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> I couldn't imagine opening more than a dozen of tabs without it. I can't imagine having more than a dozen tabs open, period. You tab hoarders will never make

> I couldn't imagine opening more than a dozen of tabs without it. I can't imagine having more than a dozen tabs open, period. You tab hoarders will never make sense to me...

Night_Thastus 3y ago
There are plenty of legitimate reasons to have multiple tabs open that doesn't really have to do with "hoarding". For games, I often have a bunch of wiki tabs open at the same time.
- grogenaut 3y ago
  For me I just type titles or word back into the browser bar and Firefox searches history. How are you searching/navigating to find the right tab of several hundred to go back to that tab?
  - SomeHacker44 3y ago
    Too many sites have useless titles, or URLs that if you go back to you don't get to the same state you had when you closed the window. So, I find that history is for the most part useless. Sometimes it works - but not reliably.
  - sundarurfriend 3y ago
    Vimium - press shift-T - search among all page titles and URLs of open tabs.
    - grogenaut 3y ago
      Why is that better than searching history or bookmarks?
      - sundarurfriend 3y ago
        Bookmarks are long-term useful things to keep saved, and don't serve the same purpose as these open tabs. As for history, imagine you're researching a topic and have gone through fifteen search results, decided three of them were relevant, and closed the others. Your history is polluted with all fifteen, whereas this tab search will directly return you these most relevant pages only.
  - beltsazar 3y ago
    You can also search open tabs in the address bar: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/address-bar-autocomplete-firefox#w_changing-results-on-the-fly https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/address-bar-autocomplet... I hardly use it, though, because I usually have < 100 open tabs, not thousands like others have. I identify tabs by their tree structures (parents, children, siblings tabs) and the prefixes of the titles, whose lengths don't depend on how many tabs opened, because the tabs are arranged vertically.
- manuelmoreale 3y ago
  A bunch is reasonable but I’ve seen people here on HN claim to have multiple windows with thousand of tabs on them. That is beyond comprehension for me but if it works for them that’s awesome.
  - Night_Thastus 3y ago
    Oh, yeah thousands seems like a lot. But I'm not sure, maybe there's a workflow where that makes sense.
    - TremendousJudge 3y ago
      You end up using them as bookmarks of some sort, especially with the search bar doubling as tab search
      - entropicdrifter 3y ago
        I'm convinced that a significant proportion of people today don't use bookmarks and have never leveraged their power because they grew up with tabs and never bothered to explore their other options for organizing websites. You can save all of the tabs of your current session as a bookmark folder in one fell swoop! Your research tabs can be all saved together and opened as a group! Your gift ideas that you won't close because you don't want to forget about them can be saved in a folder named gift ideas so the next time you need them you have them, without the cost of using up your extra RAM and CPU cycles!
        Night_Thastus 3y ago
        On modern browsers, don't unused/old tabs take up basically no resources? I remember both Chrome and FF making a big deal over that point years ago.
        seba_dos1 3y ago
        There were extensions for it more than a decade ago already, but these days it is indeed the regular out-of-box behavior (though Chrome got it only a few months ago IIRC).
capableweb 3y ago
If I'm still thinking about something and there is a related tab for it, it stays open. When researching/debugging/developing things, I usually end up with tangents, tries, multiple things to read/try and so on, so naturally, having a tree to represent my thoughts and my tabs makes sense.
phlip9 3y ago
As a serial tab hoarder, Vimium's SHIFT-T tab fuzzy search is what makes it manageable. : )
- 4w3 3y ago
  Just unfortunate that it does not work across windows for the window hoarders :)
  - shock 3y ago
    It does for me.
Sunspark 3y ago
In my case, the open tabs are longer reads I mean to come back to read properly, except a new shiny opens and I never seem to get to them.
abdullahkhalids 3y ago
I use Simple Tab Groups in addition to Tree Style Tabs. Simple Tab Groups allows you to show tabs from only one group. So, I have groups for casual browsing, work, volunteer work, etc. So I don't have to close tabs when switching from one to the other. I just switch and those tabs are still there when I want to next look at them.
ddoolin 3y ago
Agreed, but once I switched to vertical tabs (via Sidebery with Firefox), it is WAY more manageable. Multiple tab spaces, named groupings, and a scrollable view that doesn't crowd and shorten names make it great for having many items in there with little downside.
- mthoms 3y ago
  Does Firefox have the ability to hide the top tabs when you have an extension like this? Last I tried it, it required some finessing with CSS.
  - sellyme 3y ago
    Yes, I've been using TST without the top tab list visible since about 2012.
    - mthoms 3y ago
