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That's nothing. I have 10000 tabs in 24 windows (according to winger). Its an amazing technical feat to handle that ... But a total UI failure because this is

That's nothing. I have 10000 tabs in 24 windows (according to winger). Its an amazing technical feat to handle that ... But a total UI failure because this isn't what I wanted. In comparison, my Safari session is well managed in several tab groups. Interestingly, the 'Close Duplicate Tabs' things made the situation worse, because it takes ~5 seconds for the overflow menu to show. I guess they are doing some work on the UI thread.

snypher 2y ago
For what reason do you have all of these tabs?
- clumsysmurf 2y ago
  It seems to be a cycle. Begin a project, and try to keep the Window dedicated to tabs for that project. Tabs are open for electronic part datasheets, API documentation, etc. Then somehow i pop over to HN and open an unrelated link. Next thing, the window is polluted with project tabs and HN (reddit, etc) tabs. Rinse, repeat. I would say 90% tabs are unimportant, but I am afraid to nuke the session from orbit because there are some hard to find links / important ones in there.
  - g15jv2dp 2y ago
    > I would say 90% tabs are unimportant, but I am afraid to nuke the session from orbit because there are some hard to find links / important ones in there. Are they easy to find in the list of 4400 tabs?
    - clumsysmurf 2y ago
      No. Its become enough of a crisis I am writing a browser extension to help me visualize what is what.
      - prmoustache 2y ago
        Having moved 13 times in my life, I have the opinion and strategy, which I also apply to things I own, that something is of no use to me if I can't even recall it is there. Thus according to this strategy I would just nuke my session and start from a blank sheet as I won't be missing it. For the same reason I donated and sold tons of stuff over the year before each move because I realised there is no point owning something you use only every 10 full moons or can't even remember it is hidden somewhere in a storage room. You can borrow/rent that to someone. Besides, you should still have the links in your history.
      - silon42 2y ago
        I wrote my own vertical tabs extension that handles 10k tabs... but yes, something like above is needed.
  - SamuelAdams 2y ago
    I solve this by keeping a digital notebook. I have no idea why this is lost on so many people. Each project gets a new note in Obsidian or OneNote or whatever note taking tool you are using. Each day gets a new #H1 heading with the day. Any relevant URLs get added to the note. At the end of the day, review your notes and clean them up to be concise. Explain to your future self what you did and why those links are important. Then close your browser tabs, they are saved in the notes. If you need the content from the website itself (maybe you are concerned about the site disappearing), use something like Pocket or copy code snippets, text, etc directly into the note. Screenshots help too.
    - RandomThoughts3 2y ago
      I’m pretty sure the Venn diagram of people who are focused and organised enough to maintain and prune a daily list of links and people who might open thousands of tabs is empty. Personally, I have stopped trying to understand why people do it. I’m just not wired that way. I am fairly sure my way of organising and sorting through information would be similarly bemusing to someone from the other side. If you are in product, it’s just a good reminder that you are not representative of your users.
    - kasabali 2y ago
      > I solve this by keeping a digital notebook It may be working for you. People who easily accumulate 1000s of tabs, though, would now have 1000 page notebook and 1000 tabs. Don't ask me how I know.
- evanjrowley 2y ago
  Personally I open vast sums of tabs because, unlike browser history, tabs are organized in windows that help you maintain context for whatever you were thinking of when the tabs were opened. In an ideal world, I'd eventually go back and bookmark, tag, and close them. Unfortunately there are very few options for cross-browser tagged bookmark sync. I suspect the major browser vendors are not incentivized to create a solution for this problem. In the case of Microsoft and Google, they'd prefer you avoided bookmarks and asked their search engine so that they can serve you ads. Apple has never prioritized cross platform conveniences, so that leaves out Safari. Firefox is better about this, but only with other instances of Firefox.
dyauspitr 2y ago
Why not just bookmark them. It’s not like it’s going to stay in memory. It’s going to reload the page when you go back anyways.
- clumsysmurf 2y ago
  I have tried various bookmarking systems and inevitably things get lost. I don't find bookmarks useful long term either.
- nirvdrum 2y ago
  Not the OP, but I also have a lot of tabs. In every browser I’ve tried the bookmark manager is rather primitive. I once ran into a Floccus bug that duplicated tens of thousands of bookmarks and discovered bookmark managers also don’t scale very well. The bigger problem with bookmarks for me is the inability to manage relationships. With the Tree Style Tabs add-on in Firefox and vertical tabs in Orion, child tabs are opened in a tree. It codifies my search context and makes tab management quite easy. The analog in bookmarks is using folders, but they’re rather tedious to create when bookmarking and I can’t think of any browser that will auto-create nested folders when bulk bookmarking tabs.
  - Toorkit 2y ago
    I've been using Sidebery, which has a feature to bookmark the whole panel. It then creates a subfolder for every indentation in the tree.
  - EasyMark 2y ago
    What? The bookmark manager easily allows for tree structured saving of bookmarks with bookmark folders. Am I missing something here?
    - nirvdrum 2y ago
      Will it automatically create the folders based on the ancestry of tab open events? I acknowledged that you can nest folders, but find it incredibly tedious to have to do it manually. If you know of a way to carry the tab tree over to bookmarks I’d be very interested in knowing how. Absent that, it’s considerably easier to leave the tabs open. The tree will even be restored when the browser starts should I need to reboot.
8n4vidtmkvmk 2y ago
I don't understand the technical feat. The tabs are unloaded. Why should the browser struggle? 4400 URLs is small enough to fit in memory
- clumsysmurf 2y ago
  Take a look at ps, it's not that simple: https://imgur.com/a/BlTS83x https://imgur.com/a/BlTS83x
  - saurik 2y ago
    1) Just because something is dumb doesn't mean there is any good reason for it to be that way, but also 2) it in fact is that simple for Firefox, with the exception that it kind of forces you to have at least one active tab per window.
mozarella 2y ago
Not what you're are looking for but maybe Tab Session Manager might help you out : See my comment : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41158725 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41158725 Also i think they're bringing back tabgroups : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39985626 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39985626 For me, i never really liked tab groups. I prefer to organize my tabs under topical windows. Tab groups is kind of an ugly duckling in that paradigm, but thats just me.
EasyMark 2y ago
those 10000 tabs are not really open you know? It's just a list, it's like opening a huge file, the better editors only open a portion of the file to memory and not the whole 10 gigabyte file

