13 ms·

I have 218 browser tabs open

98 points by michaelsalim 4y ago

enbugger 4y ago
>“Why not use bookmarks?” section You can still prefer using bookmarks for something long-term, but utilize Bookmarks bar for a quicker access.
- CivBase 4y ago
  Yeah, the author's answer wasn't very satisfying for me. I use tabs for things I'm actively using, keep quick-access stuff on the bookmarks toolbar, and keep long-term stuff in directories or the bookmarks pane/menu. No need to come up with a hacky workflow as an excuse to keep hundreds of tabs open. It's wild what lengths people will go through to avoid minor changes to their workflow.
dmd 4y ago
No matter how many people's explanations of this I read, I still can't grasp it. I typically have 3-5 tabs open including mail. On a really busy day, maybe 8?
- bgilroy26 4y ago
  You're probably more of a project finisher than a project starter Many of my open tabs are write-ups of topics that I hope to learn about some day, but I have not returned to in years since opening (cumulatively 1000+)
  - krallja 4y ago
    I have those too. They’re called Bookmarks. Some of them are decades old. I don’t leave them in RAM.
    - throwaway821909 4y ago
      It means (for those of us who can't let go easily) going through every tab, opening all the interesting pages it links to, bookmarking them, preferably with screenshots, downloading any videos, etc. I'd rather they weren't in RAM but there's no easy way to move them to disk (automatically would be ideal)
    - antonymy 4y ago
      Ditto. I have no idea why bookmarks are so hard for some people to use. RAM is far more limited than regular storage, and bookmarks are minuscule in size compared to browser tabs. This "problem" was solved decades ago and yet I still see tab-hoarders everywhere.
      - SAI_Peregrinus 4y ago
        Bookmarks don't store history or context (for Tree-style tab users, what tab was <this> opened from?). Tabs do. Bookmarks solve only half the problem, tabs solve more.
        piva00 4y ago
        I use a mix of leaving multiple windows with 1-20 tabs in each and Toby to organise them after a while. My "workflow" usually consists of: open new window for the topic/theme (whatever it may be, research, study, reading news) and go opening tabs, searches, articles. When I get to a point where a window hasn't been active for a few days I close the useless/uninteresting tabs and save the rest as a collection in Toby. It's been extremely helpful to manage my fear of missing knowledge or closing something I could get interested, the curation after a few days really helps.
      - hammyhavoc 4y ago
        Well-written modern browsers suspend tabs. Barely uses any RAM.
      - BeFlatXIII 4y ago
        Bookmarks are buried in a toolbar and may as well be deleted. Tabs visually remind you of their presence.
  - ako 4y ago
    I collect these in pocket.
    - mackrevinack 4y ago
      personally i have found that pocket is like a black hole for articles. ive saved so many over the years but only end up reading .01% of them
    - dublin 4y ago
      Correction: You have chosen to give Pocket your most personal data. No thanks.
      - ako 4y ago
        Online bookmark services are quite common, and not very personal.
- baal80spam 4y ago
  Same here. I treat my browser like my desk and I keep it neat and tidy at the end of day.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
    /me glances at my (cluttered) desk There are apparently 2 kinds of people...
    - orthoxerox 4y ago
      Four kinds of people. My desk is always a mess, but I close my tabs every day.
      - jacquesm 4y ago
        Technically, we now have evidence for three. There is no evidence yet for people with a clean desk but messy tabs ;) But I'm confident they exist, we should put a bounty on the location of a prime specimen and see what happens when we breed them with the third kind to establish if there is a genetic component to this.
        doublerebel 4y ago
        Clean desk but messy tabs here. I like the aesthetics of clean interior design, it’s peaceful and inspiring like a blank whiteboard. Also, nobody can see my tabs.
        bobwaycott 4y ago
        My girlfriend will stop and clean the house if she sees a crumb, but I don’t think she knows she can close tabs. She probably has a tab for everything she’s ever looked at on the internet. They never go away. It’s as overwhelming to me as my inability to spot a crumb is to her.
  - Retr0id 4y ago
    Heh, I think you might be onto something here. I'm a tab maximalist, with probably a few hundred open right now. I also have a very messy desk. In fact, I bought a second desk just so that I could fit the detritus of more concurrent projects. I would be curious to hear if anyone with a clean desk uses many tabs, or vice versa.
- insightcheck 4y ago
  Let's say you're writing a research paper. You start with an introductory review paper that links to dozens of other sources. You want to evaluate whether these sources are relevant to your paper's topic, so you open them all in new tabs. Then they have other references, so you open those too. Over the course of a couple hours, you might have over 20 tabs you've opened. You then stop opening new tabs, and read them one at a time until you're done. A similar process can happen when doing research for an in-depth blog post, opinion article, or essay (except instead of starting with a review paper, you might start with one or more pages of Google search results). Outside of work, you might sign up for several emailed newsletters with various links to articles per email. If you get about 20 newsletter emails, and you choose to read 10 of them with 2-3 interesting articles each, you end up with 20+ tabs to read through. However, if you don't need to do that much research for a particular task (or you can get the information you need from just a few resources like a quality book), you may not encounter a need to open this many tabs.
  - knolan 4y ago
    When I’m writing a paper I’ll download the PDFs of relevant papers to a subfolder of my TeX document’s folder and start building a bibliography with links to those PDFs in BibDesk. Much easier to find stuff and not have to worry about forgetting something.
  - reportgunner 4y ago
    > so you open them all in new tabs but why ? you can't read them at the same time anyway, why not just save the links and open them one by one ? When I want to binge watch a whole series of a show I don't open all of the episodes at the same time in separate windows because I'm planning to watch them all in one session.
    - rasz 4y ago
      > save the links thats how we use Tabs, after browser restart the Tabs dont reload, they are suspended and act as a bookmark that you can constantly see to remind you. >binge watch a whole series ... don't open all of the episodes erm, I download whole season/series, so that I do have 'all of the episodes' in a folder under my fingertips.
- Gualdrapo 4y ago
  I'm like you, I try to keep my number of "tabs" small. And call me insane, but I managed to visually remove the tabs from the web browser I use (Falkon) and I just switch between them with Ctrl+<0-9>, Ctrl+PageUp or Ctrl+PageDown. I have a silly idea for a tabless browser interface (managing and visualizing all of them via the "magic" URL bar) but as I am no developer can't do much.
- furyofantares 4y ago
  I don't get it at all. I know how to get back to everything I use. I guess I don't do a lot of researching things, though, where you land on pages you've never seen before and might not remember how to get there since you've only done it once.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  Lucky you. That means you have a very focused work environment with very little distractions. Unfortunately the work I do pretty much forces me to have 10's, regularly 100's of documents open at the same time and to be able to memorize what bits that are relevant came from which document. This is getting harder with advancing age so I used a scrapbooking plug-in to keep track of the citations. Now it is just a file with a bunch of text snippets and hyperlinks.
- ok_dad 4y ago
  Same, I can't fathom having more than 20 tabs open, and only if I was tracking the hardest most complex bug ever and had 10 search tabs open.
- lotw_dot_site 4y ago
  One of the greatest joys of my life is going on gleeful rampages of Ctrl+w tab annihilation! Lots of times, I'll end up with just two open tabs: devdocs.io and the local development version of my own namesake :)
- stayux 4y ago
  I will never have more than 5-8 myself. For me, focus is the key of accomplishing a given task. If I have to do a research, I collect by clipping in Obsidian, then tag and reorganize. If a given project needs a series of webpages on startup, I create a new profile in chrome (with different colour) and move along. Searching trough open tabs is way more inefficient than searching trough topics/folders and tags in Obsidian. Working against complexity is a habit, I guess. It comes with realization that time is precious:)
  - boredtofears 4y ago
    Don’t you lose saved passwords / bookmarks in new profiles?
    - stayux 4y ago
      My passwords live in an encrypted folder with contextual information, then are used in the browser with per site rules. Bookmarks are collected in Markdown with tags/notes (Obsidian), or clipped with a bookmarklet. I use this script: https://bit.ly/3vyA9on https://bit.ly/3vyA9on. Big thanks to the Author. Usually at the end of the day, I refine all collected information with tags or specific folders/links. If you want to export your clipped content, there is a plugin called Obsidian Enhancing Export (requires Pandoc) https://bit.ly/3cZFmzl https://bit.ly/3cZFmzl P.S. This approach has saved my skin many times. I can sync to my Obsidian folder, which I sync with Synology NAS.
      - boredtofears 4y ago
        Very cool, thanks for explaining your setup, I like the organization of it.
      - brokenmachine 4y ago
        >My passwords live in an encrypted folder with contextual information, then are used in the browser with per site rules. Can you explain this a bit? How do you use the encrypted folder in your browser?
- Tagbert 4y ago
  On my work laptop, I have 152 tabs open right now. I use a Firefox plugins called Panorama tab groups to organize them by projects. These are long running projects where I have web documents, references, reports and action tickets for each project. There are pages that I reference multiple times per day every day. I don’t want to be closing and reopening them. That is a lot of work and sometimes context and state would be lost. The plugin lets me see just the tabs for a given project at one time. I can switch projects and then I am only seeing the tabs for that project. I could do this within separate windows but that would require managing up to 10 windows in the browser and that’s a lot of work. Also it’s too easy to close the browser and lose the windows. Most of the tabs are not active at any given time and tend to be swapped to storage so they don’t clog up the RAM. If were to try to just close everything every time I switched projects, I would be spending way to much time and mental focus just managing tabs. This works for me.
- waste_monk 4y ago
  I'm the opposite, my work machine has ~740 tabs over 14 windows, my personal machine at home is well into the 6000's... not sure how you get anything useful done with so few tabs. Admittedly only a hundred or so tend to be actively in memory at a time, mostly they get lazy-loaded as I go to use them.
- rasz 4y ago
  Ill give you one example. Just yesterday I stumbled on https://insanecoding.blogspot.com https://insanecoding.blogspot.com . Interesting blog, so I opened all of the individual blog posts (~20 going back to 2007) and will spend the next ~week reading them in my spare time. If I just bookmarked instead I would quickly forgot about it. Tabs are a live TODO list.
thomaspaulmann 4y ago
Only?
terminal_d 4y ago
