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I have almost 2000 tabs open. I use sideberry for tab management. > Are people using tabs as a soft bookmark of basically anything interesting? Yep, that's as

I have almost 2000 tabs open. I use sideberry for tab management. > Are people using tabs as a soft bookmark of basically anything interesting? Yep, that's as good a description as any. I have a lot of tabs that I'm not "finished with" in any finite amount of time. Case in point: currently shopping for a steam generator for a steam shower. I have about 30-40 tabs open to different models, stores, reviews, data pages etc. Once I'm done with the purchase, I'll close them all. I sometimes use sideberry's ability to have tab groups, but not much. To be honest, it's a not a great system in that stuff falls off my radar. Most of the tabs at the bottom of my sideberry tab list are ones I have not visited in many months. There's very little point having them there. However the cognitive cost and computational costs are close to zero.

barbazoo 2y ago
Have you checked out Arc? I switched the other day and their approach to somewhat-permanent "tabs" is interesting. At first I missed bookmarks but then I realized that what they were doing is actually closer to how I want to use the browser.
- cassianoleal 2y ago
  If you like Arc but would prefer if it was open source and/or non-Blink/Chromium, Zen is based on Firefox but with an Arc-like interface. https://zen-browser.app/ https://zen-browser.app/
  - imcritic 2y ago
    Poor UI, judging by the screenshots on that page. Another piece of software that treats users as imbeciles in dire need of being saved from "clutter".
    - cassianoleal 2y ago
      I think you missed the "If you like Arc" at the very beginning of my post. If you don't like Arc, then Zen is absolutely not for you. And that's fine.
    - jofzar 2y ago
      It's pretty much a 1:1 copy of arc, which IMO has the best browser UI/UX I have used.
  - ibll 2y ago
    It copies a lot of Arc, but the core tab organisation features from Arc are significantly lacking. Last I checked (a few weeks ago), Zen didn't even have a keybind for pinning a tab. It fully keeps the Firefox bookmarks and prioritises those all over the UI. The Arc tab system is meant to entirely replace all of that. It just makes Zen feel very shallow in comparison. It's just firefox with some goofy Arc features mashed into the front without care. Arc (macOS) is ridiculously good though. It's become difficult/impossible for me to use another browser happily the past few years. I wish they were focused on it instead of their mediocre AI browser project. They decided to claim Arc windows was out of beta when it's still vastly worse than the mac version in just about every sense. But at least they got the core tab management features locked down (from what I've heard, I don't have a windows machine to try it on.)
    - eddyg 2y ago
      What are you going to do now that Arc development has stopped and The Browser Company is pivoting? (I'm also a big fan of Arc, especially the Air Traffic Control feature to keep certain sites organized into Spaces.)
      - barbazoo 2y ago
        Thanks for pointing this out, I didn't know that. However, at least > Miller said that Arc "isn't going anywhere" and would continue to receive stability updates and bug fixes https://www.androidauthority.com/the-browser-company-planning-arc-alternative-3494362/ https://www.androidauthority.com/the-browser-company-plannin...
pawelduda 2y ago
And here I was, thinking 200-300 tabs is a lot. Turns out these are rookie numbers.
- seba_dos1 2y ago
  2000 is still in the same category :)
radicality 2y ago
Damn, 2k tabs, I’m not familiar with sideberry but with 2k of them are they even right to be called native ‘tabs’ or do they function more like bookmarks? > computational costs are close to zero Is that true for normal Firefox tabs (I usually use chrome/safari) ? Wouldn’t each one still use up some memory, keep any background tasks running etc. If some tab starts playing audio how do you even find it?
- PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
  The tabs don't get loaded until I revisit them after restarting firefox. So 90%+ of the tabs are just bookmarks really.
  - OneDeuxTriSeiGo 2y ago
    Well not exactly. Tab suspenders (at least the ones I use) dump the current DOM state, etc to disk so when you reload the tab, it reloads it in mostly the same state it was in when you left it. Of course some pages don't like that and force a full refresh but generally I find when I get a tab reload on a documentation page when it loads back up I end up at roughly the same part of the page I was on when I left off.
    - mixmastamyk 2y ago
      Don’t believe that continues through a restart by default.
      - OneDeuxTriSeiGo 2y ago
        It seems to work across restarts from what I can tell. I just tried to verify it. I have a tab group in Simple Tab Groups for a perl project I've been working on. The group is basically just a bunch of perl docs (metacpan, etc). I haven't touched the project or the group in a few weeks and I've in that time restarted both FF and my PC several times as well as having updated my FF install several times. I just switched to that tab group and opened up a random cpan docs tab and it loaded it back in half way down the page. The scroll moved a little bit (only a few lines of text worth of scroll) but that was it. Of course this doesn't work consistently for all pages. I know for a fact that social apps like bluesky don't tolerate suspends all that well and force a reload but most "vanilla" web pages like docs sites tolerate suspends quite well.
the_player 2y ago
[dead]
crossroadsguy 2y ago
Wow! My total bookmarks in raindrops are much less than that. The moment I reach 30ish tabs I start experiencing micro panic attacks.
- redeeman 2y ago
  can you describe that in more detail???
agumonkey 2y ago
Hello fellow 1k+ tab hoarder.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
quesera 2y ago
> I have almost 2000 tabs open. I use sideberry for tab management. I'm just here to report that Firefox + Sidebery continues to work perfectly well at 14571 "open" tabs. All but a few hundred are unloaded, and I block JavaScript fairly aggressively. Currently measuring 1992 MB, explicitly allocated. I won't argue with anyone who tells me that I have a problem, but I will say that Firefox and Sidebery make my problem not a problem!
- m4rtink 2y ago
  Can report that my testing indicates 40k+ tabs is doable with unloading on a 64 GB machine, across multiple Firefox windows with tree style tab. Since task manager has been introduced, making it easy to unload whole related tab groups its even easier to reach absurd total tab counts. ;-)