      As mentioned, I've done this before using CSS also. The question is... is there an easier way these days or do you still have to use CSS?
danShumway 3y ago
It's just ADHD, there's not really a workflow reason that I have 1000+ tabs open. It just kind of happens. Firefox/Sideberry is useful for mitigating that. I also have workflows set up for mass-exporting my tabs from Firefox to a text file and reorganizing them in plain-text and re-opening just the tabs I care about[0]. Bookmarking on any browser is cumbersome and leads to disorganization over time. Tree-style tabs helps make that organization at least a little bit easier. [0]: https://textmark.netlify.app/ https://textmark.netlify.app/
- lelandbatey 3y ago
  It's ADHD sure, but it's also an unwillingness to close tabs, and (generally) that we have poor windowing systems that force us into ~1-2 browser windows at a time because browser windows are harder to manage than tabs. The big change for me has been realizing that all my "tabs" are still there, in the form of my browser history, or if not, via Google search. If I can't find my way back to a website via my history or via searching the web, then I probably also wouldn't be able to find it among 1000 tabs. So why not close the tabs and be free of them?
  - danShumway 3y ago
    > in the form of my browser history, or if not, via Google search. So I do have bad news about this that may or may not be news: Firefox cycles history even if you never clear it. Unbelievably it's not permanent. This has bitten me a couple of times in the past because I always assumed that naturally history wouldn't just get randomly deleted in the background, so I'd search for a tweet or article from an obscure blog and couldn't figure out why nothing was coming up in my history searches. Took me a long time to actually check "is this article I looked up 6 months ago even there anymore?" There is a way to set up recurring database backups manually if you're willing to do some gruntwork, but it's kind of a pain and means you need to break out an SQLite browser across multiple backups in order to search. --- Where searching is concerned, :shrug: that doesn't generally work for me, but I'm happy for anyone that it does work for :) My tabs aren't just so that I remember where a document is (although they serve that purpose as well), they're also a reminder that the thing exists at all. When it gets to 1000 tabs, is that useful? Arguably no, but the process getting there is pretty organic, it's not really a conscious choice. --- In support of your comment though, being able to just stick all of my tabs in an open text file does genuinely help a lot[0] because it's permanent history and it serves the same purpose of being a reminder. It could be better, sometimes I leave tabs open on images that I forget to get around to saving or on open sessions and then the link rot hits whatever I'm looking at -- but it helps a lot. Being able to have an intermediary step between "leave everything open" and "categorize and organize everything you're looking at and save what you need" does allow me to do things like grab 500 tabs that I haven't checked in weeks and just stick them in a text file and write some notes at the top about what I was working on. Split browser sessions, better windowing would help a lot with this, although I worry I'd end up with similar situations as my Emacs window, where everything looks clean but behind the scenes I have 1000 open files and 20 of them are unsaved scratch buffers ;) But the text file does kind of work the way you're describing; you can be free of the clutter, but if you really need to find everything, you know it's in a static text file that you can grep through at any time and that you know the browser won't do anything shifty with in the background. [0]: I say that it's common to have 1000 tabs open, and it is, but currently I only have about 200, largely because of that method. I went through a bunch of stuff a few weeks ago and stashed most of the stuff I had open.
pkulak 3y ago
I turn tabs off completely and hide the tab bar.
- davidron 3y ago
  You monster.
rewmie 3y ago
> I can't imagine having more than a dozen tabs open, period. You tab hoarders will never make sense to me... Dashboards can easily take two or three tabs. The bug tracker is opened on a tab as well as the ticket page. You have a pull request opened to review it, and you check something in the repository. Pop open a couple of diffs to check where someone messed up in the past. And in the meantime you have Spotify/YouTube. A dozen tabs easily. Factor in task switching, checking CICD pipelines, and of course HackerNews opened somewhere, and you can get multiples of that.
mcpackieh 3y ago
>hoarding I've got 30 tabs open today, and the oldest of them is only a few hours old. I look down a page, see interesting links, and middle click them all. They open tabs but don't actually load until I click that tab. I close each tab after I'm done reading it, or after a few hours if I never got around to reading it and lost interest. Is that hoarding? I don't think so. But it's the sort of workflow that TST makes pleasant but is extremely frustrating with a horizontal tab bar.
JohnFen 3y ago
I truly don't understand how people benefit from using tabs that way, either. It makes no sense at all to me. Nonetheless, it's clear that people do. I don't have to understand.
aj7 3y ago
This right here is tab 46 on my phone right now.

