show I listen to in the morning, twitter, and facebook
JadeNB 5y ago
Incidentally, since a lot of people hitting this page might not know him, and since he doesn't exactly blazon information about himself around the site, this is the blog of Ricardo Signes, whom I know as a major contributor to Perl (https://github.com/rjbs https://github.com/rjbs).
miguelrochefort 5y ago
The worst part about Safari for iPhone is that they limit the number of open tabs to 500 (it used to be much lower, around 10 on my iPad 2). Whenever you open one more tab, Safari will dismiss the oldest tab. I've lost hundreds of tabs before noticing that behavior.
- kasabali 5y ago
  500 is generous. Samsung's "Internet" browser has 50 tabs limit with the same behavior. However unlike Safari, it warns you that you've hit the limit after it had gone ahead and closed the oldest tab.
gwbas1c 5y ago
For web applications I make an application shortcut, so then its a separate window instead of a tab.
dmd 5y ago
I love articles like this because they remind me how some people live - which reminds me to design with them in mind. Personally, I don't think I've ever had more than 6 tabs open in my life.
bradrn 5y ago
One hundred and fifty tabs‽ Pff, that’s nothing. I currently have 400 — after closing ~4000. My problem is that I regularly check HN (and occasionally other sites as well), and I often end up opening ~20 tabs a day from that alone. Of course, I never get around to reading them, and my tabs simply grow and grow. What eventually worked for me was getting a reference manager (I use Zotero). Every day I try to close a bunch of tabs by going through them and moving them to my reference manager. That way, I still have them listed just in case I want to go back to them later, but they don’t clutter up my browser any more. The most interesting side-effect of this has been that I’ve accumulated resources on a bunch of topics: if I decide one day that I want to learn CSS or graphics programming or electrical engineering or something, I can just go to my reference manager and find a bunch of high-quality resources waiting for me. (OK, I tell a slight lie: 4000 tabs is too much to categorise one by one, so about half of them ended up just being copied to a text file, one URL to a line. But rest assured, I will eventually add them all to my reference manager, though I suspect it will take automated keyword extraction or something like that.)
- djKianoosh 5y ago
  opening new tabs for... zotero, google search reference manager, google search get all open tab urls.... waitaminute!
rsync 5y ago
Why can't we just have: about:tabs ... which would be a plain text listing of all the URLs of all the tabs you have open ? You could just copy and paste it to a file or whatever. No fancy bookmarking scheme needed. Instead, we need to dig several directories deep into /Library (or whatever, depending on your OS) and then use JSON tools to export ... I've already lost most people. Go search for "how can I export tabs" or "how can I save tab urls" and you'll see thousands of people trying (usually in vain) to achieve this very, very simple thing. EDIT: No, I don't want to install an extension to do this.
- wly_cdgr 5y ago
  I get not wanting to install a third party extension just for this, but it would be a simple weekend project to write one to do this yourself (and install it locally to avoid the extension store shitshow)
  - conceptualspace 5y ago
    i made one and it supports mobile. it's also open source :) https://github.com/conceptualspace/tablist https://github.com/conceptualspace/tablist
    - rsync 5y ago
      Great. Get it into mainline firefox and please take our money (see above).
  - rsync 5y ago
    rsync.net will pay USD $500 for about:tabs to exist in mainline firefox with no extension required. It couldn't be simpler - you type about:tabs into the URL bar and you get a non-html plain text listing, one URL per line, of all the tabs you have open. Maybe a line break inbetween browser windows so you can tell tabs from one window apart from tabs in another ? Just email info@rsync.net to claim this.
    - zamadatix 5y ago
at_a_remove 5y ago
I find Firefox's bookmark UI to be incredibly slow and clunky, not to mention so many things get in my way, like this "Bookmarks Toolbar" I cannot remove. So, I often find myself resorting to opening the SQLite database Firefox uses to track places and doing queries against that, looking for time ranges and key words in the title or URL.
CodesInChaos 5y ago
For me the one-tab extension solved my tab addiction (I accumulated >7k over several years). It saves the tabs, so my fear of losing that data doesn't kick in. But I don't actually have to look at the closed ones and they don't consume resources.
alvarlagerlof 5y ago
Wokona's workspaces solved my problem
samatman 5y ago
I long for a browser optimized for research. Tab management would be an essential part of what I have in mind. It would offer a management view, where each window is a column with a list of all open tabs. I can select the tabs I want, move them around, group them into a new window, and (this is the key) save them. This would prompt me for a title, and would produce an ordinary Markdown text file with the title as an h1 header, each tab title as an h2 header, and the body of each section as just the repeated title with the link as the anchor. I should be able to add any text I want, including more links in the appropriate format. And I can re-launch the tabs: the browser goes through the h2 headers and launches the first link it sees. If I reorganize the tabs, the sections move around, and adding more tabs makes more sections, while leaving any textual metadata I have provided alone. I could email one of these to someone, and they could open it as well. It would ship with an in-browser Markdown text editor, such that the ordinary user would never have to leave the browser. But of course, being Just Plain Text, it would also be possible to edit it in one's editor of choice. This would, and I exaggerate only slightly, change my life.
- lkbm 5y ago
  It's nowhere near this advanced, but in Firefox you can shift-click tabs to select multiple, and then with Right-click you can choose "Bookmark Tabs", and it'll save them as a folder. You can then right click on the folder in your bookmarks and choose "Open all Bookmarks" (which will use the current window). I think Chrome has similar capability, but I haven't played around with it. An annotated document of bookmarks would be next-level, though.
- freediver 5y ago
  This has the first part (window tabs as columns plus drag&drop management): https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-organizer/gbaokejhnafeofbniplkljehipcekkbh?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-organizer/gbao...
eplanit 5y ago
"I am widely admired at work for my ability to have many, many browser tabs open. (That, at least, is what I take from the frequent shouts of "holy cow, man, look at your browser!" You might consider that maybe they're very politely saying "Man, that's insane". Would you leave 150 books open on one table, or maybe use bookmarks instead? I guess the table might work, but it seems like lots of clutter. Everyone's mileage varies.
- travisjungroth 5y ago
  I believe that's the joke.
  - eplanit 5y ago
    I wanted to think that, but the article (though interesting) seems to be written by somebody quite impressed by themself. I may be biased, though, because most of the (few) people I've known to have so many tabs open seem that way to me. The ones I know not only have so many tabs open, but they really like it when people notice the great number.
snowwrestler 5y ago
It’s crazy that we’re forced to distinguish between tabs, windows, history, bookmarks in the browser, and bookmarks in a 3rd party service like Pinboard. What overhead! Why can’t our browsers just act like 2nd brains, remember it all, and have killer search to find and/or resurface it? One challenge is paywalls with temp access. Just because I can read an entire article today at a URL, that doesn’t mean I’ll be able to if I revisit that URL. “This is your last free article!”
tiffanyh 5y ago
How much of this tab proliferation is a function of Google Docs? I'll explain ... I never understood why folks would have 100+ tabs. Then I joined a company which uses Google Workplace (Apps) for collaboration. Immediately, I had 2 dozen tabs open because those tabs represented files I was working on; where previously, those were discrete Excel, PowerPoint, Word documents - but where all now "tabs" open in my browser since I didn't use discrete document apps anymore due to Google Docs all being on the web.
- zamadatix 5y ago
  I don't think most had 20+ Excel, PowerPoint, and Word documents open at the same time so "Google Workspace is browser based" doesn't explain why most have 20 documents unclosed in Google Workspace it just explains why said documents were originally opened in a browser.
  - wintermutestwin 5y ago
    Huh? I always have >20 document windows open. Some for future reading, some for future editing and some that I forgot to close. I guess it depends on the kind of work you do. I think many office worker types are similar to me...
- wintermutestwin 5y ago
  The problem is that we are now using the browser for many disparate tasks: web apps, reading, entertainment, shopping/banking/etc. Maybe we need different browsers tailored to each use case? I do something similar using the Window Titler extension where each FF window is labeled for a certain type of task/information.
pmarreck 5y ago
The browser extensions "Merge All Windows" and "OneTab" (available in firefox and chrome, not sure about other browsers) basically completely eliminate this issue
galkk 5y ago
I just started turning off laptop every day and starting each next day from scratch.
brokenmachine 5y ago
Please forgive me father for I have sinned. My Firefox with it's hundreds of session tabs was taking over 23Gb of memory on my PC, which was making it difficult to run some other things - VMs, etc. My PC only had 32Gb RAM. My solution was to buy another 32Gb of RAM.