snypher 2y ago

For what reason do you have all of these tabs?

clumsysmurf 2y ago
It seems to be a cycle. Begin a project, and try to keep the Window dedicated to tabs for that project. Tabs are open for electronic part datasheets, API documentation, etc. Then somehow i pop over to HN and open an unrelated link. Next thing, the window is polluted with project tabs and HN (reddit, etc) tabs. Rinse, repeat. I would say 90% tabs are unimportant, but I am afraid to nuke the session from orbit because there are some hard to find links / important ones in there.
- g15jv2dp 2y ago
  > I would say 90% tabs are unimportant, but I am afraid to nuke the session from orbit because there are some hard to find links / important ones in there. Are they easy to find in the list of 4400 tabs?
  - clumsysmurf 2y ago
    No. Its become enough of a crisis I am writing a browser extension to help me visualize what is what.
    - prmoustache 2y ago
      Having moved 13 times in my life, I have the opinion and strategy, which I also apply to things I own, that something is of no use to me if I can't even recall it is there. Thus according to this strategy I would just nuke my session and start from a blank sheet as I won't be missing it. For the same reason I donated and sold tons of stuff over the year before each move because I realised there is no point owning something you use only every 10 full moons or can't even remember it is hidden somewhere in a storage room. You can borrow/rent that to someone. Besides, you should still have the links in your history.
    - silon42 2y ago
      I wrote my own vertical tabs extension that handles 10k tabs... but yes, something like above is needed.
- SamuelAdams 2y ago
  I solve this by keeping a digital notebook. I have no idea why this is lost on so many people. Each project gets a new note in Obsidian or OneNote or whatever note taking tool you are using. Each day gets a new #H1 heading with the day. Any relevant URLs get added to the note. At the end of the day, review your notes and clean them up to be concise. Explain to your future self what you did and why those links are important. Then close your browser tabs, they are saved in the notes. If you need the content from the website itself (maybe you are concerned about the site disappearing), use something like Pocket or copy code snippets, text, etc directly into the note. Screenshots help too.
  - RandomThoughts3 2y ago
    I’m pretty sure the Venn diagram of people who are focused and organised enough to maintain and prune a daily list of links and people who might open thousands of tabs is empty. Personally, I have stopped trying to understand why people do it. I’m just not wired that way. I am fairly sure my way of organising and sorting through information would be similarly bemusing to someone from the other side. If you are in product, it’s just a good reminder that you are not representative of your users.
  - kasabali 2y ago
    > I solve this by keeping a digital notebook It may be working for you. People who easily accumulate 1000s of tabs, though, would now have 1000 page notebook and 1000 tabs. Don't ask me how I know.
evanjrowley 2y ago
Personally I open vast sums of tabs because, unlike browser history, tabs are organized in windows that help you maintain context for whatever you were thinking of when the tabs were opened. In an ideal world, I'd eventually go back and bookmark, tag, and close them. Unfortunately there are very few options for cross-browser tagged bookmark sync. I suspect the major browser vendors are not incentivized to create a solution for this problem. In the case of Microsoft and Google, they'd prefer you avoided bookmarks and asked their search engine so that they can serve you ads. Apple has never prioritized cross platform conveniences, so that leaves out Safari. Firefox is better about this, but only with other instances of Firefox.