I have 9 windows with 4780 tabs open currently. Not kidding. I have maybe 150 active, the rest are "suspended". Firefox. This is my current PC, I have another ~3K on my previous browser, which I gave up on. Have another ~1.5K on the one before that.
rektide 4y ago
Opera browser's forums shutting down made me sad, because I had a very long very old post talking about how the browser window was a container of information. My final ask was a way to save a single window into a session, which would complement Opera's ability to load a session of windows. Making the browser a better organizer of information, where subworkspaces can be open & closed, remains a priority for me, decades latter (because I still have too many tabs open). I had some progress reading out & snapshotting current tabs across devices, but I'd like a weekly list, and ability yo annotate better the tabs that cross my feed.
- superkuh 4y ago
  I started tabbed browsing with Opera 5. It was amazing then back when I could do 50 tabs, and it's amazing now with firefox forks when I can do 500 tabs with less than 3GB of ram used (with Noscript on for most websites not whitelisted). But don't try this in a multi-process browser, not even modern Firefox can handle truly large session files like Palemoon or Seamonkey classic can. I have saved my Opera->Firefox->Palemoon session files at least every month since 2003. I have a little perl script for converting any of their session file formats to a number of tabs (http://superkuh.com/opera-sessions-to-tab-number.pl.txt http://superkuh.com/opera-sessions-to-tab-number.pl.txt). Using it I can plot the number of tabs in my browser over 20 years. But that's just trivial visualization. I still find my old session files valuable in other ways.
mjevans 4y ago
Firefox's switch to dynamically unloading opened tabs has regressed my use of the UI from precached anything I might want to have open or remember later... to a rolling snowball of tabs cross multiple 'windows' (idea sessions) and several profiles (cookie sandboxes). Yeah, it's bad enough that the tab search feature is useful and also that I'd like some better way of re-organizing the dataset.
- the8472 4y ago
  browser.tabs.unloadOnLowMemory defaults to false for me? and for cookie sandboxes you can use container tabs.
  - nix0n 4y ago
    Defaults to true for me, but sometimes I end up using about:unloads to manually force unloading anyway.
UncleOxidant 4y ago
Only 218?
mavhc 4y ago
I have 1000 tabs open over various computers, not sure it's a good thing though, 10% I need, 20% I forgot to close, and 70% I'm totally going to get around to reading one day
- switchbak 4y ago
  I just found the limit on Safari mobile .. 500 for those who are curious :) I'm just lazy too, I almost never go back and read the old ones. Digital hoarding I suppose.
avmich 4y ago
Is there a tool which saves on the local machine the pages which were opened? So that e.g. browser can safely be closed, and then information from those pages searched, and page re-opened if needed? I remember there were some companies specializing in desktop-wide search...
- m12k 4y ago
  I use OneTab for this. It feels like the browser equivalent of just sweeping all the papers on your desk into a drawer
  - TylerE 4y ago
    Once I get past about 15-20 it’s time to go on a ctrl w fest
  - andrew_jef 4y ago
    OneTab is great. I’m using daily. Though it lacks a proper way to sync the OneTab list between devices. I have been waiting for their development since years
  - thebigspacefuck 4y ago
    I used to use OneTab and it was fantastic. My new workplace won’t allow us to use it so every few days I’ll have to go through all my tabs. It’s so annoying and time consuming. Last time I was up to 513 tabs and it took me at least an hour. Once I get past a certain point I can’t find my old tabs and start opening duplicates so the problem gets worse.
- TylerE 4y ago
  Chrome almost always manages this
- myhf 4y ago
  Pinboard[1] has a browser plugin that can do that with a "save tab set" command. Searching the saved bookmarks is a separate paid feature. [1] https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/
- 4y ago
fletchowns 4y ago
Simple Tab Groups is an extremely useful Firefox extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/simple-tab-groups/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/simple-tab-gr...
- baal80spam 4y ago
  I prefer Chrome's built-in tab grouping feature and I cannot understand why Firefox doesn't have it out of the box.
  - daveidol 4y ago
    It's a relatively new feature for Chrome, but I agree I think FF should copy it
  - hammyhavoc 4y ago
    Haven't used it, but is this going to be the thing that makes me switch to Chrome?
  - Gunirus 4y ago
    Tab grouping is the number one reason I switched from Chrome to Firefox. Especially on mobile it only makes it harder to find an open tab.
gitgud 4y ago
It's great your browser can now scale to hundreds of tabs, but can your brain handle that many? Can you focus with 200 tabs open? Personally, I feel much better when I close a tab, rather than leave it open. It feels like I'm freeing up RAM in my head...
- turdit 4y ago
  that’s really interesting
- boplicity 4y ago
  I do a lot of research for my job; I often open up 30 new tabs in a matter of a minute, and then slowly work through them, a little bit like a checklist, vetting the information in each one. I can imagine using a similar process for even larger number of tabs, but you're right that it gets a bit unwieldy at some point. That being said, Tree Style Tabs in Firefox makes mentally handling large numbers of tabs very easy. Without it, my workflow would not be functional.
- themodelplumber 4y ago
  The tabs handle it so your brain doesn't have to? Tabs represent productive effort toward a goal, mission, or valued task. https://www.friendlyskies.net/maybe/why-closing-tabs-is-so-hard https://www.friendlyskies.net/maybe/why-closing-tabs-is-so-h... The false dichotomy of "reasonable tabs vs. too many tabs" is an embarrassing result of slow evolution in software design. The fact that humans feel blame for the resulting behavior is 100% wrong and unnecessary.
  - hammyhavoc 4y ago
    Eloquent. I've been struggling to put this into words in a way that doesn't sound pretentious, but you nailed it.
    - themodelplumber 4y ago
      Kind of you to say so --Marc
zh3 4y ago
You should see my wife's laptop....
- hammyhavoc 4y ago
  Is it work? If so, what does she do? Always curious to hear about fellow tab hoarders.
  - zh3 4y ago
    Doesn't use bookmarks, follows her curiousity and simply leaves every tab open.
Pokepokalypse 4y ago
amateur
galkk 4y ago
I find tree style tabs very effective in things like oncall/learning/investigation situations because they act as kind of breadcrumbs/grouping solution. Like list of issues -> issue -> [log search, similar issues search, metrics etc]. You get stuck/wait for something then go to next issue, but have chance to return back to your entire context. And when you finished you just close entire subtree and move on. With linear list of tabs (or even groups in chrome) it is much less convenient.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
mihaitodor 4y ago
Only? for me it got out of hand years ago... Session Buddy is currently reporting "146 Windows 1371 Tabs" on my personal computer. On top of that, I have more than 100 on my phone, around 200 on my work laptop and several txt files with lists of open tabs saved from years ago when I changed computers. While I'm sure I want to read / watch over 50% of those, going back through them requires some time off which I'm struggling to find, so they keep piling up slowly...
- brazzy 4y ago
  It's amazing how humans keep finding new ways to hoard things...
  - mihaitodor 4y ago
    It’s not as burdensome as piling up physical objects. In fact, I’m quite used to having them lie around in my browser since it doesn’t keep them loaded in memory any more (I’m using Chrome on OSX). While I know nothing about collecting stamps, I believe there is some similarity: If any of them seem of some value, I will bother to bookmark them along with a brief description in Google Keep. After several years, this small “mind map” has proven to be quite valuable for me. Why Google Keep and not bookmarks? It seems to work better for me than any other bookmark system I tried and the 2-level nesting feels just right: I created about 30 labels and each of them have various archived notes that contain multiple links together with their descriptions. So far, I believe each of the notes I created have one label, but I might end up attaching multiple labels to some of them eventually.
user_7832 4y ago
I know it's hardly anything worth "flexing", but I have hundreds of tabs on every browser on all my devices, easily (and regrettably) totalling a few thousand overall. I have had to install new browsers because reopening a crashed browser would freeze my computer. The reason I'm posting this here? Because I want people to know how terrible of an experience it is. No, not having the tabs open themselves. But the frequent app crashes and hangs. The time chrome crashed and lost all tabs (iPadOS so no ctr shift t. And it was triggered by opening a link so the "restore" button disapeared immediately.) I do not know if anyone on Google's Chrome, or Apple's Safari or Mozilla's Firefox teams are reading this - but if you are, you should know that tab management on all types of devices - be it android or a windows laptop - sucks to say the least, and is buggy/broken to be more accurate. Chrome throws a smiley face which isn't cute when you want to actually see a number. (Fortunately kiwi browser - my designated music browser - tells me I have 700-something tabs despite being chromium based.) I cannot open the tab switcher in chrome (android) for a solid few minutes unless I want the app to freeze, or more realistically, to delete/misplace some tabs. (I.e Tabs get randomly rearranged, and the tab grouping feature doesn't help.) You end up learning "tricks" to avoid upsetting your browser. "Don't newtab for the first x seconds, instead open a link from Google search and it'll be faster" "Don't bother typing anything at all in the search field, auto complete doesn't work until the tab-smiley comes on which takes 20 seconds in chrome canary and 2 minutes on regular chrome" On windows browsers hog memory until the system slows to a crawl. Safari is the least terrible, despite the questionable 500 tab limit navigation is still fluid. As to why I don't close tabs - because when you think 20 different things you want to search (thanks ADHD) and haven't read any of them, you'll want to go back later when you have time. (Btw if anyone from any of the browser's teams is interested in seeing a live demo of this in a "real life" use-case I'll be more than happy to demonstrate what "ultra-high" organic page use looks like.)
- baisq 4y ago
  Safari has a very low limit of tabs open. I don't manage the tabs of my phone at all, I just let them pile up, and eventually I always hit the limit. Thankfully there's an option that automatically deletes all tabs that you haven't opened in a month.
Tamer 4y ago
Over 1000 (+The great Suspender) https://i.imgur.com/ESBKggu.png https://i.imgur.com/ESBKggu.png (Session Buddy)
jimbob45 4y ago
1827 tabs here - I have a problem. Firefox devs, if you're listening, an "automatically clear tabs older than 30 days on close/open" option would be highly desirable for me (and maybe those like me).
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  For bonus points, I'm pretty sure that option exists on Firefox for Android
- sebow 4y ago
  I also recently closed ~8k.(Yes, mostly HN/lobsters/news and usually things I found interesting in the past ~6 months) For firefox users: there's a nice little addon called LoadTabOnSelect3. Without it firefox crashes to the point where you can't recover a session if firefox tries to impossibly load thousands of tabs on a machine(ram amount is irrelevant). The feature you're talking about is found in many addons, I believe also in the one i mentioned. Don't hold your breath waiting for Mozilla to implement good things quickly (though they're much better in that regard than Google: which removes features and makes the web experience worse)