156 points by tjwds 5y ago

Is that a lot? I think I've got Firefox up to 3500, indeed I mentioned this when I went to a meetup hosted by Mozilla, and they said that few people use more than 14. I think some of the tab tools start to make it unstable, but the root issue is that it'd be good to clear down browser tabs often.

Veen 5y ago
When you have this many tabs, do you actively manage them or even have any idea what they contain. How do you find the information you need amongst 3000+ tabs. Isn't it annoying to have to shuffle through lots of windows with lots of tabs? I start to lose track after a dozen or so.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- zeristor 5y ago
  Because I can. Hacker News facilitates me opening scores of tabs a day, that and not being able to find the tab I need means duplicating it; although the browser now serves me up with the original one. I tend to open a new window for a new line of work, so the tabs are over 40 or so windows. The limit used to be the bowser crashing, or me forgetting to reopen history and so relinquishing the interesting things. My point is that I’d greatly appreciate keeping this down. I’m currently down to 800 or so, I think the tab history tool crashes Firefox, without it it could go a lot higher. ADHD can creep up on you
  - joekunin 5y ago
    The OneTab extension has done great things for my tab organization, might be of interest to you as well .
  - silon42 5y ago
    I've started on my own vertical tabs addon that can handle many thousands of tabs. Still work in progress...
- detaro 5y ago
  once it gets to the thousands it breaks down, but in my experience spatial memory + pattern matching on favicons works surprisingly well to navigate a large number of tabs.
milesvp 5y ago
I just don’t understand how anyone could have less than 14 tabs open at any time. Just using a search engine requires at least 4 at a time, and I’ve often got four or five searches going at any time. And then there’s at least a half dozen communication tabs. Even when I declare browser bankruptcy and close whole windows dedicated to some topic, I don’t think I can get my total count below 14. I mean, I get that my workflow is unique, but I’m apparently truly out of touch with typical browser usage.
- mattlondon 5y ago
  I regularly have only one or two at once. When I am done with a tab, I close it - this makes it very simple. Sure I might temporarily open 10 at once when searching, but many will be culled within the first 10-20 seconds of reading the page as either the info I need is not there, or I've found what I need so can close the rest. Occasionally when cross-referencing stuff I will go up to perhaps 5 or even 10 in extreme circumstances, but then - as before - I close the tab when I am done. For stuff I want to come back to "later" I just use a bookmark instead of just leaving it open. At work I tend to leave email chat and calendar open all day, but that is only an extra 3 tabs. In my experience - both at work and at home - it is better to concentrate on only a small number of things at once and try to work them through to completion (or as far as you can get) so you can just drop it from your head when you are done and not need to dedicate and brain energy on juggling all these differen "in-flight" tasks. I find it easier to concentrate and way more productive to finish a task and then move on, rather than context-switching every 2 minutes and wasting endless time hunting for "that tab with that thing I need" on it.
  - asymptosis 5y ago
    I have this approach too. When working, I might have up to 20 tabs open at a given time, but most of them are just there passively for things like monitoring and calendars. Some tips for people who are struggling with their tab count: * Always close all tabs at the end of the day. * Use different browser profiles for different types of task (eg work admin/emails/calendars/trello vs work-related documentation/search vs monitoring vs nonwork.) * If you notice you have enough tabs open that the browser needs to shrink or hide them, cycle through and cull a bunch. If needed, you can always find them again later, either just by searching for them or using your browser history.
_tom_ 5y ago
I had gotten up to 1000 a few times. Just never getting back to things to close them, mostly. It turned have to have huge performance impact, so I don't do it anymore. I got out of the habit a few years ago. I think since then, browser went to lazy loading of tabs on restart. If you think your system is running slow, cut the number of tabs to under 100, and try again. You may see a huge jump in performance. The one thing that helped me break the habit of not closing tabs was just installing a tab counter extension. Now, if I see it creeping up towards 100, I know it's time to clean house.
bashwizard 5y ago
I don't think I've ever had more than 10 tabs. Why on earth would anyone have more than a few open at the same time?
e3bc54b2 5y ago
> few people use more than 14 I can definitely say there is a selection bias at play here. Tab management as it is in major browsers by default sucks. At more than half dozen tabs, you start losing tab titles, basically playing "Where is waldo". When you go beyond a dozen tabs you can barely see the favicon. Any more and it becomes a game of "Concentration"[0]. When the experience is so horrible, no wonder people don't use more than 14 tabs at once. Give people vertical tabs with nested hierarchy and watch how quickly people go about operating 100+ tabs without losing sweat. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentration_(card_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentration_(card_game)