> I couldn't imagine opening more than a dozen of tabs without it. I can't imagine having more than a dozen tabs open, period. You tab hoarders will never make sense to me...

Night_Thastus 3y ago

There are plenty of legitimate reasons to have multiple tabs open that doesn't really have to do with "hoarding". For games, I often have a bunch of wiki tabs open at the same time.

grogenaut 3y ago
For me I just type titles or word back into the browser bar and Firefox searches history. How are you searching/navigating to find the right tab of several hundred to go back to that tab?
- SomeHacker44 3y ago
  Too many sites have useless titles, or URLs that if you go back to you don't get to the same state you had when you closed the window. So, I find that history is for the most part useless. Sometimes it works - but not reliably.
- sundarurfriend 3y ago
  Vimium - press shift-T - search among all page titles and URLs of open tabs.
  - grogenaut 3y ago
    Why is that better than searching history or bookmarks?
    - sundarurfriend 3y ago
      Bookmarks are long-term useful things to keep saved, and don't serve the same purpose as these open tabs. As for history, imagine you're researching a topic and have gone through fifteen search results, decided three of them were relevant, and closed the others. Your history is polluted with all fifteen, whereas this tab search will directly return you these most relevant pages only.
- beltsazar 3y ago
  You can also search open tabs in the address bar: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/address-bar-autocomplete-firefox#w_changing-results-on-the-fly https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/address-bar-autocomplet... I hardly use it, though, because I usually have < 100 open tabs, not thousands like others have. I identify tabs by their tree structures (parents, children, siblings tabs) and the prefixes of the titles, whose lengths don't depend on how many tabs opened, because the tabs are arranged vertically.
manuelmoreale 3y ago
A bunch is reasonable but I’ve seen people here on HN claim to have multiple windows with thousand of tabs on them. That is beyond comprehension for me but if it works for them that’s awesome.
- Night_Thastus 3y ago
  Oh, yeah thousands seems like a lot. But I'm not sure, maybe there's a workflow where that makes sense.
  - TremendousJudge 3y ago
    You end up using them as bookmarks of some sort, especially with the search bar doubling as tab search
    - entropicdrifter 3y ago
      I'm convinced that a significant proportion of people today don't use bookmarks and have never leveraged their power because they grew up with tabs and never bothered to explore their other options for organizing websites. You can save all of the tabs of your current session as a bookmark folder in one fell swoop! Your research tabs can be all saved together and opened as a group! Your gift ideas that you won't close because you don't want to forget about them can be saved in a folder named gift ideas so the next time you need them you have them, without the cost of using up your extra RAM and CPU cycles!
      - Night_Thastus 3y ago
        On modern browsers, don't unused/old tabs take up basically no resources? I remember both Chrome and FF making a big deal over that point years ago.
        seba_dos1 3y ago
        There were extensions for it more than a decade ago already, but these days it is indeed the regular out-of-box behavior (though Chrome got it only a few months ago IIRC).

capableweb 3y ago

If I'm still thinking about something and there is a related tab for it, it stays open. When researching/debugging/developing things, I usually end up with tangents, tries, multiple things to read/try and so on, so naturally, having a tree to represent my thoughts and my tabs makes sense.

phlip9 3y ago

As a serial tab hoarder, Vimium's SHIFT-T tab fuzzy search is what makes it manageable. : )

4w3 3y ago
Just unfortunate that it does not work across windows for the window hoarders :)
- shock 3y ago
  It does for me.

Sunspark 3y ago

In my case, the open tabs are longer reads I mean to come back to read properly, except a new shiny opens and I never seem to get to them.

abdullahkhalids 3y ago

I use Simple Tab Groups in addition to Tree Style Tabs. Simple Tab Groups allows you to show tabs from only one group. So, I have groups for casual browsing, work, volunteer work, etc. So I don't have to close tabs when switching from one to the other. I just switch and those tabs are still there when I want to next look at them.

ddoolin 3y ago

Agreed, but once I switched to vertical tabs (via Sidebery with Firefox), it is WAY more manageable. Multiple tab spaces, named groupings, and a scrollable view that doesn't crowd and shorten names make it great for having many items in there with little downside.

mthoms 3y ago
Does Firefox have the ability to hide the top tabs when you have an extension like this? Last I tried it, it required some finessing with CSS.
- sellyme 3y ago
  Yes, I've been using TST without the top tab list visible since about 2012.
  - mthoms 3y ago
    As mentioned, I've done this before using CSS also. The question is... is there an easier way these days or do you still have to use CSS?