- iKlsR 4y ago
  Funny that I will hoard an entire window with dozens for weeks, accidentally lose it one day and be like meh.
Night_Thastus 4y ago
Is there some kind of tree view for bookmarks as well? I have hundreds. I put them into relevant folder, and put those folders into more folders. Still, it does feel a little clunky and I'm running out of space at the top of my bookmarks bar.
- Macha 4y ago
  Firefox bookmarks open in the sidebar these days with Ctrl-B which is pretty similar? I guess the one disadvantage compared to the tree presentation of tree tabs is that everything starts collapsed.
- michaelsalim 4y ago
  The same extension in the article, Sideberry does so for bookmarks. It's on the first panel by default.
qwertox 4y ago
Meanwhile here I am on Chrome using a Python script which kills all Chrome instances so that it presents me the "restore tabs" option upon startup when I decide that I want to continue the last session the next day. I do this because my default settings are to load some predefined pages which I use very often. This is on Windows, which I power off every night. When I send it to sleep for a couple of days in a row (in order to "persist" my Chrome windows and tabs) it suddenly stops working. The entire machine stops working. Well, I can still use it, but I can't start new processes (I do have 32 GB of RAM and a lot of it is not used then). Only a matter of months until I switch to some Apple product, I'm so done with Windows.
incanus77 4y ago
I'll add to the chorus of "only?" I have abut 300 right now across three Macs, an iPad, and an iPhone, plus Safari Tab Groups (i.e. tab groups shared between machines) with 11 groups of (on average) about 15 tabs per group. Before Safari Tab Groups, I had some Bash & AppleScripts setup to give me menu access to all tabs via SwiftBar and some Syncthing syncing of tabs metadata. I also actively bookmark (in fact, one of my 11 tab groups is "To Pinboard" which allows me a space to thoughtfully write up certain links for my link blog[1]) and I aggressively close tabs. But I'm in a lot of projects, some stalled, some periodic, some active, some tiny, some technical, some more blue sky-y. I'm always reading the book that is the internet - tabs are all pages. I don't really get overwhelmed by it since everything has a place and I don't have to dedicate mental energy to it, knowing my system works. [1] https://justinmiller.io/links/ https://justinmiller.io/links/
michaelsalim 4y ago
Author here. Based on some of the comments, it sounds like I'm an amateur by HN standards haha. But hey, now I can send this to people who says I'm crazy.
- hammyhavoc 4y ago
  Whilst not crazy, I am autistic. >beams
Bayart 4y ago
I have about 500 between the two computers in my room atm. Probably 50 on my work laptop. My tab count only resets whenever my browser crashes irrecoverably. I started doing it back in the Opera days (presto engine). It could sustain hundreds of tabs consistently at a time everything swapped on spinning rust. I treat tabs as "urgent" bookmarks : stuff I want to read later, but in a more palpable time frame.
yatharth1991 4y ago
After a certain number N, which is < 20-30, the number of open tabs are inversely proportional to your productivity.
btown 4y ago
For those skeptical how this can happen, it's the natural situation when two things are true: (a) wanting to create a new browser window when a new "context" is necessary, rather than navigating away from one's current context, and (b) being in an environment where "contexts" are added more rapidly than they can be fully triaged, delegated, or completed. If you're (1) working on some deep frontend code and previewing it in the browser, then (2) you need to look up how to do a certain thing in React which might require reading multiple documentation and Stack Overflow posts, and in the midst of that (3) need to fix an urgent bug in something you've owned, and you do so but are waiting for CI to pass on the fix, and while waiting for that (4) you also need to unblock a colleague on a question about a specific piece of documentation and send them some Github links but not wanting to close them until they respond: you've just created 4 windows with many tabs open in each. Now, if on top of this you are in a CTO or PM style role in which you need to do a few observability or analytics dives per day to try to understand specific customer situations... each of those may result in a context as well. On this crazy day, you have 10 context windows, each with 4 or more tabs, accumulate during a single day, and you may only be able to fully get through the backlog over the course of the following few days. Probabilistically, there will be a time during certain weeks where you have 160-200 tabs from this workload alone. Tools like https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/toby-for-chrome/hddnkoipeenegfoeaoibdmnaalmgkpip?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/toby-for-chrome/hd... and https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-manager-plus-for-chro/cnkdjjdmfiffagllbiiilooaoofcoeff https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-manager-plus-f... are extremely useful, but do require that you're willing to suspend your page state, including any state in dev tools or scroll position - so they're simply a way to speed up getting through the backlog of contexts, not a silver bullet. So if you're the one they go to when situations arise, and you can't grow your team as fast as you need... the TL;DR is: if any of this sounds familiar, you will want that 64GB of RAM for your laptop sooner rather than later.
readingnews 4y ago
I was literally working on a computer at work. Was taking too long to shutdown... I wonder why. I could not resist taking a picture. http://dimlight.org/number9/pics/tabs.jpg http://dimlight.org/number9/pics/tabs.jpg
Dracophoenix 4y ago
laughs in multiple VMs solely devoted to Firefox tabs
spython 4y ago
In 2018 I wrote a blog post called Open tabs are cognitive spaces [0] – about that exact problem. It got a bit popular on HN, and since then quite a few alternative browsers tried to solve the problem, I even consulted a few of them, such as Beam[1] and Synth[2]. The hard part of the problem is that by creating 'spaces' full of tabs to make our lives easier we create yet another categorization, another taxonomy, and with it all the timeless problems that taxonomies have: Should the current page belong to category A or a similar category B? Or to both? How can I merge two spaces into one in a good way? Can I do it automatically or do I have to, yet again, select, curate, categorize? How can browsing and researching be a living process and at the same time be neatly sorted for later recall? One thing that I kind of still miss after watching the field develop for four years, is the simple idea of making groups of tabs easily shareable. Just let me share a tab group with another person! Better yet let us work on the same tab group together, treating it like a living document, a living research space. I guess this can't be solved by an alternative browser, but instead by an open standard that could be implemented in all browsers. [0] https://rybakov.com/blog/open_tabs_are_cognitive_spaces/ https://rybakov.com/blog/open_tabs_are_cognitive_spaces/ [1] https://beamapp.co/ https://beamapp.co/ [2] https://synth.app/ https://synth.app/
- jul45 4y ago
  Well, making groups of tabs easily shareable is coming in iOS 16 and macOS Ventura, I guess that's a start. https://allthings.how/how-to-use-shared-tab-groups-in-safari/ https://allthings.how/how-to-use-shared-tab-groups-in-safari...
  - spython 4y ago
    Great to see that. Kind of disappointed not seeing it developed first in Firefox.
  - hammyhavoc 4y ago
    But there's still a 500 tab limit on Safari, right?
lotw_dot_site 4y ago
Needing lots of browser tabs is a direct result of the fact that individual web sites are not very good at multitasking (they can usually only do one thing) or at "remembering" (they are almost never locally stateful). I'm actively working on both of those things via Linux on the Web!
- hammyhavoc 4y ago
  Please, keep me in the loop about your work: me@hammyhavoc.com
jacquesm 4y ago
Probably a multiple of that here. My trick to keep it manageable is when I start a new job I start a new browser instance and I really try hard to keep all of the related articles open in tabs in that particular instance. Vertical tabs are pretty much a must for this. Then, when the job is done (invoice sent) the whole browser instance is nuked and that cleans it all up again. It's a bit like garbage collection in software, I don't have to make any small decisions because I'll just kill the whole process.
mohamez 4y ago
On Chrome: OneTab + The Marvellous Suspender + "Ctrl+Shift+A" to search tabs, did wonders for me.
booleandilemma 4y ago
Over 15 tabs and the person is just using it as a conversation piece.
tconfrey 4y ago
Tabs == To-do's Every open tab is a pending to-do, if only to come back and close or bookmark it. Having hundreds of open todo's in your face the whole time takes a mental toll. For most people closing tabs will free up some mental space as well as swap space. The problem is that it's still too hard to save and organize things as you go without the right tooling. My approach FWIW: https://braintool.org/2022/01/28/Browser-based-Productivity-and-pkm-with-emacs-org-mode-LogSeq-and-BrainTool.html https://braintool.org/2022/01/28/Browser-based-Productivity-...
- ssivark 4y ago
  As someone who regularly runs up thousands of tabs, BrainTool has been an absolute blessing for organizing tabs into contexts! Since the tabs list/tree is available in an easily parseable plain text format, it becomes trivially easy to process tabs programmatically. I strongly encourage anyone who is curious to try it out.
  - hammyhavoc 4y ago
    I would love to use this, but doesn't seem like tasks can have dependencies/blocking tasks. Very few todo systems do. That's how I derive the "right" order to do things in with complex parallel tasks and research. Love it UX-wise though.
    - ssivark 4y ago
      My use case is research-oriented and it’s impossible to impose that much structure on tasks — for me it’s mainly about keeping track of tabs/links while I go through them and organize my mental models (they’re not even really tasks). I don’t know about the applicability for a more execution-oriented workflow.
deleted 4y ago
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travoltaj 4y ago
I have a massive tab problem, and had to build a personal SOP to manage it. I have 400+ tabs open on Chrome right now, on my mobile. Every now and then, I use chrome on my laptop to open all tabs from my mobile (tabs from other devices show in History), save them to one tab (browser extension), and save it as a HTML, and close all tabs on my mobile. It doesn't take more than a week to build up to more than 100 again. I believe my record has been 1100+ tabs on Chrome, and 5000+ tabs on Opera Mobile. The desktop version of these apps can't handle these amounts nearly as well..
- morninglight 4y ago
  What is the cost of this capability in terms of a browser's memory footprint, performance and security? In other words, if the browser could omit this capability would it be significantly smaller, faster and more secure? If that were true, then perhaps there should be a "pro" or "enterprise" version of the browser at a different price point. Most users can easily limit themselves to about 10 tabs.
  - Jerrrry 4y ago
    no
tannhaeuser 4y ago
I don't have that many tabs open right now or usually, but I'm wondering what Firefox users in the habit of messing with > 100 tabs are doing. Sooner rather than later Firefox won't allow you to open new tabs ("one thing to do") and forces a restart after updating in the background. I don't know if you can open another FF window/process in that situation but I think that behavior is very annoying and kindof needs fixing if FF wants to be a browser for power users.