bellyfullofbac 5y ago

Vivaldi allows placing the tab bar vertically[1], I've used this since Opera times (an Opera founder departed the company after its Chinese takeover, and started Vivaldi), I currently have around 120 tabs open in 5 windows (actually you can also scroll on the tab bar itself), yeah too damn many. I suppose people without AppleScript can write a browser extension that iterates through all the tabs and report the count to a Grafana. It would also be interesting to also record ages of tabs (e.g. time since it was opened/time since it was last seen)... [1] https://vivaldi.com/features/tab-management/ https://vivaldi.com/features/tab-management/

sfg 5y ago
Tree Style Tabs in Firefox. Vertical with nesting.
- OJFord 5y ago
  Another option is Sidebery, seemed to be the only maintained one when I last looked. It also supports 'panels' - 'tabs' to the sidebar that switch between sets of tabs. You can assign a panel to a FF container.
  - m_t 5y ago
    This looks like a good replacement of the old tab group Firefox used to have. The fact we can assign them a container is really promising, I'll give it a go!
    - Vinnl 5y ago
      For me it replaced both my tab groups extension and vertical tabs extension. It's a godsend, although a little bit buggy every now and then.
    - cmehdy 5y ago
      I found this[0] minimal style (not by me) particularly useful, with auto-folding and a thin visual footprint. [0] https://github.com/ongots/firefox-sidebery-minimal-style https://github.com/ongots/firefox-sidebery-minimal-style (screenshots further down the page)

pjmlp 5y ago

Maybe this a generation thing, I never have more than 10 open, on average. Anything worth keeping, bookmarks.

alpaca128 5y ago
Tabs are the better bookmarks imho. They can also be directly searched in the address bar, but are treated consistently like every other tab and stay more visible than items in some hidden list. They're also just as persistent as bookmarks; last time I reinstalled my system I just copy-pasted the Firefox profile over and instantly had the exact same session back. Of course that's based on the assumption I don't switch the browser. But Firefox is the last relevant non-Chromium browser and I dislike Chromium and its derivatives for various reasons.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  And that you are lucky with the file not being corrupted on crash.
  - silon42 5y ago
    The reason I have thousands of tabs open is that Firefox stopped losing tabs on crash/restart in recent years... a decade or more ago this would not be a "problem".
- _Algernon_ 5y ago
  Do you use any particular workflows or extensions to manage a large number of tabs? I don't how a tab bar with 40+ tabs is useable, even if tabs persist through crashes and restarts.
  - johnny22 5y ago
    tree style tabs or something like that probably
  - rasguanabana 5y ago
    I just open more browser windows.

amelius 5y ago

What I want is a History functionality that allows me to better search through visited pages. Firefox does this, but they only show the page title, which is often not sufficiently descriptive. They should show search results like DDG/Google shows them. With a better search, I wouldn't feel the need to keep so many tabs open.

m_93 5y ago
That’s what was “to be native” in Cliqz. They were indexing url, title and I’m not sure about content was in plan or implemented - forgot my trials. But they approached exactly that issue in their browser (Firefox fork). There was something like internal index which was pre-fetched and updated next to user data which were added while using. All that was 1 search, 2nd was going to internet. That was really cool idea.

cookiengineer 5y ago

Isn't this tab fatigue of every user not more a hint that bookmarking is broken? I mean, no matter how I bookmark a website, omnibar is absolutely useless in every browser when it comes to re-discovering your bookmarks via keywords that you remember. Sometimes I bookmark the same URL multiple times, because the Browser is too stupid to realize that a #generated-hashbang or a ?utm_source is a generated tracking parameter; and that it's actually the same URL with the identical content. In my opinion, bookmarks as implementations are seriously broken. If we solve bookmarks _locally_, there ain't gonna be a "too many tabs" problem anymore.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
bodge5000 5y ago
The solution for me is to use the great suspender (pre kerfuffle version) which makes tabs act kind of like temporary bookmarks, but you're right in that something better is needed. I guess the problem is that a lot of people, myself included, use tabs as a kind of todo list of things to look at (whether thats effective or not is another point), whereas bookmarks hide themselves out of sight and out of mind
- wintermutestwin 5y ago
  >pre kerfuffle version What does that mean? I am using Total Suspender
  - bodge5000 5y ago
    The Great Suspender was sold to an unknown party which made some less than trustworthy changes, forcing google to eventually take it down for containing malware.
detaro 5y ago
Yes, a good bookmarking/archiving/... solution would likely solve this for many people.

hawski 5y ago

On Firefox for a lots of tabs management solution I recommend Simple Tab Groups [0]. It is how built-in tab groups should have always worked instead of the manual panorama. It does periodical backups, that I have never needed to use and it even integrates with tab containers. [0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/simple-tab-groups/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/simple-tab-gr...