dyauspitr 2y ago

Why not just bookmark them. It’s not like it’s going to stay in memory. It’s going to reload the page when you go back anyways.

clumsysmurf 2y ago
I have tried various bookmarking systems and inevitably things get lost. I don't find bookmarks useful long term either.
nirvdrum 2y ago
Not the OP, but I also have a lot of tabs. In every browser I’ve tried the bookmark manager is rather primitive. I once ran into a Floccus bug that duplicated tens of thousands of bookmarks and discovered bookmark managers also don’t scale very well. The bigger problem with bookmarks for me is the inability to manage relationships. With the Tree Style Tabs add-on in Firefox and vertical tabs in Orion, child tabs are opened in a tree. It codifies my search context and makes tab management quite easy. The analog in bookmarks is using folders, but they’re rather tedious to create when bookmarking and I can’t think of any browser that will auto-create nested folders when bulk bookmarking tabs.
- Toorkit 2y ago
  I've been using Sidebery, which has a feature to bookmark the whole panel. It then creates a subfolder for every indentation in the tree.
- EasyMark 2y ago
  What? The bookmark manager easily allows for tree structured saving of bookmarks with bookmark folders. Am I missing something here?
  - nirvdrum 2y ago
    Will it automatically create the folders based on the ancestry of tab open events? I acknowledged that you can nest folders, but find it incredibly tedious to have to do it manually. If you know of a way to carry the tab tree over to bookmarks I’d be very interested in knowing how. Absent that, it’s considerably easier to leave the tabs open. The tree will even be restored when the browser starts should I need to reboot.

8n4vidtmkvmk 2y ago

I don't understand the technical feat. The tabs are unloaded. Why should the browser struggle? 4400 URLs is small enough to fit in memory

clumsysmurf 2y ago
Take a look at ps, it's not that simple: https://imgur.com/a/BlTS83x https://imgur.com/a/BlTS83x
- saurik 2y ago
  1) Just because something is dumb doesn't mean there is any good reason for it to be that way, but also 2) it in fact is that simple for Firefox, with the exception that it kind of forces you to have at least one active tab per window.

mozarella 2y ago

Not what you're are looking for but maybe Tab Session Manager might help you out : See my comment : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41158725 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41158725 Also i think they're bringing back tabgroups : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39985626 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39985626 For me, i never really liked tab groups. I prefer to organize my tabs under topical windows. Tab groups is kind of an ugly duckling in that paradigm, but thats just me.

EasyMark 2y ago

those 10000 tabs are not really open you know? It's just a list, it's like opening a huge file, the better editors only open a portion of the file to memory and not the whole 10 gigabyte file