- michaelsalim 4y ago
  This is actually something I almost touch on in the article. Sideberry have a feature to store snapshots. So if I restart the browser, I just restore from there. I also have it set to save every 2 hours so that I can always recover from crashes.
- matthberg 4y ago
  I'm not quite sure what you're talking about. Firefox allows thousands of tabs without stopping new tabs being created. I currently have 3109 open (with only a dozen or so loaded though) which has survived abrupt power loss, freezing and force quitting, and updates across several years worth of versions both in the background and manually triggered. It's using 1571MB RAM at the moment and rarely goes over 10Gb, even after having viewed hundreds of tabs recently. In that case it's easy enough to unload everything by restarting the browser or selecting a bunch of tabs then unloading them with Sidebery.
  - hammyhavoc 4y ago
    This matches my experience to the word.
  - tannhaeuser 4y ago
    FF telling me it needs to restart, refusing to open a new tab, happens all the time for me, at mostly annoying times such as in the middle of a session while logged in. Doesn't have anything to do with the number of open tabs, but is due to FF having downloaded updates. Maybe it's a config option? Anyway, I'm wondering why FF needs restarting, and in combination with the frequency this happens (at least once a month), I'm questioning the architecture behind this - after all I don't want my browser to update more often and consume more download bytes than the content I'm after, and I'm not looking forward to a web/web browser that needs constant updates after 30 years sorry.
controversial97 4y ago
With 32GB of RAM, I can have roughly around 3000 tabs open in firefox and 3000 in Chromium at the same time before things go unrecoverable wonky.
deleted 4y ago
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MerelyMortal 4y ago
I recently had over 4,000 tabs opened on Firefox for Android. The app kept crashing when I tried to "share" (export) them, so I manually selected them in groups of 100 to "share" at a time. Other than that, the only issue I had with the app is that if I was typing something in the URL/search bar, it would take a while to find any matches in my browsing history. Over half of the tabs were HN posts that I've been meaning to get back to. I keep telling myself (lying to myself?): One day I will.
- hammyhavoc 4y ago
  TIL there's a fucking export function after having manually copied and pasted 1000+ URLs from it on another machine. Urgh. Now I know for next time.
  - zeroimpl 4y ago
    Could also "Bookmark All Tabs" and then export your bookmark list.
- 1MachineElf 4y ago
  I've just now gone through the steps to export my Brave Browser for Android tabs into a JSON file and I think I've set a new record for myself: [me@comupter]$ cat tabs.json | grep "page" | wc -l 17022 That's all of the "open" tabs since I got this phone back in January of this year. So about 7 months worth. I was aware Brave automatically puts tabs to sleep to conserve resources, and this confirmed to me that Brave wasn't auto-deleting any after a certain time-based or numeric threshold. Yes I am a big-time tab accumulator, but I'm sure the number would be smaller if the Brave team would just implement the "Bookmark All Tabs" feature that's been requested since at least 2019: https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/5711 https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/5711 Method to get open Google Chrome tabs from an Android phone into a JSON file (steps are identical for Brave Browser): https://android.stackexchange.com/a/199496 https://android.stackexchange.com/a/199496
matthberg 4y ago
It's not the best of habits yet I currently have 3109, recently migrated to Sidebery from Panorama View [0]. I'll likely go pruning soon, yet having time context of what I was looking at (by neighboring tabs and indent levels) is so useful for sparking my memory and associating ideas. I've tried using bookmarks and tagging yet the tooling around that is annoying enough I keep coming back to having an obscene amount of tabs open. Ideally, I'd like a bookmarking system which allows for referencing tab history, past visits and other tabs viewed in each visit's timeframe, manual tagging, external references, and more, yet that doesn't exist yet. I've looked into developing such an extension, yet tab history APIs are clunky enough I haven't bothered going further. If anyone knows of other extensions that fill this niche, I'd love to hear of them. [0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/panorama-view/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/panorama-view... This used to be a built-in feature of Firefox, which I used until I was forced to switch to the addon.
- dublin 4y ago
  I've worked with thousands of open tabs for many years now. (I'm not defending my habits to anyone - this is how I prefer to work, and it is not negotiable.) AFAIK, this many tabs is only possible with Firefox. In the main window (of five) that I'm typing this in, the OpenTabs extension reports that I have 2260 tabs. The other four windows have anywhere from a few dozen to a few hundred tabs. My max was around 5000 tabs, but that was back before Firefox Quantum. And yeah, I really miss TabMixPlus, and want a better way to scroll through multiple tab rows. (I currently use a hack to Firefox's chrome file, but it's still a little clunky, and that method doesn't properly support things like dragging tabs to reorder them, etc.) The Moz team gutted the tab history APIs when they killed off XUL which is why TMP has never been rewritten - it really can't be...
kderbyma 4y ago
this is insane to me....I get everyone has their own process....but this is not it....
- hammyhavoc 4y ago
  Everybody thinks differently. This naive idea that there should be one-size-fits-all workflows is counterproductive. Whilst "insane", the results speak for themselves in terms of output.
_8j50 4y ago
I regularly have 300-500 tabs open on multiple browsers at the same time. This freaks out many people when I share my screen. Works wonders for me, no tree style or additional plugins other than to change user agents or tamper with js (tampermonkey). AMA lol. Tabs are like part of workloads I am actively working on. They are not a set of stores items to organize or clean up. I very rarely bookmark or use bookmarks. I research and investigate many things, the results of any one of them could be useful to the rest yet storing them as bookmarks makes little sense since they are all temporary. Whatever output I am working on is stored elsewhere. I just don't struggle that much to find tabs because I have good short term (days/weeks) memory and auto-complete with "switch tabs" instead of opening them helps a lot too.
- hammyhavoc 4y ago
  Bookmarks are such a slow and inefficient workflow. I detest them. As the old adage goes, "out of sight, out of mind". I need it in my face.
  - _8j50 4y ago
    Thank you! I am not reading a single text like a book, they make little sense to my workflow.
swayvil 4y ago
I get anxious if my tab count goes over 10.
swishman 4y ago
Too many tabs is overwhelming. I know for myself when the tab count gets high it's a sign that my mind is cluttered, I'm unfocused, and I need to prune and centre myself again. Bookmarks are one way, but I mainly just use the search bar directly for history. Things to read later are put into Pocket or linked in Obsidian notes or somewhere more relevant.
hammyhavoc 4y ago
I have ~1600 on my ThinkPad. That's much better than the 3000+ on my desktop.
urgentresearch 4y ago
iPhone Safari browser tabs max out at 500. I have 442 open right now. My combined OneTab closed tabs count is approaching 100k between both my laptops, since early 2020. (This comment is a confession, of sorts.)
jsr0 4y ago
I'm up to 9343 tabs in Firefox. I am adding about 2000 per year. I keep thinking I'm going to get back to the older ones and read then close them...
- nairboon 4y ago
  Spread over how many windows? It seems that FF can handle loads of tabs, but after too many open windows, the window manager or something else starts to get sluggish on my machine.
  - jsr0 4y ago
    This is across 37 windows. Firefox takes a couple of minutes to start up (possibly due to some extensions not performing well with thousands of tabs), but runs fine after loading.
hyperjeff 4y ago
If you work with many dedicated workspaces for specific tasks (for me, 16), then a lot of tabs on a machine can mean a perfectly reasonable amount per workspace. At any time I have between ~500 and 1k open across all devices. I've built up a custom semi-madcap system, but like others, it works with my workflow. A script takes a snapshot of all tabs across all devices, saved to raw html so that it's fairly well future-proofed, and then I'm free to close any tabs that I can't get to right away. And then I've created a custom browser purely for being able to go thru the saved tabs, auto-organizing pages by subject or domain, with custom pruning tools. I feel like page/tab/bookmark management is a core problem from the birth of web browsing that has never really been solved for most people. I have 3 main places for my core bookmarks, in Safari, Firefox and then also folders on my drive (still one of the few guaranteed cross-browser ways to store them without using online tools). This is all related to the tab problem above.
nairboon 4y ago
Some time ago, I used browsers as a meta-tab manager. Whenever there were too many open tabs in let's say Firefox, I'd switch to Chrome, then Chrome Beta, Chromium,... But it was a bit hard to remember in which browser a particular tab was.
wanghq 4y ago
1. I usually open about 30 to 50 tabs, and then my laptop becomes slow or it's difficult to navigate them. 2. I decide to close some but find it difficult to choose which ones to close - they all seem important to me. 3. I use onetab to close them all so if I need any of them I can get them back. Funny enough, I rarely go to onetab to reopen them. Seems if I need them again, I find them in different ways, e.g. google search, browser history, ...
mikewarot 4y ago
How is this any different than treating a tab as a bookmark?
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zeroimpl 4y ago
The author mentioned the vimium addon with the ability to quickly flip back to the previous tab. This makes me want something similar to the recently-used-tab selector in VSCode - pressing ctrl-tab pops-up a list of recently used tabs in reverse-chronological order and makes it super easy to flip back and forth. I wonder if there's any browser extension like this?
- zeroimpl 4y ago
  Wow just realized Firefox has this feature built-in but not enabled by default! Just needed to turn on "Ctrl+Tab cycles through tabs in recently used order".
- mrg2k8 4y ago
  Opera does this by default.
generalunited 4y ago
I have 500 tabs open with Safari on iPhone - it won’t let me make any more tabs so I have to reuse them.
thebitstick 4y ago
Vertical/Nested Tabs is the main reason I love Orion for macOS.
subjectsigma 4y ago
I get that everyone has different preferences, but it baffles me that this guy had to write an entire essay justifying his terrible workflow and explain how he's leaning on extra tools and hardware to make it workable. Browser bookmarks are fast, flexible, easy to use, native to every browser. Most browsers support syncing bookmarks to different devices with practically zero setup, and also exporting to formats like HTML or JSON. They can be tagged, searched, organized into folders, assigned keywords, parameterized with values (like %s in Firefox), copied into desktop icons... And plus there's near zero risk of losing them if your browser crashes! There's just no world where this tab workflow makes sense.
nunez 4y ago
I cannot for the life of me understand people who keep zillions of tabs open instead of using something like Pocket or the Reading List to keep track of things to read later. Feels like convenient disorganization.