b0rsuk 5y ago

TabFS lets you mount Firefox tabs as a filesystem. You can then use regular scripting to operate on them.

avnigo 5y ago
This looks brilliant, thanks for the recommendation. https://omar.website/tabfs/ https://omar.website/tabfs/

DrSiemer 5y ago

The new Chrome tab group is not great, but it does help. One group for things that are being processed (handle asap), one group for "stuff to check", one for each project I'm working on and one for entertainment. All with short names and their own color, so it takes up a minimum of space. The remaining space is for temporary tabs. Larger temporary side quests get their own window and will be either closed or moved into a new group before closing the browser. It's still not as good as Firefox's nested Tree Style Tab once was (and might be again?) but I'm kind of locked into Chrome at this point. Bookmarks only work for tools and resources I need on a regular basis, and even then it's usually easier to just google them when they are needed. Who has the time to actually study all those bookmarks saved for later? Maybe some kind of organizational bookmark extension, that would help you go through it all, could help with this.

unicornporn 5y ago
» It's still not as good as Firefox's nested Tree Style Tab once was (and might be again?) but I'm kind of locked into Chrome at this point. What terrible being is locking people into Chrome?
- TchoBeer 5y ago
  Google
- wintermutestwin 5y ago
  Web devs who don't give a shit about FF.
- DrSiemer 5y ago
  If it's where your passwords and addons live, switching takes effort. Besides, what is the big advantage of Firefox? Chrome has 65% of the worldwide market share. Firefox does not even have 4 [1]. About half of the stuff I build will literally only ever run in Chrome anyway. [1] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share
  - 5y ago

lol768 5y ago

Interesting choice to use some sort of proprietary OS scripting language instead of just writing a standard WebExtension, I thought. Presumably chrome.tabs.query would have returned all tabs and a native manifest would've allowed comms with the outside world to build a HTTP server. Still, I suppose the approach taken by the author worked at the end of the day - just not very portable.

somehnacct3757 5y ago
Yeah I think the web extension approach is the best one. Shame they ruled it out. Extension background scripts can push data wherever you want. You can sideload the extension and talk to localhost ports or anyone on the internet. Use ajax or native events to talk to a local process. There's even an event system that tells you when tabs are opened, closed, activated, deactivated, etc.
- rjbs 5y ago
  Thanks, I'll have a look at writing a web extension, sometime. It sounds like they might not be such a pain, after all. Here, I just forged forward with what I already knew I could get done while goofing off on the weekend.

nephrite 5y ago

I open almost all links in new tabs because the sites became too large. Simple pressing "Back" in the browser takes too much time, but I can quickly switch to the previous tab.

apples_oranges 5y ago

I discovered that many tabs for me are indicative of my own laziness and lack of discipline and an unhealthy tendency to multitask. Now I pay attention (not just about tabs but also about my desktop files, and the cleanness of my actual desk) and I am happier for it. Optimal number of tabs: < 5, with 1 being Youtube playing some ambient music, 1 being JIRA, one being Github.

Joeri 5y ago

What is the value in keeping all this stuff around in tabs to look at later? If it is important, you will see it again and it is not necessary to put it on a todo list of tabs to read later. If it is not important it is just more busy work. I would also argue that reading all these random things on the internet does not build knowledge. We learn by doing or by repeating, not by reading something once. Isn’t keeping that many tabs around just an example of FOMO? To be clear, I’m all for todo lists, but tabs are a terrible UI for having a todo list in. If you’re going to keep a todo list, use a proper todo software, and be mindful of what you put on the list.

lewisjoe 5y ago

I built https://closetab.email https://closetab.email specifically for this problem. I set a timer within which I'd like to read the tab, and immediately close it. The extension emails me a digest of all these tabs, once a week - until I either finish reading it or the timeout is reached. Works like charm for me.

sharmi 5y ago

I use firefox. I open ridiculous amount of tabs. I have had atleast 600+ that I have counted. There is a good chance I have exceeded 1000 more than once, maybe often. One of the reasons is I keep tabs from previous sessions open through "Recover tabs". I found that having too many tabs also affects my ability to concentrate, as I get distracted often. To keep the tab count low, I use Two extensions together: Open Tab Count Resurrected (gives me the count of tabs in current window and across windows, current count: 44/147) Lean Tab Limiter: Limits the number of tabs you can open. This gives me the wakeup call I need when I exceed the number of tabs I have set.

mFixman 5y ago

I normally have 2–3 browser windows open with at most 5 tabs each. I find that the window → tab hierarchy works very well with my workflow and it allows me to close tabs aggressively when I don't need them without being complex like TreeStyleTabs. For example, if I'm looking for reference on a particular function I open a new window, open tabs for a couple of relevant results, do some research, and when I'm done I just close the window with all the tabs in it. I just don't understand people who have a million tabs open in a single window. You clearly don't remember what's on each tab, so it's just screen and mental real estate being used for nothing. For a Mac, I found that Hyperswitch works really great for letting Command+tab choose the correct window instead of doing the unexplainable mess of OSX application and window switching.

Angostura 5y ago
I’m glad I’m not the only person who works like this. I was beginning to think there was something wrong with me. I use Safari on MacOS as my daily driver and find the search history functionality really handy

timvisee 5y ago

What do you use to visualize these tabs? Just the tab bar? I also like to open a lot of tabs, but sometimes find it hard to manage them. I use Tree Style Tab, in a sidebar, wich collapsible groups. I like that a lot but am always wondering what others use.

nathias 5y ago

Too many tabs is a problem of browser UX, I have fixed it for myself by using Tree Style Tab extension with vimium.