  - seba_dos1 2y ago
    It's doable with a single window on a 16 GB RAM machine as well.
  - nativeit 2y ago
    I just wanted to say thank you to all you mad tab hungry folks for making me feel both seen and comparatively sane.
  - jowea 2y ago
    As someone who has gotten to 2000 a few times, even I have to ask myself "how? why?"
    - m4rtink 2y ago
      Investigating some some are to decide what to buy properly could be a couple hundred tabs easily. Usually you can close those when you are done, especially if you use Tree Style Tab to have them in their own little trees - but not always you have the time or are waiting to try the thing after it arrives. Its is more tricky with technical projects, as you might and up with a big reference tab hierarchy that ideally you should first all read before closing it (maybe, just maybe, someone in one of those forum posts you opened in a tab without looking yet solved your problem!) or get back to the interesting tabs when working on the project. Worst of all are fiction or world building sites... Like, you end up on some page on Project RHO or Orion's Arm or a WH40K wiki somehow and that page has links to some other interesting topics. And those pages have more links - oh, interesting! Those can get to hundreds or even thousands of tabs easily and you just can't close them - they are just so interesting and there is that one topic/megascale engineering project/story you did not read to the end yet and you can always get back to it - as long as you keep the tabs open! And lastly, it is a sort of a diary/history log - sometimes you see a forgotten tab tree you did not touch in a while - oh, right I was researching that thing, how nostalgic! :)
jerf 2y ago
"To be honest, it's a not a great system in that stuff falls off my radar." That's a feature, not a bug. A system that doesn't let things fall off your radar is a taskmaster, not a servant. You have to let things fall off your radar.
- karaterobot 2y ago
  Maybe not, if there's no way to differentiate between something that has fallen off the radar, and something that is currently on the radar (I mean that all the tabs are in one big flat list, no matter if they're relevant or not). Also, if additional cruft increases the search time (i.e. how long does it take me to find the right tab from among these 2000 open ones) then each unused tab is a small additional burden. I'm not arguing for or against any position that works for anybody, I'm just pointing out some possible wrinkles I see from the outside.
glenstein 2y ago
This approach has made me wonder about the utility of a pin board style bookmark managing service where browser history and bookmarking amount to the same thing. As a way of kind of serving that process that's served by having all kinds of tabs. And maybe it could even overlap with tab management. Like if you name a tab group something, it gets named that as part of a persistent history. Like a tag for your bookmark or something.
- imcritic 2y ago
  Browser history gets rotated. I've lost a beautiful song that way, forgetting to like/bookmark it properly, thinking I'd just find it in history...
jiehong 2y ago
Safari tends to do a good job at that too. I currently have 867 tabs on Firefox desktop, and 495 in Safari mobile on my phone (I need to start cleaning safari, because weird things happen at 500 when a new tabs is opened). Safari on desktop also keeps tabs unloaded when re-opening a window. I just wish safari would allow me to hide the top tab bar when I open the vertical sidebar (if someone knows how to do that, let me know!).
drtgh 2y ago
I use instead the bookmarks toolbar, where you create a folder by topic, select the open tabs with Ctrl, and do a drag&drop into the folder to store such urls. You can then press "Open all tabs" from within the folder when you need to, or individually. When you have many folders in the bookmarks toolbar, an ">>" icon will appear at the end to the right of the bar, which will expand the rest of the folders vertically, that I scroll with the mouse wheel. So I have my at first sight folders of common use, and also the other ones by pressing ">>". I like much such dynamic (first sight horizontal, and ">>"). I do not like the folder-icon on such first sight bar with folders, I find it a bit distracting and takes up valuable space, so I have a css in userChrome.css to hide such icons (only there, not in the ones unfolded by ">>") leaving this way only the folder name, where I use short names. This in combination with another css to show only icons for some bookmarks placed at such first sight (bookmarks with no name was the easier way for this). I also had to reduce the separation between such first sight bookmarks. In addition, I also have the bookmarks button to the left of the url bar, which unfolds another group of different bookmarks vertically. Sometimes I get the feeling that people are using tabs for what bookmarks were designed for, which is why the number of tabs open is so high. About the OP, I often search several topics at once, and/or a topic with several sub-topics where the open tabs of different topics sometimes get visually mixed up or I lose the track/focus, for what this new tabs groups sounds ideal.
dredmorbius 2y ago
What are you using to unload tabs? I've got to confess that my FF memory management is a run-as-needed-or-think-it-should-be-needed shell script which arbitrarily kills the top 10 Firefox processes by memory utilisation. If I'm leaving my desktop for a while I'll run that several times. Tree-style Tabs keeps the slots open, and can reload tabs as needed. I'd really like to have the capacity to unload all tabs other than, say, a specifically-specified set. Though on balance, the tabs that are likely to be most usefully kept open also tend to be the worst memory offenders. If I fail to prune, MacOS falls over early and often, which is somewhat unpleasant.
- louky 2y ago
  I personally have been using "Auto Tab Discard" for years. It works perfectly for me, and you can set a group of tabs to not unload. It has a ton of options. I have ~320 tabs open right now, for multiple projects and only ~5 are loaded. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-discard/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc...
  - dredmorbius 2y ago
    Thanks!
snapplebobapple 2y ago
If relaxamist still exists and is in your region check them out. I have been using my 2.5kw steam generator daily with zero maintenance for 11 years now. Been very happy.