98 points by michaelsalim 4y ago

>“Why not use bookmarks?” section You can still prefer using bookmarks for something long-term, but utilize Bookmarks bar for a quicker access.

CivBase 4y ago
Yeah, the author's answer wasn't very satisfying for me. I use tabs for things I'm actively using, keep quick-access stuff on the bookmarks toolbar, and keep long-term stuff in directories or the bookmarks pane/menu. No need to come up with a hacky workflow as an excuse to keep hundreds of tabs open. It's wild what lengths people will go through to avoid minor changes to their workflow.

dmd 4y ago

No matter how many people's explanations of this I read, I still can't grasp it. I typically have 3-5 tabs open including mail. On a really busy day, maybe 8?

bgilroy26 4y ago
You're probably more of a project finisher than a project starter Many of my open tabs are write-ups of topics that I hope to learn about some day, but I have not returned to in years since opening (cumulatively 1000+)
- krallja 4y ago
  I have those too. They’re called Bookmarks. Some of them are decades old. I don’t leave them in RAM.
  - throwaway821909 4y ago
    It means (for those of us who can't let go easily) going through every tab, opening all the interesting pages it links to, bookmarking them, preferably with screenshots, downloading any videos, etc. I'd rather they weren't in RAM but there's no easy way to move them to disk (automatically would be ideal)
  - antonymy 4y ago
    Ditto. I have no idea why bookmarks are so hard for some people to use. RAM is far more limited than regular storage, and bookmarks are minuscule in size compared to browser tabs. This "problem" was solved decades ago and yet I still see tab-hoarders everywhere.
    - SAI_Peregrinus 4y ago
      Bookmarks don't store history or context (for Tree-style tab users, what tab was <this> opened from?). Tabs do. Bookmarks solve only half the problem, tabs solve more.
      - piva00 4y ago
        I use a mix of leaving multiple windows with 1-20 tabs in each and Toby to organise them after a while. My "workflow" usually consists of: open new window for the topic/theme (whatever it may be, research, study, reading news) and go opening tabs, searches, articles. When I get to a point where a window hasn't been active for a few days I close the useless/uninteresting tabs and save the rest as a collection in Toby. It's been extremely helpful to manage my fear of missing knowledge or closing something I could get interested, the curation after a few days really helps.
    - hammyhavoc 4y ago
      Well-written modern browsers suspend tabs. Barely uses any RAM.
    - BeFlatXIII 4y ago
      Bookmarks are buried in a toolbar and may as well be deleted. Tabs visually remind you of their presence.
- ako 4y ago
  I collect these in pocket.
  - mackrevinack 4y ago
    personally i have found that pocket is like a black hole for articles. ive saved so many over the years but only end up reading .01% of them
  - dublin 4y ago
    Correction: You have chosen to give Pocket your most personal data. No thanks.
    - ako 4y ago
      Online bookmark services are quite common, and not very personal.
baal80spam 4y ago
Same here. I treat my browser like my desk and I keep it neat and tidy at the end of day.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  /me glances at my (cluttered) desk There are apparently 2 kinds of people...
  - orthoxerox 4y ago
    Four kinds of people. My desk is always a mess, but I close my tabs every day.
    - jacquesm 4y ago
      Technically, we now have evidence for three. There is no evidence yet for people with a clean desk but messy tabs ;) But I'm confident they exist, we should put a bounty on the location of a prime specimen and see what happens when we breed them with the third kind to establish if there is a genetic component to this.
      - doublerebel 4y ago
        Clean desk but messy tabs here. I like the aesthetics of clean interior design, it’s peaceful and inspiring like a blank whiteboard. Also, nobody can see my tabs.
      - bobwaycott 4y ago
        My girlfriend will stop and clean the house if she sees a crumb, but I don’t think she knows she can close tabs. She probably has a tab for everything she’s ever looked at on the internet. They never go away. It’s as overwhelming to me as my inability to spot a crumb is to her.
- Retr0id 4y ago
  Heh, I think you might be onto something here. I'm a tab maximalist, with probably a few hundred open right now. I also have a very messy desk. In fact, I bought a second desk just so that I could fit the detritus of more concurrent projects. I would be curious to hear if anyone with a clean desk uses many tabs, or vice versa.
insightcheck 4y ago
Let's say you're writing a research paper. You start with an introductory review paper that links to dozens of other sources. You want to evaluate whether these sources are relevant to your paper's topic, so you open them all in new tabs. Then they have other references, so you open those too. Over the course of a couple hours, you might have over 20 tabs you've opened. You then stop opening new tabs, and read them one at a time until you're done. A similar process can happen when doing research for an in-depth blog post, opinion article, or essay (except instead of starting with a review paper, you might start with one or more pages of Google search results). Outside of work, you might sign up for several emailed newsletters with various links to articles per email. If you get about 20 newsletter emails, and you choose to read 10 of them with 2-3 interesting articles each, you end up with 20+ tabs to read through. However, if you don't need to do that much research for a particular task (or you can get the information you need from just a few resources like a quality book), you may not encounter a need to open this many tabs.
- knolan 4y ago
  When I’m writing a paper I’ll download the PDFs of relevant papers to a subfolder of my TeX document’s folder and start building a bibliography with links to those PDFs in BibDesk. Much easier to find stuff and not have to worry about forgetting something.
- reportgunner 4y ago
  > so you open them all in new tabs but why ? you can't read them at the same time anyway, why not just save the links and open them one by one ? When I want to binge watch a whole series of a show I don't open all of the episodes at the same time in separate windows because I'm planning to watch them all in one session.
  - rasz 4y ago
    > save the links thats how we use Tabs, after browser restart the Tabs dont reload, they are suspended and act as a bookmark that you can constantly see to remind you. >binge watch a whole series ... don't open all of the episodes erm, I download whole season/series, so that I do have 'all of the episodes' in a folder under my fingertips.
Gualdrapo 4y ago
I'm like you, I try to keep my number of "tabs" small. And call me insane, but I managed to visually remove the tabs from the web browser I use (Falkon) and I just switch between them with Ctrl+<0-9>, Ctrl+PageUp or Ctrl+PageDown. I have a silly idea for a tabless browser interface (managing and visualizing all of them via the "magic" URL bar) but as I am no developer can't do much.
furyofantares 4y ago
I don't get it at all. I know how to get back to everything I use. I guess I don't do a lot of researching things, though, where you land on pages you've never seen before and might not remember how to get there since you've only done it once.
jacquesm 4y ago
Lucky you. That means you have a very focused work environment with very little distractions. Unfortunately the work I do pretty much forces me to have 10's, regularly 100's of documents open at the same time and to be able to memorize what bits that are relevant came from which document. This is getting harder with advancing age so I used a scrapbooking plug-in to keep track of the citations. Now it is just a file with a bunch of text snippets and hyperlinks.
ok_dad 4y ago
Same, I can't fathom having more than 20 tabs open, and only if I was tracking the hardest most complex bug ever and had 10 search tabs open.
lotw_dot_site 4y ago
One of the greatest joys of my life is going on gleeful rampages of Ctrl+w tab annihilation! Lots of times, I'll end up with just two open tabs: devdocs.io and the local development version of my own namesake :)
stayux 4y ago
I will never have more than 5-8 myself. For me, focus is the key of accomplishing a given task. If I have to do a research, I collect by clipping in Obsidian, then tag and reorganize. If a given project needs a series of webpages on startup, I create a new profile in chrome (with different colour) and move along. Searching trough open tabs is way more inefficient than searching trough topics/folders and tags in Obsidian. Working against complexity is a habit, I guess. It comes with realization that time is precious:)
- boredtofears 4y ago
  Don’t you lose saved passwords / bookmarks in new profiles?
  - stayux 4y ago
    My passwords live in an encrypted folder with contextual information, then are used in the browser with per site rules. Bookmarks are collected in Markdown with tags/notes (Obsidian), or clipped with a bookmarklet. I use this script: https://bit.ly/3vyA9on https://bit.ly/3vyA9on. Big thanks to the Author. Usually at the end of the day, I refine all collected information with tags or specific folders/links. If you want to export your clipped content, there is a plugin called Obsidian Enhancing Export (requires Pandoc) https://bit.ly/3cZFmzl https://bit.ly/3cZFmzl P.S. This approach has saved my skin many times. I can sync to my Obsidian folder, which I sync with Synology NAS.
    - boredtofears 4y ago
      Very cool, thanks for explaining your setup, I like the organization of it.
    - brokenmachine 4y ago
      >My passwords live in an encrypted folder with contextual information, then are used in the browser with per site rules. Can you explain this a bit? How do you use the encrypted folder in your browser?
Tagbert 4y ago
On my work laptop, I have 152 tabs open right now. I use a Firefox plugins called Panorama tab groups to organize them by projects. These are long running projects where I have web documents, references, reports and action tickets for each project. There are pages that I reference multiple times per day every day. I don’t want to be closing and reopening them. That is a lot of work and sometimes context and state would be lost. The plugin lets me see just the tabs for a given project at one time. I can switch projects and then I am only seeing the tabs for that project. I could do this within separate windows but that would require managing up to 10 windows in the browser and that’s a lot of work. Also it’s too easy to close the browser and lose the windows. Most of the tabs are not active at any given time and tend to be swapped to storage so they don’t clog up the RAM. If were to try to just close everything every time I switched projects, I would be spending way to much time and mental focus just managing tabs. This works for me.
waste_monk 4y ago
I'm the opposite, my work machine has ~740 tabs over 14 windows, my personal machine at home is well into the 6000's... not sure how you get anything useful done with so few tabs. Admittedly only a hundred or so tend to be actively in memory at a time, mostly they get lazy-loaded as I go to use them.
rasz 4y ago
Ill give you one example. Just yesterday I stumbled on https://insanecoding.blogspot.com https://insanecoding.blogspot.com . Interesting blog, so I opened all of the individual blog posts (~20 going back to 2007) and will spend the next ~week reading them in my spare time. If I just bookmarked instead I would quickly forgot about it. Tabs are a live TODO list.

thomaspaulmann 4y ago

Only?

