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.
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.
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...
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?
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.
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.
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.
What I don’t understand is why someone will have scores of tabs open _all the time_. And at work these same people are always leaving work for the day while still logged in to shared assets which prevent others from accessing or weekly backups. Same with shared Excel files. Oh! And they leave those annoying app launchers on their desktops like it’s 1997, rather than using the toolbar.
I think if I could see their desk it would be buried with old food wrappers and coffee cups.
The way I deal with information sprawl (lots of stuff I want to read, but I can't right now) is to move it to a Reading List where I can prioritize and archive each entry as I read them. For me, tabs are things I need right now; I close them when I'm done with them.
I usually don't have any tabs left when I'm done with the day and usually don't exceed more than ten tabs.
My main browser is Safari, but when I use Firefox (on my work machine) I also use tab-less and Amethyst to have all of my pages on my screen. This way, I'm more aggressive about only keeping what I need and closing what I don't.
Ill give you one example. Just yesterday I stumbled on 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.
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+)
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.
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.
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.
To be fair, Firefox starts up quickly even with hundreds of tabs saved, because only the pinned and current tabs are loaded on start. I used to think it was awesome how it kept memory use efficient by leaving unused tabs unloaded, but it has gotten too good.
I use Sidebery to classify my dozens of dormant tabs, but the net weekly balance is a few tabs positive because I've become less selective with this power.
Tabs are not in RAM in Firefox - they don't get loaded until you click into them, so you can effectively have a nearly unlimited number of tabs open. (My primary browsing PC has only 8 GB of RAM, but handles thousands of tabs with ease.)
As I said above, this is how I work, and it's not negotiable. If it bothers you to have that many tabs open, then fine, kill off your tabs. That's fine with me. And my way should be fine with you. (You're probably one of those persnickety inbox zero people, too :-), aren't you?) (My Inbox has 38K unread messages, and I reset them at the start of the year. That's after the many thousands that Google already threw away. It's just not worth the effort to throw away all that stuff one message at a time...)
BTW, I have probably 100K bookmarks, but have no good way to merge multiple old bookmarks files and convert them to the new format, so unlike the tabs, the bookmarks are now useless. I stopped using bookmarks in favor of tabs years ago now.
Now let's talk about power tools for handling large numbers of tabs!
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)
The problem with bookmarks, for a lot of us anyway, is that they're very much "out of sight, out of mind". You bookmark something, and never come back to it.
Its probably the same case if you have thousands of tabs and mechanisms to hide them, but maybe 30 tabs or so spread across a few windows gets crowded, your forced to prune them regularly, either by doing the thing you had the tab open for or deciding its not worth your time right now.
I wish there was something better, but I've never found it.
They aren't in RAM in a decent browser. Mine are written to disk, possible to use session after session, and they are also suspended, thus aren't using resources.
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:)
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 usually generate my passwords with pwgen (you can install on Mac with brew and use this command pwgen -s 20 -1 -v -y -c -0) then store in plain text within an encrypted folder on my NAS.
In some cases, I use 2FA. In some, a lengthy "mumbo-jumbo" passwords that are easy to remember. :)
P.S. This is just an old habit and I have nothing against using a password manager like https://keepassxc.org/
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.
My tabs get as messy as my desk. Eventually, I hit a point where the mess bothers me. So I clear it all out and get back to a clean slate.
With the desk, the “this bothers me” moment is very physical/spatial, when I realize I’m now working around the mess (most often, mail I haven’t yet been bothered to look through).
With the tabs, the mess always builds up when I’m in the early phases of starting or investigating something, but as I get going, the mess becomes a distraction I’m mentally working around. So I’ll start dropping tabs that are no longer relevant. I have a tendency to “group” my tabs in separate windows by topic, and eventually I’ll just start closing a window with a dozen or more tabs at a time when that topic is handled or otherwise irrelevant. It’s like finally going through my mail that’s been piling up.
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.
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.
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.
I used to have a completely clean desk at an engineering company where everyone had piles and piles of spec sheets, documentation, and first articles strewn around. People thought I didn't work, so I piled up a few things here and there to gather dust and look "messy" and kept the working area of my desk clean :)
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Interesting, I see your point of view, but I guess my browsing habits are different.
Tabs are ephemeral in my opinion and can be closed without a trace at any moment. I can't rely on them being there, so I don't keep hundreds of them open with chains of context.
I have a tiny amount of reliance on the browser history to search and re-open pages if needed, or if I actually care about the URL's I'll add bookmarks, or URL's to a document/note.
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.