barbazoo 2y ago

Have you checked out Arc? I switched the other day and their approach to somewhat-permanent "tabs" is interesting. At first I missed bookmarks but then I realized that what they were doing is actually closer to how I want to use the browser.

cassianoleal 2y ago
If you like Arc but would prefer if it was open source and/or non-Blink/Chromium, Zen is based on Firefox but with an Arc-like interface. https://zen-browser.app/ https://zen-browser.app/
- imcritic 2y ago
  Poor UI, judging by the screenshots on that page. Another piece of software that treats users as imbeciles in dire need of being saved from "clutter".
  - cassianoleal 2y ago
    I think you missed the "If you like Arc" at the very beginning of my post. If you don't like Arc, then Zen is absolutely not for you. And that's fine.
  - jofzar 2y ago
    It's pretty much a 1:1 copy of arc, which IMO has the best browser UI/UX I have used.
- ibll 2y ago
  It copies a lot of Arc, but the core tab organisation features from Arc are significantly lacking. Last I checked (a few weeks ago), Zen didn't even have a keybind for pinning a tab. It fully keeps the Firefox bookmarks and prioritises those all over the UI. The Arc tab system is meant to entirely replace all of that. It just makes Zen feel very shallow in comparison. It's just firefox with some goofy Arc features mashed into the front without care. Arc (macOS) is ridiculously good though. It's become difficult/impossible for me to use another browser happily the past few years. I wish they were focused on it instead of their mediocre AI browser project. They decided to claim Arc windows was out of beta when it's still vastly worse than the mac version in just about every sense. But at least they got the core tab management features locked down (from what I've heard, I don't have a windows machine to try it on.)
  - eddyg 2y ago
    What are you going to do now that Arc development has stopped and The Browser Company is pivoting? (I'm also a big fan of Arc, especially the Air Traffic Control feature to keep certain sites organized into Spaces.)
    - barbazoo 2y ago
      Thanks for pointing this out, I didn't know that. However, at least > Miller said that Arc "isn't going anywhere" and would continue to receive stability updates and bug fixes https://www.androidauthority.com/the-browser-company-planning-arc-alternative-3494362/ https://www.androidauthority.com/the-browser-company-plannin...