terminal_d 4y ago

I have 9 windows with 4780 tabs open currently. Not kidding. I have maybe 150 active, the rest are "suspended". Firefox. This is my current PC, I have another ~3K on my previous browser, which I gave up on. Have another ~1.5K on the one before that.

rektide 4y ago

Opera browser's forums shutting down made me sad, because I had a very long very old post talking about how the browser window was a container of information. My final ask was a way to save a single window into a session, which would complement Opera's ability to load a session of windows. Making the browser a better organizer of information, where subworkspaces can be open & closed, remains a priority for me, decades latter (because I still have too many tabs open). I had some progress reading out & snapshotting current tabs across devices, but I'd like a weekly list, and ability yo annotate better the tabs that cross my feed.

superkuh 4y ago
I started tabbed browsing with Opera 5. It was amazing then back when I could do 50 tabs, and it's amazing now with firefox forks when I can do 500 tabs with less than 3GB of ram used (with Noscript on for most websites not whitelisted). But don't try this in a multi-process browser, not even modern Firefox can handle truly large session files like Palemoon or Seamonkey classic can. I have saved my Opera->Firefox->Palemoon session files at least every month since 2003. I have a little perl script for converting any of their session file formats to a number of tabs (http://superkuh.com/opera-sessions-to-tab-number.pl.txt http://superkuh.com/opera-sessions-to-tab-number.pl.txt). Using it I can plot the number of tabs in my browser over 20 years. But that's just trivial visualization. I still find my old session files valuable in other ways.

mjevans 4y ago

Firefox's switch to dynamically unloading opened tabs has regressed my use of the UI from precached anything I might want to have open or remember later... to a rolling snowball of tabs cross multiple 'windows' (idea sessions) and several profiles (cookie sandboxes). Yeah, it's bad enough that the tab search feature is useful and also that I'd like some better way of re-organizing the dataset.

the8472 4y ago
browser.tabs.unloadOnLowMemory defaults to false for me? and for cookie sandboxes you can use container tabs.
- nix0n 4y ago
  Defaults to true for me, but sometimes I end up using about:unloads to manually force unloading anyway.

UncleOxidant 4y ago

Only 218?

mavhc 4y ago

I have 1000 tabs open over various computers, not sure it's a good thing though, 10% I need, 20% I forgot to close, and 70% I'm totally going to get around to reading one day

switchbak 4y ago
I just found the limit on Safari mobile .. 500 for those who are curious :) I'm just lazy too, I almost never go back and read the old ones. Digital hoarding I suppose.

avmich 4y ago

Is there a tool which saves on the local machine the pages which were opened? So that e.g. browser can safely be closed, and then information from those pages searched, and page re-opened if needed? I remember there were some companies specializing in desktop-wide search...

m12k 4y ago
I use OneTab for this. It feels like the browser equivalent of just sweeping all the papers on your desk into a drawer
- TylerE 4y ago
  Once I get past about 15-20 it’s time to go on a ctrl w fest
- andrew_jef 4y ago
  OneTab is great. I’m using daily. Though it lacks a proper way to sync the OneTab list between devices. I have been waiting for their development since years
- thebigspacefuck 4y ago
  I used to use OneTab and it was fantastic. My new workplace won’t allow us to use it so every few days I’ll have to go through all my tabs. It’s so annoying and time consuming. Last time I was up to 513 tabs and it took me at least an hour. Once I get past a certain point I can’t find my old tabs and start opening duplicates so the problem gets worse.
TylerE 4y ago
Chrome almost always manages this
myhf 4y ago
Pinboard[1] has a browser plugin that can do that with a "save tab set" command. Searching the saved bookmarks is a separate paid feature. [1] https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/
4y ago

fletchowns 4y ago

Simple Tab Groups is an extremely useful Firefox extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/simple-tab-groups/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/simple-tab-gr...

baal80spam 4y ago
I prefer Chrome's built-in tab grouping feature and I cannot understand why Firefox doesn't have it out of the box.
- daveidol 4y ago
  It's a relatively new feature for Chrome, but I agree I think FF should copy it
- hammyhavoc 4y ago
  Haven't used it, but is this going to be the thing that makes me switch to Chrome?
- Gunirus 4y ago
  Tab grouping is the number one reason I switched from Chrome to Firefox. Especially on mobile it only makes it harder to find an open tab.

gitgud 4y ago

It's great your browser can now scale to hundreds of tabs, but can your brain handle that many? Can you focus with 200 tabs open? Personally, I feel much better when I close a tab, rather than leave it open. It feels like I'm freeing up RAM in my head...

turdit 4y ago
that’s really interesting
boplicity 4y ago
I do a lot of research for my job; I often open up 30 new tabs in a matter of a minute, and then slowly work through them, a little bit like a checklist, vetting the information in each one. I can imagine using a similar process for even larger number of tabs, but you're right that it gets a bit unwieldy at some point. That being said, Tree Style Tabs in Firefox makes mentally handling large numbers of tabs very easy. Without it, my workflow would not be functional.
themodelplumber 4y ago
The tabs handle it so your brain doesn't have to? Tabs represent productive effort toward a goal, mission, or valued task. https://www.friendlyskies.net/maybe/why-closing-tabs-is-so-hard https://www.friendlyskies.net/maybe/why-closing-tabs-is-so-h... The false dichotomy of "reasonable tabs vs. too many tabs" is an embarrassing result of slow evolution in software design. The fact that humans feel blame for the resulting behavior is 100% wrong and unnecessary.
- hammyhavoc 4y ago
  Eloquent. I've been struggling to put this into words in a way that doesn't sound pretentious, but you nailed it.
  - themodelplumber 4y ago
    Kind of you to say so --Marc

zh3 4y ago

You should see my wife's laptop....

hammyhavoc 4y ago
Is it work? If so, what does she do? Always curious to hear about fellow tab hoarders.
- zh3 4y ago
  Doesn't use bookmarks, follows her curiousity and simply leaves every tab open.

Pokepokalypse 4y ago

amateur

galkk 4y ago

I find tree style tabs very effective in things like oncall/learning/investigation situations because they act as kind of breadcrumbs/grouping solution. Like list of issues -> issue -> [log search, similar issues search, metrics etc]. You get stuck/wait for something then go to next issue, but have chance to return back to your entire context. And when you finished you just close entire subtree and move on. With linear list of tabs (or even groups in chrome) it is much less convenient.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

mihaitodor 4y ago

Only? for me it got out of hand years ago... Session Buddy is currently reporting "146 Windows 1371 Tabs" on my personal computer. On top of that, I have more than 100 on my phone, around 200 on my work laptop and several txt files with lists of open tabs saved from years ago when I changed computers. While I'm sure I want to read / watch over 50% of those, going back through them requires some time off which I'm struggling to find, so they keep piling up slowly...

brazzy 4y ago
It's amazing how humans keep finding new ways to hoard things...
- mihaitodor 4y ago
  It’s not as burdensome as piling up physical objects. In fact, I’m quite used to having them lie around in my browser since it doesn’t keep them loaded in memory any more (I’m using Chrome on OSX). While I know nothing about collecting stamps, I believe there is some similarity: If any of them seem of some value, I will bother to bookmark them along with a brief description in Google Keep. After several years, this small “mind map” has proven to be quite valuable for me. Why Google Keep and not bookmarks? It seems to work better for me than any other bookmark system I tried and the 2-level nesting feels just right: I created about 30 labels and each of them have various archived notes that contain multiple links together with their descriptions. So far, I believe each of the notes I created have one label, but I might end up attaching multiple labels to some of them eventually.

user_7832 4y ago

I know it's hardly anything worth "flexing", but I have hundreds of tabs on every browser on all my devices, easily (and regrettably) totalling a few thousand overall. I have had to install new browsers because reopening a crashed browser would freeze my computer. The reason I'm posting this here? Because I want people to know how terrible of an experience it is. No, not having the tabs open themselves. But the frequent app crashes and hangs. The time chrome crashed and lost all tabs (iPadOS so no ctr shift t. And it was triggered by opening a link so the "restore" button disapeared immediately.) I do not know if anyone on Google's Chrome, or Apple's Safari or Mozilla's Firefox teams are reading this - but if you are, you should know that tab management on all types of devices - be it android or a windows laptop - sucks to say the least, and is buggy/broken to be more accurate. Chrome throws a smiley face which isn't cute when you want to actually see a number. (Fortunately kiwi browser - my designated music browser - tells me I have 700-something tabs despite being chromium based.) I cannot open the tab switcher in chrome (android) for a solid few minutes unless I want the app to freeze, or more realistically, to delete/misplace some tabs. (I.e Tabs get randomly rearranged, and the tab grouping feature doesn't help.) You end up learning "tricks" to avoid upsetting your browser. "Don't newtab for the first x seconds, instead open a link from Google search and it'll be faster" "Don't bother typing anything at all in the search field, auto complete doesn't work until the tab-smiley comes on which takes 20 seconds in chrome canary and 2 minutes on regular chrome" On windows browsers hog memory until the system slows to a crawl. Safari is the least terrible, despite the questionable 500 tab limit navigation is still fluid. As to why I don't close tabs - because when you think 20 different things you want to search (thanks ADHD) and haven't read any of them, you'll want to go back later when you have time. (Btw if anyone from any of the browser's teams is interested in seeing a live demo of this in a "real life" use-case I'll be more than happy to demonstrate what "ultra-high" organic page use looks like.)

baisq 4y ago
Safari has a very low limit of tabs open. I don't manage the tabs of my phone at all, I just let them pile up, and eventually I always hit the limit. Thankfully there's an option that automatically deletes all tabs that you haven't opened in a month.

Tamer 4y ago

Over 1000 (+The great Suspender) https://i.imgur.com/ESBKggu.png https://i.imgur.com/ESBKggu.png (Session Buddy)

jimbob45 4y ago

1827 tabs here - I have a problem. Firefox devs, if you're listening, an "automatically clear tabs older than 30 days on close/open" option would be highly desirable for me (and maybe those like me).

yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
For bonus points, I'm pretty sure that option exists on Firefox for Android
sebow 4y ago
I also recently closed ~8k.(Yes, mostly HN/lobsters/news and usually things I found interesting in the past ~6 months) For firefox users: there's a nice little addon called LoadTabOnSelect3. Without it firefox crashes to the point where you can't recover a session if firefox tries to impossibly load thousands of tabs on a machine(ram amount is irrelevant). The feature you're talking about is found in many addons, I believe also in the one i mentioned. Don't hold your breath waiting for Mozilla to implement good things quickly (though they're much better in that regard than Google: which removes features and makes the web experience worse)
iKlsR 4y ago
Funny that I will hoard an entire window with dozens for weeks, accidentally lose it one day and be like meh.