theshrike79 5y ago

This is a type of FOMO. You start collecting Absolutely Essential Reading in tabs, stuff that you'll for sure read later, no joke, seriously. You never will. But you can't close the tab or you can't find the content again and bookmarking is mostly useless if you use multiple computers and browsers daily. I got over my tab-itis with Pinboard[0]. If stuff seems to sit in my tabs for too long, I can send the link easily to Pinboard, slap on a few tags if it's an unique one or grab a few of the suggested ones if it's a common bookmark. With the Archiving feature it'll even mirror the content for me so it doesn't get lost in the tides of time. I'll never look at most of the stuff I pin, but my mind is at ease because the precious stuff is stored =) [0] https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/

pjmlp 5y ago
> But you can't close the tab or you can't find the content again and bookmarking is mostly useless if you use multiple computers and browsers daily. Tabs are hardly any different.
dionidium 5y ago
One way to combat this FOMO is to remember that the subset of web pages you'll never read that also just happen to have caught your attention is dwarfed by the billions of web sites you don't know about and won't ever read. There's no particular reason to privilege this former set in your mind based solely on the randomness of having noticed the items within it. They're just more pages in the set of billions of pages that you won't ever read. The water that splashes into your boat is the same as the rest of the water in the ocean.
elsurudo 5y ago
I do the same thing, especially the "not reading later" part. but it's a kind of hack that works for me. By posting this, you just prompted me to do my routine of "evaluate, add, close". Problem is some of the short-term ones that I "really want to read" – well, I'm not closing those. So it's a partial solution.
shalmanese 5y ago
Chiming in to say this was one of my checks notes currently 508 tabs that I saved to read later which I did eventually come back to read and engage in so tab hoarding isn't entirely always fruitless.

somehnacct3757 5y ago

There's a couple guys at work who are the hundred-tabs type and when I pair with them I notice their dev environment is much slower to build and run. I think it considerably reduces their output. Imagine another 15 seconds on your development loop that you do dozens of times a day. In fact it probably reinforces the problem because I know when I have long rebuild times, I open a tab to read the news!

agent327 5y ago

Here's something I'd love to have. Let's you are reading hacker news. Clicking a link gives you two options: open in a new tab, or open, replacing the current tab. Opening in a new tab works, but leaves you with a lot of tabs open that are cognitively hard to deal with ("why did I think this would be interesting?"). Replacing the current tab removes the context. When you return to the front page, it may have changed, and you may not remember where you left of. So why can't I have the front page on the left of the window, and anything I click on on the right (replacing whatever is already there)? The front page would remain in place, so I'm not losing my context. I can click on something, quickly determine if it is worth reading in depth, and go on to the next thing if it's not. I would never have a thousand tabs open; just the one would be enough. Why isn't this a thing in browsers? It would make so many websites so much easier to deal with...

kace91 5y ago
On iOS you've got link previews on long press which might be similar to what your looking for. There's probably a way to do it on osx as well. That wouldn't solve my problem though, for me tabs are a way to queue other paths to take in a way of reading that's naturally branching. For example, reading an article in Wikipedia might lead to 3-4 more I want to check out, but the preview system doesn't work because visiting each of those will probably give me 3-4 branches more. I'm basically doing recursive reading over a potentially infinite-depth structure, so there is no guarantee that I'll ever resurface to the upper node.
- agent327 5y ago
  No offense, but that's something entirely different. I'm looking for a way to utilize my 27" monitor to see an entire article without falling into the doomscroll trap, not a tiny popup containing a lousy summary on an even tinier screen.
tigerlily 5y ago
So like a left and right pane? That would be extremely useful, especially for search engine results, you could click on results in the left pane and quickly view them in succession in the right side pane.

jessikat 5y ago

I had a co-worker that would have over 300 tabs open. Except, unlike some, in a single window, so the tabs barely had enough room to click on. Yet he could still find the tab he wanted, I think it was down to spatial awareness of what was where. It still boggles my mind.

thefr0g 5y ago

I don't get why people litter their browser with tabs. I pretty sure I never used more than 30 at the same time. I just close them if I don't need them anymore. At the latest when I can't read the titles anymore the garbage collection runs. If I might still need it I just bookmark the page. (It helps to sort your bookmarks and have proper syncing)

lifthrasiir 5y ago
Because I'll be never sure when I need this tab next time. I can't use bookmarks because bookmarks don't record the exact context (the history leading to that tab and neighbor tabs).
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Better never let the process die or corrupt the session cache.
anewone 5y ago
One problem for me is opening more interesting links than I have time to get to. Bookmarks don't really solve the core problem of not properly managing my time. When I used to use RSS, I would have many feeds racking up dozens of unread and potentially interesting posts as a sort of todo list which I never got around to clearing. So I decided to forget about RSS and try not to worry about catching every single item out there.
mrweasel 5y ago
I normally just exit the browser if I reach 20 tabs. Mentally I can’t/won’t deal with it and just declare tab bankrupcy and exists everything. Browsers like Safari have excellent time based history, should I need a page within the next few days. On problem with this method is that is has made me hate webapps, including PWAs, as it they incompatible with the browser being closed down a few times a day.
- thefr0g 5y ago
  > On problem with this method is that is has made me hate webapps, including PWAs Javascript is the new Flash...

mackrevinack 5y ago

tab stash for firefox is the best solution I've found so far. i still end up with tab creep every now and again, but when it happens it's really quick to stash them into different groups, give it an optional name of needed, then when you open the that group of the later on, the stash is deleted. the other thing i love about it is that is just uses plain bookmarks and folders for each stash, so i means that you can sync your bookmarks to mobile and still access them there. a few other extensions ive tried in the past store they bookmarks in a database, so you can only access on another device if you use the same extension

brongondwana 5y ago

I am very much the opposite! I close my entire browser at least once per day - every tab closed. I have about 10 sites in my bookmarks toolbar - which are basically the key sites I use for work, and that's it. If I have too many tabs open, I lose context. Ditto with terminals - they ALL get shut down multiple times per day. Reset to zero, spin up state, do task, reset back to zero. I treat it like a commercial kitchen - you clean the whole place and then you cook the session's meals, and then you clean it all down again.