pawelduda 2y ago

And here I was, thinking 200-300 tabs is a lot. Turns out these are rookie numbers.

seba_dos1 2y ago
2000 is still in the same category :)

radicality 2y ago

Damn, 2k tabs, I’m not familiar with sideberry but with 2k of them are they even right to be called native ‘tabs’ or do they function more like bookmarks? > computational costs are close to zero Is that true for normal Firefox tabs (I usually use chrome/safari) ? Wouldn’t each one still use up some memory, keep any background tasks running etc. If some tab starts playing audio how do you even find it?

PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
The tabs don't get loaded until I revisit them after restarting firefox. So 90%+ of the tabs are just bookmarks really.
- OneDeuxTriSeiGo 2y ago
  Well not exactly. Tab suspenders (at least the ones I use) dump the current DOM state, etc to disk so when you reload the tab, it reloads it in mostly the same state it was in when you left it. Of course some pages don't like that and force a full refresh but generally I find when I get a tab reload on a documentation page when it loads back up I end up at roughly the same part of the page I was on when I left off.
  - mixmastamyk 2y ago
    Don’t believe that continues through a restart by default.
    - OneDeuxTriSeiGo 2y ago
      It seems to work across restarts from what I can tell. I just tried to verify it. I have a tab group in Simple Tab Groups for a perl project I've been working on. The group is basically just a bunch of perl docs (metacpan, etc). I haven't touched the project or the group in a few weeks and I've in that time restarted both FF and my PC several times as well as having updated my FF install several times. I just switched to that tab group and opened up a random cpan docs tab and it loaded it back in half way down the page. The scroll moved a little bit (only a few lines of text worth of scroll) but that was it. Of course this doesn't work consistently for all pages. I know for a fact that social apps like bluesky don't tolerate suspends all that well and force a reload but most "vanilla" web pages like docs sites tolerate suspends quite well.

the_player 2y ago

[dead]

crossroadsguy 2y ago

Wow! My total bookmarks in raindrops are much less than that. The moment I reach 30ish tabs I start experiencing micro panic attacks.

redeeman 2y ago
can you describe that in more detail???

agumonkey 2y ago

Hello fellow 1k+ tab hoarder.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

quesera 2y ago

> I have almost 2000 tabs open. I use sideberry for tab management. I'm just here to report that Firefox + Sidebery continues to work perfectly well at 14571 "open" tabs. All but a few hundred are unloaded, and I block JavaScript fairly aggressively. Currently measuring 1992 MB, explicitly allocated. I won't argue with anyone who tells me that I have a problem, but I will say that Firefox and Sidebery make my problem not a problem!

m4rtink 2y ago
Can report that my testing indicates 40k+ tabs is doable with unloading on a 64 GB machine, across multiple Firefox windows with tree style tab. Since task manager has been introduced, making it easy to unload whole related tab groups its even easier to reach absurd total tab counts. ;-)
- seba_dos1 2y ago
  It's doable with a single window on a 16 GB RAM machine as well.
- nativeit 2y ago
  I just wanted to say thank you to all you mad tab hungry folks for making me feel both seen and comparatively sane.
- jowea 2y ago
  As someone who has gotten to 2000 a few times, even I have to ask myself "how? why?"
  - m4rtink 2y ago
    Investigating some some are to decide what to buy properly could be a couple hundred tabs easily. Usually you can close those when you are done, especially if you use Tree Style Tab to have them in their own little trees - but not always you have the time or are waiting to try the thing after it arrives. Its is more tricky with technical projects, as you might and up with a big reference tab hierarchy that ideally you should first all read before closing it (maybe, just maybe, someone in one of those forum posts you opened in a tab without looking yet solved your problem!) or get back to the interesting tabs when working on the project. Worst of all are fiction or world building sites... Like, you end up on some page on Project RHO or Orion's Arm or a WH40K wiki somehow and that page has links to some other interesting topics. And those pages have more links - oh, interesting! Those can get to hundreds or even thousands of tabs easily and you just can't close them - they are just so interesting and there is that one topic/megascale engineering project/story you did not read to the end yet and you can always get back to it - as long as you keep the tabs open! And lastly, it is a sort of a diary/history log - sometimes you see a forgotten tab tree you did not touch in a while - oh, right I was researching that thing, how nostalgic! :)

jerf 2y ago

"To be honest, it's a not a great system in that stuff falls off my radar." That's a feature, not a bug. A system that doesn't let things fall off your radar is a taskmaster, not a servant. You have to let things fall off your radar.