Night_Thastus 4y ago

Is there some kind of tree view for bookmarks as well? I have hundreds. I put them into relevant folder, and put those folders into more folders. Still, it does feel a little clunky and I'm running out of space at the top of my bookmarks bar.

Macha 4y ago
Firefox bookmarks open in the sidebar these days with Ctrl-B which is pretty similar? I guess the one disadvantage compared to the tree presentation of tree tabs is that everything starts collapsed.
michaelsalim 4y ago
The same extension in the article, Sideberry does so for bookmarks. It's on the first panel by default.

qwertox 4y ago

Meanwhile here I am on Chrome using a Python script which kills all Chrome instances so that it presents me the "restore tabs" option upon startup when I decide that I want to continue the last session the next day. I do this because my default settings are to load some predefined pages which I use very often. This is on Windows, which I power off every night. When I send it to sleep for a couple of days in a row (in order to "persist" my Chrome windows and tabs) it suddenly stops working. The entire machine stops working. Well, I can still use it, but I can't start new processes (I do have 32 GB of RAM and a lot of it is not used then). Only a matter of months until I switch to some Apple product, I'm so done with Windows.

incanus77 4y ago

I'll add to the chorus of "only?" I have abut 300 right now across three Macs, an iPad, and an iPhone, plus Safari Tab Groups (i.e. tab groups shared between machines) with 11 groups of (on average) about 15 tabs per group. Before Safari Tab Groups, I had some Bash & AppleScripts setup to give me menu access to all tabs via SwiftBar and some Syncthing syncing of tabs metadata. I also actively bookmark (in fact, one of my 11 tab groups is "To Pinboard" which allows me a space to thoughtfully write up certain links for my link blog[1]) and I aggressively close tabs. But I'm in a lot of projects, some stalled, some periodic, some active, some tiny, some technical, some more blue sky-y. I'm always reading the book that is the internet - tabs are all pages. I don't really get overwhelmed by it since everything has a place and I don't have to dedicate mental energy to it, knowing my system works. [1] https://justinmiller.io/links/ https://justinmiller.io/links/

michaelsalim 4y ago

Author here. Based on some of the comments, it sounds like I'm an amateur by HN standards haha. But hey, now I can send this to people who says I'm crazy.

hammyhavoc 4y ago
Whilst not crazy, I am autistic. >beams

Bayart 4y ago

I have about 500 between the two computers in my room atm. Probably 50 on my work laptop. My tab count only resets whenever my browser crashes irrecoverably. I started doing it back in the Opera days (presto engine). It could sustain hundreds of tabs consistently at a time everything swapped on spinning rust. I treat tabs as "urgent" bookmarks : stuff I want to read later, but in a more palpable time frame.

yatharth1991 4y ago

After a certain number N, which is < 20-30, the number of open tabs are inversely proportional to your productivity.

btown 4y ago

For those skeptical how this can happen, it's the natural situation when two things are true: (a) wanting to create a new browser window when a new "context" is necessary, rather than navigating away from one's current context, and (b) being in an environment where "contexts" are added more rapidly than they can be fully triaged, delegated, or completed. If you're (1) working on some deep frontend code and previewing it in the browser, then (2) you need to look up how to do a certain thing in React which might require reading multiple documentation and Stack Overflow posts, and in the midst of that (3) need to fix an urgent bug in something you've owned, and you do so but are waiting for CI to pass on the fix, and while waiting for that (4) you also need to unblock a colleague on a question about a specific piece of documentation and send them some Github links but not wanting to close them until they respond: you've just created 4 windows with many tabs open in each. Now, if on top of this you are in a CTO or PM style role in which you need to do a few observability or analytics dives per day to try to understand specific customer situations... each of those may result in a context as well. On this crazy day, you have 10 context windows, each with 4 or more tabs, accumulate during a single day, and you may only be able to fully get through the backlog over the course of the following few days. Probabilistically, there will be a time during certain weeks where you have 160-200 tabs from this workload alone. Tools like https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/toby-for-chrome/hddnkoipeenegfoeaoibdmnaalmgkpip?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/toby-for-chrome/hd... and https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-manager-plus-for-chro/cnkdjjdmfiffagllbiiilooaoofcoeff https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-manager-plus-f... are extremely useful, but do require that you're willing to suspend your page state, including any state in dev tools or scroll position - so they're simply a way to speed up getting through the backlog of contexts, not a silver bullet. So if you're the one they go to when situations arise, and you can't grow your team as fast as you need... the TL;DR is: if any of this sounds familiar, you will want that 64GB of RAM for your laptop sooner rather than later.

readingnews 4y ago

I was literally working on a computer at work. Was taking too long to shutdown... I wonder why. I could not resist taking a picture. http://dimlight.org/number9/pics/tabs.jpg http://dimlight.org/number9/pics/tabs.jpg

Dracophoenix 4y ago

laughs in multiple VMs solely devoted to Firefox tabs

spython 4y ago

In 2018 I wrote a blog post called Open tabs are cognitive spaces [0] – about that exact problem. It got a bit popular on HN, and since then quite a few alternative browsers tried to solve the problem, I even consulted a few of them, such as Beam[1] and Synth[2]. The hard part of the problem is that by creating 'spaces' full of tabs to make our lives easier we create yet another categorization, another taxonomy, and with it all the timeless problems that taxonomies have: Should the current page belong to category A or a similar category B? Or to both? How can I merge two spaces into one in a good way? Can I do it automatically or do I have to, yet again, select, curate, categorize? How can browsing and researching be a living process and at the same time be neatly sorted for later recall? One thing that I kind of still miss after watching the field develop for four years, is the simple idea of making groups of tabs easily shareable. Just let me share a tab group with another person! Better yet let us work on the same tab group together, treating it like a living document, a living research space. I guess this can't be solved by an alternative browser, but instead by an open standard that could be implemented in all browsers. [0] https://rybakov.com/blog/open_tabs_are_cognitive_spaces/ https://rybakov.com/blog/open_tabs_are_cognitive_spaces/ [1] https://beamapp.co/ https://beamapp.co/ [2] https://synth.app/ https://synth.app/

jul45 4y ago
Well, making groups of tabs easily shareable is coming in iOS 16 and macOS Ventura, I guess that's a start. https://allthings.how/how-to-use-shared-tab-groups-in-safari/ https://allthings.how/how-to-use-shared-tab-groups-in-safari...
- spython 4y ago
  Great to see that. Kind of disappointed not seeing it developed first in Firefox.
- hammyhavoc 4y ago
  But there's still a 500 tab limit on Safari, right?

lotw_dot_site 4y ago

Needing lots of browser tabs is a direct result of the fact that individual web sites are not very good at multitasking (they can usually only do one thing) or at "remembering" (they are almost never locally stateful). I'm actively working on both of those things via Linux on the Web!

hammyhavoc 4y ago
Please, keep me in the loop about your work: me@hammyhavoc.com

jacquesm 4y ago

Probably a multiple of that here. My trick to keep it manageable is when I start a new job I start a new browser instance and I really try hard to keep all of the related articles open in tabs in that particular instance. Vertical tabs are pretty much a must for this. Then, when the job is done (invoice sent) the whole browser instance is nuked and that cleans it all up again. It's a bit like garbage collection in software, I don't have to make any small decisions because I'll just kill the whole process.

mohamez 4y ago

On Chrome: OneTab + The Marvellous Suspender + "Ctrl+Shift+A" to search tabs, did wonders for me.

booleandilemma 4y ago

Over 15 tabs and the person is just using it as a conversation piece.

tconfrey 4y ago

Tabs == To-do's Every open tab is a pending to-do, if only to come back and close or bookmark it. Having hundreds of open todo's in your face the whole time takes a mental toll. For most people closing tabs will free up some mental space as well as swap space. The problem is that it's still too hard to save and organize things as you go without the right tooling. My approach FWIW: https://braintool.org/2022/01/28/Browser-based-Productivity-and-pkm-with-emacs-org-mode-LogSeq-and-BrainTool.html https://braintool.org/2022/01/28/Browser-based-Productivity-...

ssivark 4y ago
As someone who regularly runs up thousands of tabs, BrainTool has been an absolute blessing for organizing tabs into contexts! Since the tabs list/tree is available in an easily parseable plain text format, it becomes trivially easy to process tabs programmatically. I strongly encourage anyone who is curious to try it out.
- hammyhavoc 4y ago
  I would love to use this, but doesn't seem like tasks can have dependencies/blocking tasks. Very few todo systems do. That's how I derive the "right" order to do things in with complex parallel tasks and research. Love it UX-wise though.
  - ssivark 4y ago
    My use case is research-oriented and it’s impossible to impose that much structure on tasks — for me it’s mainly about keeping track of tabs/links while I go through them and organize my mental models (they’re not even really tasks). I don’t know about the applicability for a more execution-oriented workflow.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

travoltaj 4y ago

I have a massive tab problem, and had to build a personal SOP to manage it. I have 400+ tabs open on Chrome right now, on my mobile. Every now and then, I use chrome on my laptop to open all tabs from my mobile (tabs from other devices show in History), save them to one tab (browser extension), and save it as a HTML, and close all tabs on my mobile. It doesn't take more than a week to build up to more than 100 again. I believe my record has been 1100+ tabs on Chrome, and 5000+ tabs on Opera Mobile. The desktop version of these apps can't handle these amounts nearly as well..

morninglight 4y ago
What is the cost of this capability in terms of a browser's memory footprint, performance and security? In other words, if the browser could omit this capability would it be significantly smaller, faster and more secure? If that were true, then perhaps there should be a "pro" or "enterprise" version of the browser at a different price point. Most users can easily limit themselves to about 10 tabs.
- Jerrrry 4y ago
  no

tannhaeuser 4y ago

I don't have that many tabs open right now or usually, but I'm wondering what Firefox users in the habit of messing with > 100 tabs are doing. Sooner rather than later Firefox won't allow you to open new tabs ("one thing to do") and forces a restart after updating in the background. I don't know if you can open another FF window/process in that situation but I think that behavior is very annoying and kindof needs fixing if FF wants to be a browser for power users.