Freak_NL 5y ago
Same. I usually open our company's MatterMost in the first tab when I start (the only one I leave open all day), and will clear out anything else if I'm done with some task that required them. If I want to read something later I'll find it with DuckDuckGo or just the browser history. If I use it often the address bar will prioritize it so even just the first letter of the URL will show it at the top of the list. For sites that I search frequently I use DuckDuckGo's bangs directly in the address bar: https://duckduckgo.com/bang https://duckduckgo.com/bang.
tsjq 5y ago
Nice. I am able to relate this with the book : organize your mind organize your life . https://www.amazon.in/Organize-your-Mind-Life/dp/9351060640 https://www.amazon.in/Organize-your-Mind-Life/dp/9351060640
travisjungroth 5y ago
My most ranty and deservedly downvoted HN comment was expressing this same opinion. The kitchen cleaning analogy is great. What's amazing to me is clean-up takes less than a second. I view all my left over tabs like food scraps, and sweep them off the counter in a single click.

wazoox 5y ago

Tree style tab for me. Makes it easy to keep hundreds of tabs open and organised. I generally have about 40 open on my laptop, and between 50 and 100 on my work PC (various documentation websites, applications, etc). Not a generational thing, I'm 50.

globular-toast 5y ago

I have a strong tendency for things to disappear if they are kept around for too long. This happens in real life too. When my girlfriend and I moved house last year we started describing things as "gone" because we kept finding that whole boxes or pieces of furniture became completely invisible to us if they had been in one place too long. The same thing happens with browser tabs. Sometimes I'll leave one open "for later" and then I'll realise sometimes a week later that the tab is still open. I wonder, do these loads of tabs people have the same problem as me, or can they see the tabs and "later" really just hasn't arrived yet? In emacs I have a completely different approach to "tabs". I actually don't have visible tabs at all and "midnight-mode" automatically garbage collects unused buffers in the middle of the night. That way I only ever have stuff open that I am actually using. And, think about it, you only need to know what "tabs" are available at the moment you are switching, why are they visible at all other times? I wonder if such an approach could work for web browsers too?

felipeerias 5y ago

Ultimately, how you use tabs is very related to how your thought process operates. Some people need to have their tabs always visible as an aid for thought, so they can quickly see all the little tasks that are needed for the goal that they are trying to fulfil. In some cases, tabs that go away from view will literally go away from the user’s mind as well. Web browsers need to get a lot better at supporting different thinking styles. After all, it is easier to change how our software operates that how people’s brains work.

bhaak 5y ago

"I want to clean up my tabs so I setup Grafana." What a turn of events. And the most surprising thing is that it seemed to have actually helped to get the number of tabs down.

mountainb 5y ago

Use notetaking software instead. Just as searchable, can add context. But also most web content is not worth bookmarking and will be link rotted in an eyeblink anyway. If you are serious about organizing your knowledge do not externalize it to the flighty whims of the web.

lazyweb 5y ago

I've been looking for platform-independent bookmark keeper and like to selfhost things, so I've set up a wallabag instance [1] hosted behind my TLD. There's an Android app via F-Droid as well. Can recommend this a lot. Using it to either save websites (wallabag downloads all HTML content) or catch up on longer articles during train rides etc. [1] https://github.com/wallabag/wallabag https://github.com/wallabag/wallabag

gwbrooks 5y ago
+1 for Wallabag, which cut my open-tab problem in half. I found it a persnickety installation and eventually went with the Docker image, which was fast and painless.

mrkramer 5y ago

Tabs, bookmarks and browser history are productivity nightmare; there is just no good way to organize all of it and search through it. Navigation is pain. Imo the greatest problem of the modern internet is search; there is so much information and in particular unstructured information and no internet search engine even comes close to efficiently searching through all that trove of information. Personal analytics and better internet search solutions should be the next big focus of web development in order to increase productivity. Metadata and semantic web dream should never be forsaken.

enobrev 5y ago

Interesting solution for tracking open tabs. Every so often I like to dump all my open tabs into pocket just to make absolutely sure I will never see them again.

reportgunner 5y ago

Max 8 tabs per window. If you need more, open another browser window. If you 'lose' a tab you can always find it the way you found it in the first place. You should remember how you found things instead of remembering which tab they were in - this way you can reproduce the process and "find" the content on any other device.

nicholasjarr 5y ago

I use Firefox and I have too many tabs open. Tab Stash helped a lot though, great extension. Firefox container Tabs puts a color border on tabs and also helps with work stuff.

jbverschoor 5y ago

Bookmarks are notes. The problem is there is no proper contexting anymore. Everything is mixed up. Personal, work, development, everything scattered around in applications, files. A good solution is to have multiple machines with something like synergy. I'd still love a multi-user environment (multi-context actually), with separate file systems, application instances etc.

masto 5y ago

Lots of discussion of tabs and bookmarks and how to solve them once and for all with a new ontological hierarchy or server or service.. I get that, we’re nerds, that’s what we do. But if, like me, your tab clutter is more a problem of psychology: not being ready to close things because you might need them later (even though you won’t), plus a distinct lack of interest in spending hours trying to perfectly curate a museum of links, here’s a trick I picked up years ago that has continued to work reasonably well for me. I have a bookmark folder named after the current year and month (e.g. “2021-08 Bookmarks”). I keep it in my favorites/bookmarks bar. As I realize my tabs are starting to build up again, I fairly ruthlessly dump them all into the current month’s folder (it’s a pretty quick process of Cmd-D, Enter, Cmd-W). I don’t spend time trying to name them, organize them, or think about whether they deserve pride of place. I just put them there and close the tab, knowing I haven’t thrown any information away, and should I choose to get back to it, I at least have it somewhere. This is all my brain needs to let go of the need to have the tab open. This isn’t a chore I need to do every day (that would make me stop doing it), it’s an escape hatch I can use when I start to feel like my browser is a mess. When I notice it’s a new month, I put the old one into an “Archives” folder and make a new one. Practically this doesn’t do much, but it does keep it from feeling like one giant trash pile. While I’m doing this, I’ll usually make a smaller collection or two for things that I do actively need at the moment. E.g. if I’m working on a project and have opened a dozen tabs to research how to do part of it, or components I might want to buy, I’ll put them into a sub-folder of my top-level “Projects” or “Shopping” folders. These are the only other things that live in the favorites bar. The main motivation for this is, again, to allow me to feel ok closing the tab. It might seem today that the information I looked up about hot-wire anemometers is super valuable because I’m thinking about measuring the delta-P in my air conditioning ducts to figure out if I can buy higher MERV filters without compromising evaporator performance. And then next week when I’m no longer as interested in doing that, I still invested that time in finding those articles and Amazon links and might get back to it.. the reality is that if I still care to do this in a year I could easily look it up again, but it doesn’t feel that way. So save it in Projects > Air Filters and get back to Tab Zero.