karaterobot 2y ago
Maybe not, if there's no way to differentiate between something that has fallen off the radar, and something that is currently on the radar (I mean that all the tabs are in one big flat list, no matter if they're relevant or not). Also, if additional cruft increases the search time (i.e. how long does it take me to find the right tab from among these 2000 open ones) then each unused tab is a small additional burden. I'm not arguing for or against any position that works for anybody, I'm just pointing out some possible wrinkles I see from the outside.

glenstein 2y ago

This approach has made me wonder about the utility of a pin board style bookmark managing service where browser history and bookmarking amount to the same thing. As a way of kind of serving that process that's served by having all kinds of tabs. And maybe it could even overlap with tab management. Like if you name a tab group something, it gets named that as part of a persistent history. Like a tag for your bookmark or something.

imcritic 2y ago
Browser history gets rotated. I've lost a beautiful song that way, forgetting to like/bookmark it properly, thinking I'd just find it in history...

jiehong 2y ago

Safari tends to do a good job at that too. I currently have 867 tabs on Firefox desktop, and 495 in Safari mobile on my phone (I need to start cleaning safari, because weird things happen at 500 when a new tabs is opened). Safari on desktop also keeps tabs unloaded when re-opening a window. I just wish safari would allow me to hide the top tab bar when I open the vertical sidebar (if someone knows how to do that, let me know!).

drtgh 2y ago

I use instead the bookmarks toolbar, where you create a folder by topic, select the open tabs with Ctrl, and do a drag&drop into the folder to store such urls. You can then press "Open all tabs" from within the folder when you need to, or individually. When you have many folders in the bookmarks toolbar, an ">>" icon will appear at the end to the right of the bar, which will expand the rest of the folders vertically, that I scroll with the mouse wheel. So I have my at first sight folders of common use, and also the other ones by pressing ">>". I like much such dynamic (first sight horizontal, and ">>"). I do not like the folder-icon on such first sight bar with folders, I find it a bit distracting and takes up valuable space, so I have a css in userChrome.css to hide such icons (only there, not in the ones unfolded by ">>") leaving this way only the folder name, where I use short names. This in combination with another css to show only icons for some bookmarks placed at such first sight (bookmarks with no name was the easier way for this). I also had to reduce the separation between such first sight bookmarks. In addition, I also have the bookmarks button to the left of the url bar, which unfolds another group of different bookmarks vertically. Sometimes I get the feeling that people are using tabs for what bookmarks were designed for, which is why the number of tabs open is so high. About the OP, I often search several topics at once, and/or a topic with several sub-topics where the open tabs of different topics sometimes get visually mixed up or I lose the track/focus, for what this new tabs groups sounds ideal.

dredmorbius 2y ago

What are you using to unload tabs? I've got to confess that my FF memory management is a run-as-needed-or-think-it-should-be-needed shell script which arbitrarily kills the top 10 Firefox processes by memory utilisation. If I'm leaving my desktop for a while I'll run that several times. Tree-style Tabs keeps the slots open, and can reload tabs as needed. I'd really like to have the capacity to unload all tabs other than, say, a specifically-specified set. Though on balance, the tabs that are likely to be most usefully kept open also tend to be the worst memory offenders. If I fail to prune, MacOS falls over early and often, which is somewhat unpleasant.

louky 2y ago
I personally have been using "Auto Tab Discard" for years. It works perfectly for me, and you can set a group of tabs to not unload. It has a ton of options. I have ~320 tabs open right now, for multiple projects and only ~5 are loaded. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-discard/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc...
- dredmorbius 2y ago
  Thanks!

snapplebobapple 2y ago

If relaxamist still exists and is in your region check them out. I have been using my 2.5kw steam generator daily with zero maintenance for 11 years now. Been very happy.