michaelsalim 4y ago
This is actually something I almost touch on in the article. Sideberry have a feature to store snapshots. So if I restart the browser, I just restore from there. I also have it set to save every 2 hours so that I can always recover from crashes.
matthberg 4y ago
I'm not quite sure what you're talking about. Firefox allows thousands of tabs without stopping new tabs being created. I currently have 3109 open (with only a dozen or so loaded though) which has survived abrupt power loss, freezing and force quitting, and updates across several years worth of versions both in the background and manually triggered. It's using 1571MB RAM at the moment and rarely goes over 10Gb, even after having viewed hundreds of tabs recently. In that case it's easy enough to unload everything by restarting the browser or selecting a bunch of tabs then unloading them with Sidebery.
- hammyhavoc 4y ago
  This matches my experience to the word.
- tannhaeuser 4y ago
  FF telling me it needs to restart, refusing to open a new tab, happens all the time for me, at mostly annoying times such as in the middle of a session while logged in. Doesn't have anything to do with the number of open tabs, but is due to FF having downloaded updates. Maybe it's a config option? Anyway, I'm wondering why FF needs restarting, and in combination with the frequency this happens (at least once a month), I'm questioning the architecture behind this - after all I don't want my browser to update more often and consume more download bytes than the content I'm after, and I'm not looking forward to a web/web browser that needs constant updates after 30 years sorry.

controversial97 4y ago

With 32GB of RAM, I can have roughly around 3000 tabs open in firefox and 3000 in Chromium at the same time before things go unrecoverable wonky.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

MerelyMortal 4y ago

I recently had over 4,000 tabs opened on Firefox for Android. The app kept crashing when I tried to "share" (export) them, so I manually selected them in groups of 100 to "share" at a time. Other than that, the only issue I had with the app is that if I was typing something in the URL/search bar, it would take a while to find any matches in my browsing history. Over half of the tabs were HN posts that I've been meaning to get back to. I keep telling myself (lying to myself?): One day I will.

hammyhavoc 4y ago
TIL there's a fucking export function after having manually copied and pasted 1000+ URLs from it on another machine. Urgh. Now I know for next time.
- zeroimpl 4y ago
  Could also "Bookmark All Tabs" and then export your bookmark list.
1MachineElf 4y ago
I've just now gone through the steps to export my Brave Browser for Android tabs into a JSON file and I think I've set a new record for myself: [me@comupter]$ cat tabs.json | grep "page" | wc -l 17022 That's all of the "open" tabs since I got this phone back in January of this year. So about 7 months worth. I was aware Brave automatically puts tabs to sleep to conserve resources, and this confirmed to me that Brave wasn't auto-deleting any after a certain time-based or numeric threshold. Yes I am a big-time tab accumulator, but I'm sure the number would be smaller if the Brave team would just implement the "Bookmark All Tabs" feature that's been requested since at least 2019: https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/5711 https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/5711 Method to get open Google Chrome tabs from an Android phone into a JSON file (steps are identical for Brave Browser): https://android.stackexchange.com/a/199496 https://android.stackexchange.com/a/199496

matthberg 4y ago

It's not the best of habits yet I currently have 3109, recently migrated to Sidebery from Panorama View [0]. I'll likely go pruning soon, yet having time context of what I was looking at (by neighboring tabs and indent levels) is so useful for sparking my memory and associating ideas. I've tried using bookmarks and tagging yet the tooling around that is annoying enough I keep coming back to having an obscene amount of tabs open. Ideally, I'd like a bookmarking system which allows for referencing tab history, past visits and other tabs viewed in each visit's timeframe, manual tagging, external references, and more, yet that doesn't exist yet. I've looked into developing such an extension, yet tab history APIs are clunky enough I haven't bothered going further. If anyone knows of other extensions that fill this niche, I'd love to hear of them. [0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/panorama-view/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/panorama-view... This used to be a built-in feature of Firefox, which I used until I was forced to switch to the addon.

dublin 4y ago
I've worked with thousands of open tabs for many years now. (I'm not defending my habits to anyone - this is how I prefer to work, and it is not negotiable.) AFAIK, this many tabs is only possible with Firefox. In the main window (of five) that I'm typing this in, the OpenTabs extension reports that I have 2260 tabs. The other four windows have anywhere from a few dozen to a few hundred tabs. My max was around 5000 tabs, but that was back before Firefox Quantum. And yeah, I really miss TabMixPlus, and want a better way to scroll through multiple tab rows. (I currently use a hack to Firefox's chrome file, but it's still a little clunky, and that method doesn't properly support things like dragging tabs to reorder them, etc.) The Moz team gutted the tab history APIs when they killed off XUL which is why TMP has never been rewritten - it really can't be...

kderbyma 4y ago

this is insane to me....I get everyone has their own process....but this is not it....

hammyhavoc 4y ago
Everybody thinks differently. This naive idea that there should be one-size-fits-all workflows is counterproductive. Whilst "insane", the results speak for themselves in terms of output.

_8j50 4y ago

I regularly have 300-500 tabs open on multiple browsers at the same time. This freaks out many people when I share my screen. Works wonders for me, no tree style or additional plugins other than to change user agents or tamper with js (tampermonkey). AMA lol. Tabs are like part of workloads I am actively working on. They are not a set of stores items to organize or clean up. I very rarely bookmark or use bookmarks. I research and investigate many things, the results of any one of them could be useful to the rest yet storing them as bookmarks makes little sense since they are all temporary. Whatever output I am working on is stored elsewhere. I just don't struggle that much to find tabs because I have good short term (days/weeks) memory and auto-complete with "switch tabs" instead of opening them helps a lot too.

hammyhavoc 4y ago
Bookmarks are such a slow and inefficient workflow. I detest them. As the old adage goes, "out of sight, out of mind". I need it in my face.
- _8j50 4y ago
  Thank you! I am not reading a single text like a book, they make little sense to my workflow.

swayvil 4y ago

I get anxious if my tab count goes over 10.

swishman 4y ago

Too many tabs is overwhelming. I know for myself when the tab count gets high it's a sign that my mind is cluttered, I'm unfocused, and I need to prune and centre myself again. Bookmarks are one way, but I mainly just use the search bar directly for history. Things to read later are put into Pocket or linked in Obsidian notes or somewhere more relevant.

hammyhavoc 4y ago

I have ~1600 on my ThinkPad. That's much better than the 3000+ on my desktop.

urgentresearch 4y ago

iPhone Safari browser tabs max out at 500. I have 442 open right now. My combined OneTab closed tabs count is approaching 100k between both my laptops, since early 2020. (This comment is a confession, of sorts.)

jsr0 4y ago

I'm up to 9343 tabs in Firefox. I am adding about 2000 per year. I keep thinking I'm going to get back to the older ones and read then close them...

nairboon 4y ago
Spread over how many windows? It seems that FF can handle loads of tabs, but after too many open windows, the window manager or something else starts to get sluggish on my machine.
- jsr0 4y ago
  This is across 37 windows. Firefox takes a couple of minutes to start up (possibly due to some extensions not performing well with thousands of tabs), but runs fine after loading.

hyperjeff 4y ago

If you work with many dedicated workspaces for specific tasks (for me, 16), then a lot of tabs on a machine can mean a perfectly reasonable amount per workspace. At any time I have between ~500 and 1k open across all devices. I've built up a custom semi-madcap system, but like others, it works with my workflow. A script takes a snapshot of all tabs across all devices, saved to raw html so that it's fairly well future-proofed, and then I'm free to close any tabs that I can't get to right away. And then I've created a custom browser purely for being able to go thru the saved tabs, auto-organizing pages by subject or domain, with custom pruning tools. I feel like page/tab/bookmark management is a core problem from the birth of web browsing that has never really been solved for most people. I have 3 main places for my core bookmarks, in Safari, Firefox and then also folders on my drive (still one of the few guaranteed cross-browser ways to store them without using online tools). This is all related to the tab problem above.

nairboon 4y ago

Some time ago, I used browsers as a meta-tab manager. Whenever there were too many open tabs in let's say Firefox, I'd switch to Chrome, then Chrome Beta, Chromium,... But it was a bit hard to remember in which browser a particular tab was.

wanghq 4y ago

1. I usually open about 30 to 50 tabs, and then my laptop becomes slow or it's difficult to navigate them. 2. I decide to close some but find it difficult to choose which ones to close - they all seem important to me. 3. I use onetab to close them all so if I need any of them I can get them back. Funny enough, I rarely go to onetab to reopen them. Seems if I need them again, I find them in different ways, e.g. google search, browser history, ...

mikewarot 4y ago

How is this any different than treating a tab as a bookmark?

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

zeroimpl 4y ago

The author mentioned the vimium addon with the ability to quickly flip back to the previous tab. This makes me want something similar to the recently-used-tab selector in VSCode - pressing ctrl-tab pops-up a list of recently used tabs in reverse-chronological order and makes it super easy to flip back and forth. I wonder if there's any browser extension like this?

zeroimpl 4y ago
Wow just realized Firefox has this feature built-in but not enabled by default! Just needed to turn on "Ctrl+Tab cycles through tabs in recently used order".
mrg2k8 4y ago
Opera does this by default.

generalunited 4y ago

I have 500 tabs open with Safari on iPhone - it won’t let me make any more tabs so I have to reuse them.

thebitstick 4y ago

Vertical/Nested Tabs is the main reason I love Orion for macOS.

subjectsigma 4y ago

I get that everyone has different preferences, but it baffles me that this guy had to write an entire essay justifying his terrible workflow and explain how he's leaning on extra tools and hardware to make it workable. Browser bookmarks are fast, flexible, easy to use, native to every browser. Most browsers support syncing bookmarks to different devices with practically zero setup, and also exporting to formats like HTML or JSON. They can be tagged, searched, organized into folders, assigned keywords, parameterized with values (like %s in Firefox), copied into desktop icons... And plus there's near zero risk of losing them if your browser crashes! There's just no world where this tab workflow makes sense.

nunez 4y ago

I cannot for the life of me understand people who keep zillions of tabs open instead of using something like Pocket or the Reading List to keep track of things to read later. Feels like convenient disorganization.