danShumway 3y ago

It's just ADHD, there's not really a workflow reason that I have 1000+ tabs open. It just kind of happens. Firefox/Sideberry is useful for mitigating that. I also have workflows set up for mass-exporting my tabs from Firefox to a text file and reorganizing them in plain-text and re-opening just the tabs I care about[0]. Bookmarking on any browser is cumbersome and leads to disorganization over time. Tree-style tabs helps make that organization at least a little bit easier. [0]: https://textmark.netlify.app/ https://textmark.netlify.app/

lelandbatey 3y ago
It's ADHD sure, but it's also an unwillingness to close tabs, and (generally) that we have poor windowing systems that force us into ~1-2 browser windows at a time because browser windows are harder to manage than tabs. The big change for me has been realizing that all my "tabs" are still there, in the form of my browser history, or if not, via Google search. If I can't find my way back to a website via my history or via searching the web, then I probably also wouldn't be able to find it among 1000 tabs. So why not close the tabs and be free of them?
- danShumway 3y ago
  > in the form of my browser history, or if not, via Google search. So I do have bad news about this that may or may not be news: Firefox cycles history even if you never clear it. Unbelievably it's not permanent. This has bitten me a couple of times in the past because I always assumed that naturally history wouldn't just get randomly deleted in the background, so I'd search for a tweet or article from an obscure blog and couldn't figure out why nothing was coming up in my history searches. Took me a long time to actually check "is this article I looked up 6 months ago even there anymore?" There is a way to set up recurring database backups manually if you're willing to do some gruntwork, but it's kind of a pain and means you need to break out an SQLite browser across multiple backups in order to search. --- Where searching is concerned, :shrug: that doesn't generally work for me, but I'm happy for anyone that it does work for :) My tabs aren't just so that I remember where a document is (although they serve that purpose as well), they're also a reminder that the thing exists at all. When it gets to 1000 tabs, is that useful? Arguably no, but the process getting there is pretty organic, it's not really a conscious choice. --- In support of your comment though, being able to just stick all of my tabs in an open text file does genuinely help a lot[0] because it's permanent history and it serves the same purpose of being a reminder. It could be better, sometimes I leave tabs open on images that I forget to get around to saving or on open sessions and then the link rot hits whatever I'm looking at -- but it helps a lot. Being able to have an intermediary step between "leave everything open" and "categorize and organize everything you're looking at and save what you need" does allow me to do things like grab 500 tabs that I haven't checked in weeks and just stick them in a text file and write some notes at the top about what I was working on. Split browser sessions, better windowing would help a lot with this, although I worry I'd end up with similar situations as my Emacs window, where everything looks clean but behind the scenes I have 1000 open files and 20 of them are unsaved scratch buffers ;) But the text file does kind of work the way you're describing; you can be free of the clutter, but if you really need to find everything, you know it's in a static text file that you can grep through at any time and that you know the browser won't do anything shifty with in the background. [0]: I say that it's common to have 1000 tabs open, and it is, but currently I only have about 200, largely because of that method. I went through a bunch of stuff a few weeks ago and stashed most of the stuff I had open.

pkulak 3y ago

I turn tabs off completely and hide the tab bar.

davidron 3y ago
You monster.

rewmie 3y ago

> I can't imagine having more than a dozen tabs open, period. You tab hoarders will never make sense to me... Dashboards can easily take two or three tabs. The bug tracker is opened on a tab as well as the ticket page. You have a pull request opened to review it, and you check something in the repository. Pop open a couple of diffs to check where someone messed up in the past. And in the meantime you have Spotify/YouTube. A dozen tabs easily. Factor in task switching, checking CICD pipelines, and of course HackerNews opened somewhere, and you can get multiples of that.

mcpackieh 3y ago

>hoarding I've got 30 tabs open today, and the oldest of them is only a few hours old. I look down a page, see interesting links, and middle click them all. They open tabs but don't actually load until I click that tab. I close each tab after I'm done reading it, or after a few hours if I never got around to reading it and lost interest. Is that hoarding? I don't think so. But it's the sort of workflow that TST makes pleasant but is extremely frustrating with a horizontal tab bar.

JohnFen 3y ago

I truly don't understand how people benefit from using tabs that way, either. It makes no sense at all to me. Nonetheless, it's clear that people do. I don't have to understand.

aj7 3y ago

This right here is tab 46 on my phone right now.