ninkendo 5y ago

My solution is simple: When I feel like I have a lot of tabs [0], I close all of them. What happens when I close a tab I wanted open? I use browser history. Browser history is one of those things that I feel most people don’t use enough. It’s easy to search, it contains everything you visited, and (for the macOS/iOS ecosystem at least) is synced across devices. A quick cmd-Y and search makes for a very efficient user experience for me. [0] A “lot” is typically 10-20. I close all of my tabs probably 5-10 times during a typical work day.

automatic6131 5y ago
This is the way
dgellow 5y ago
It took me a very long time to learn this. I always had multiple hundred of tabs open, until the day I decided to stop caring about it and let them all go. I almost never actually used old open tabs, just refused to close them, by fear of missing something. That’s in fact not true, I now close all of them at the end of the day and start fresh every morning. Anything I have to keep from one day to the other is written down in my daily notes, but it’s really a small amount. Or I just use the history, as you said. People say it’s a bookmarking issue, I personally think it’s driven by fear of missing out, which isn’t really something solved by tools.
- djKianoosh 5y ago
  how does one learn this power and enlightenment? I easily have over a thousand tabs open across several browsers. Sometimes I go back to review them and am gladly surprised. Or sometimes I don't remember why I was looking at a thing, but it's still interesting.
  - q3k 5y ago
    > how does one learn this power and enlightenment? Right click the tab you're on right now, left click 'close other tabs'. Exhale.

rjmunro 5y ago

I now can't decide whether to leave this tab open as a reminder for me to implement open tabs vs time graph. Rather than run a server on my machine, I'd prefer a tiny extension that sent an updated count to a service every time I open or close a tab. The easiest service to use would probably be a google sheet. I use https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/quick-tabs/jnjfeinjfmenlddahdjdmgpbokiacbbb https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/quick-tabs/jnjfein... to let me search through my tabs across different windows etc. and it tells me I have 320 open at the moment in my work profile and 56 in my personal profile.

solairephantom 5y ago
Cool extension, thanks! I added it to Brave, to only realize that Brave has something similar built-in. It looks like a "play" button in upper right corner, and can be activated by "CTRL-SHIFT-A", lets you search through tabs and switch to one quickly. I was wondering what that "play" button was for about a month, lol. Unfortunate choice of icon on their part, IMO.

jccalhoun 5y ago

I'm not a tons of tabs open person. I am a multiple browser person. Right now I am writing this in firefox on my main window with this tab and the tab for my custom homepage. I just opened Edge for work-related stuff. On my secondary monitor I have chrome with my more entertainment-based stuff: twitch (currently multitwitch with two streams), a tab for the video stream of the radio show I listen to in the morning, twitter, and facebook

JadeNB 5y ago

Incidentally, since a lot of people hitting this page might not know him, and since he doesn't exactly blazon information about himself around the site, this is the blog of Ricardo Signes, whom I know as a major contributor to Perl (https://github.com/rjbs https://github.com/rjbs).

miguelrochefort 5y ago

The worst part about Safari for iPhone is that they limit the number of open tabs to 500 (it used to be much lower, around 10 on my iPad 2). Whenever you open one more tab, Safari will dismiss the oldest tab. I've lost hundreds of tabs before noticing that behavior.

kasabali 5y ago
500 is generous. Samsung's "Internet" browser has 50 tabs limit with the same behavior. However unlike Safari, it warns you that you've hit the limit after it had gone ahead and closed the oldest tab.

gwbas1c 5y ago

For web applications I make an application shortcut, so then its a separate window instead of a tab.

dmd 5y ago

I love articles like this because they remind me how some people live - which reminds me to design with them in mind. Personally, I don't think I've ever had more than 6 tabs open in my life.

bradrn 5y ago

One hundred and fifty tabs‽ Pff, that’s nothing. I currently have 400 — after closing ~4000. My problem is that I regularly check HN (and occasionally other sites as well), and I often end up opening ~20 tabs a day from that alone. Of course, I never get around to reading them, and my tabs simply grow and grow. What eventually worked for me was getting a reference manager (I use Zotero). Every day I try to close a bunch of tabs by going through them and moving them to my reference manager. That way, I still have them listed just in case I want to go back to them later, but they don’t clutter up my browser any more. The most interesting side-effect of this has been that I’ve accumulated resources on a bunch of topics: if I decide one day that I want to learn CSS or graphics programming or electrical engineering or something, I can just go to my reference manager and find a bunch of high-quality resources waiting for me. (OK, I tell a slight lie: 4000 tabs is too much to categorise one by one, so about half of them ended up just being copied to a text file, one URL to a line. But rest assured, I will eventually add them all to my reference manager, though I suspect it will take automated keyword extraction or something like that.)

djKianoosh 5y ago
opening new tabs for... zotero, google search reference manager, google search get all open tab urls.... waitaminute!

rsync 5y ago

Why can't we just have: about:tabs ... which would be a plain text listing of all the URLs of all the tabs you have open ? You could just copy and paste it to a file or whatever. No fancy bookmarking scheme needed. Instead, we need to dig several directories deep into /Library (or whatever, depending on your OS) and then use JSON tools to export ... I've already lost most people. Go search for "how can I export tabs" or "how can I save tab urls" and you'll see thousands of people trying (usually in vain) to achieve this very, very simple thing. EDIT: No, I don't want to install an extension to do this.

wly_cdgr 5y ago
I get not wanting to install a third party extension just for this, but it would be a simple weekend project to write one to do this yourself (and install it locally to avoid the extension store shitshow)
- conceptualspace 5y ago
  i made one and it supports mobile. it's also open source :) https://github.com/conceptualspace/tablist https://github.com/conceptualspace/tablist
  - rsync 5y ago
    Great. Get it into mainline firefox and please take our money (see above).
- rsync 5y ago
  rsync.net will pay USD $500 for about:tabs to exist in mainline firefox with no extension required. It couldn't be simpler - you type about:tabs into the URL bar and you get a non-html plain text listing, one URL per line, of all the tabs you have open. Maybe a line break inbetween browser windows so you can tell tabs from one window apart from tabs in another ? Just email info@rsync.net to claim this.
  - zamadatix 5y ago

at_a_remove 5y ago

I find Firefox's bookmark UI to be incredibly slow and clunky, not to mention so many things get in my way, like this "Bookmarks Toolbar" I cannot remove. So, I often find myself resorting to opening the SQLite database Firefox uses to track places and doing queries against that, looking for time ranges and key words in the title or URL.

CodesInChaos 5y ago

For me the one-tab extension solved my tab addiction (I accumulated >7k over several years). It saves the tabs, so my fear of losing that data doesn't kick in. But I don't actually have to look at the closed ones and they don't consume resources.

alvarlagerlof 5y ago

Wokona's workspaces solved my problem

samatman 5y ago

I long for a browser optimized for research. Tab management would be an essential part of what I have in mind. It would offer a management view, where each window is a column with a list of all open tabs. I can select the tabs I want, move them around, group them into a new window, and (this is the key) save them. This would prompt me for a title, and would produce an ordinary Markdown text file with the title as an h1 header, each tab title as an h2 header, and the body of each section as just the repeated title with the link as the anchor. I should be able to add any text I want, including more links in the appropriate format. And I can re-launch the tabs: the browser goes through the h2 headers and launches the first link it sees. If I reorganize the tabs, the sections move around, and adding more tabs makes more sections, while leaving any textual metadata I have provided alone. I could email one of these to someone, and they could open it as well. It would ship with an in-browser Markdown text editor, such that the ordinary user would never have to leave the browser. But of course, being Just Plain Text, it would also be possible to edit it in one's editor of choice. This would, and I exaggerate only slightly, change my life.

lkbm 5y ago
It's nowhere near this advanced, but in Firefox you can shift-click tabs to select multiple, and then with Right-click you can choose "Bookmark Tabs", and it'll save them as a folder. You can then right click on the folder in your bookmarks and choose "Open all Bookmarks" (which will use the current window). I think Chrome has similar capability, but I haven't played around with it. An annotated document of bookmarks would be next-level, though.
freediver 5y ago
This has the first part (window tabs as columns plus drag&drop management): https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-organizer/gbaokejhnafeofbniplkljehipcekkbh?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-organizer/gbao...

eplanit 5y ago

"I am widely admired at work for my ability to have many, many browser tabs open. (That, at least, is what I take from the frequent shouts of "holy cow, man, look at your browser!" You might consider that maybe they're very politely saying "Man, that's insane". Would you leave 150 books open on one table, or maybe use bookmarks instead? I guess the table might work, but it seems like lots of clutter. Everyone's mileage varies.

travisjungroth 5y ago
I believe that's the joke.
- eplanit 5y ago
  I wanted to think that, but the article (though interesting) seems to be written by somebody quite impressed by themself. I may be biased, though, because most of the (few) people I've known to have so many tabs open seem that way to me. The ones I know not only have so many tabs open, but they really like it when people notice the great number.

snowwrestler 5y ago

It’s crazy that we’re forced to distinguish between tabs, windows, history, bookmarks in the browser, and bookmarks in a 3rd party service like Pinboard. What overhead! Why can’t our browsers just act like 2nd brains, remember it all, and have killer search to find and/or resurface it? One challenge is paywalls with temp access. Just because I can read an entire article today at a URL, that doesn’t mean I’ll be able to if I revisit that URL. “This is your last free article!”

tiffanyh 5y ago

How much of this tab proliferation is a function of Google Docs? I'll explain ... I never understood why folks would have 100+ tabs. Then I joined a company which uses Google Workplace (Apps) for collaboration. Immediately, I had 2 dozen tabs open because those tabs represented files I was working on; where previously, those were discrete Excel, PowerPoint, Word documents - but where all now "tabs" open in my browser since I didn't use discrete document apps anymore due to Google Docs all being on the web.

zamadatix 5y ago
I don't think most had 20+ Excel, PowerPoint, and Word documents open at the same time so "Google Workspace is browser based" doesn't explain why most have 20 documents unclosed in Google Workspace it just explains why said documents were originally opened in a browser.
- wintermutestwin 5y ago
  Huh? I always have >20 document windows open. Some for future reading, some for future editing and some that I forgot to close. I guess it depends on the kind of work you do. I think many office worker types are similar to me...
wintermutestwin 5y ago
The problem is that we are now using the browser for many disparate tasks: web apps, reading, entertainment, shopping/banking/etc. Maybe we need different browsers tailored to each use case? I do something similar using the Window Titler extension where each FF window is labeled for a certain type of task/information.

pmarreck 5y ago

The browser extensions "Merge All Windows" and "OneTab" (available in firefox and chrome, not sure about other browsers) basically completely eliminate this issue

galkk 5y ago

I just started turning off laptop every day and starting each next day from scratch.

brokenmachine 5y ago

Please forgive me father for I have sinned. My Firefox with it's hundreds of session tabs was taking over 23Gb of memory on my PC, which was making it difficult to run some other things - VMs, etc. My PC only had 32Gb RAM. My solution was to buy another 32Gb of RAM.