Because that is completely different approach. When using TST extension then "tab" is like bookmark + history element and not in your short term memory. One of the advantages over those is that visual overview is almost instant and so much clearer with structured tab trees with long descriptive tab names. It reduces brain strain as I no longer have to relay on blind searches in history and bookmakrs menu, google and notes in documents.
For example when getting into some game then all the guides, tips, videos, maps, mods etc. are open below one master tab and it is very easy to go back there after every month or so, back and forward works on tabs and you are like exactly back in this moment where had to stop that time. One such subject domain can be like 50 or sometimes 100 tabs and if your interests and work over about a year revolve around 30 subjects then few thousand tab-s is quite normal usage. Firefox + TST works with max 7999 tabs so there is quite some room.
I think the easily manageable high tab count is not even the primary advantage for starters, the fixed tab width with vertical tabs is as tab label is always visible and usually horizontal screen space is wasted anyway. Then comes the tree structure advantages and then the paradigm change to tabs as usable history when tab count is high.
Tab hoarder here: mentally, they're somewhere between history and how you probably treat tabs. Probably 90% of my actual switches are within the last 10, another 9% in the last 100, etc.
All I really want is infinite storage of pages with exact state, including dynamic content. Since history can't do this I use tabs and wait for the inevitable browser crashes.
I think there's no particular moment/decision when a short-term memory becomes a long-term memory, tabs are the closest you can get to this. They're not at the front of my mind.
My brain only has to focus on ONE at a time. I can be blissfully unaware of the thousands of others that are ready when I decide to pay attention to them.
(I also run almost everything fullscreen almost all the time. Even a 4K screen isn't really dense enough for two side-by-side browser windows to render properly.)
BTW, one thing I've noticed is that people who like lots of tabs seem to have good/different spatial and directional orientation - I don't know exactly where tabs are, but in my current window, I know for instance, without even thinking about it, that the dozen or so tabs on laser cutters that I rounded up back in April are about 6 scrolls of the mousewheel down from where my email window is pinned at the top, last seen on the left side. (So, maybe 400 tabs down? But I don't think of either of these numbers, just a relative "place". I have FF set to show/scroll three rows of tabs to compromise tab space vs. content space.)
It's kind of like why I hate digital books like Kindles - you can never just open the book maybe a bit less than 2/3 through, thinking, "it was about here" and then flip back and forth a few dozen pages to zero in on what you want. (In a real book, though I don't have a "photographic" memory, I usually know whether what I'm looking for was on the right or left page, and sometimes, where it was on the page. I don't think about this, it's just either "there" (usually), or sometimes, not.)
"Messy organization" like "piling systems" is usually associated with people who find existing categorization systems (say email or filesystem folders) way too restrictive, and so they find it easier to have multidimensional ways to locate things in space, time, and sensory association. If you don't think this way, more tabs are going to drive you batty.
Neither way is right or wrong - people just think differently. Vive la difference!
Agree. I have a handful of pinned tabs. My email, messages, and, depending on the machine, a few tabs of research for either my current work task or game I'm playing or project I'm working on. At the end of each day I close all non-pinned tabs. Stuff that I access regularly but not constantly gets bookmarked into some folders.
Sure. Like with not using the Start menu on Windows and just hitting the Windows key and typing, I do similar with browser extensionsntombe able to find the point in my workflow in terms of sites that I need at any given moment. Nobody is scrolling through tabs.
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...
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.
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.)
> The time chrome crashed and lost all tabs (iPadOS so no ctr shift t. And it was triggered by opening link so the "restore" button disapeared immediately.)
That's actually what pushed me to Firefox. After loosing ~50 tabs (yet again) I simply said f that, now I have a clean state and installed Firefox. I've never lost any tabs since.
Do you mean Firefox on iOS? Do you know if they have auto-translate?
One of the hidden "pros" of using chrome is that as a non-dutch speaking guy in the Netherlands chrome actually can translate pages 80% of the time. I almost don't use my iPad for browsing as safari (on iOS 14) cannot and chrome is a little quicker than a dead horse.
Have you noticed that todo lists tend to progress a bit like ticket queues for long lived projects? The oldest open ticket is usually from the day the ticket system was founded and the last one from five minutes ago. And there is a monotonic increase in the number of open tickets across any span of time you care to zoom in on.
Chrome crashing and losing all the tabs was the only way to keep them under control, now with bugs fixed and a session manager extension, I can always get them back.
I used an extension called OneTab that had a few thousand of my tabs on my old laptop... it took that extension crashing twice (probably burning 4~5k tabs) before I learnt my lesson and backed up all my tabs to a txt file.
Vivaldi(chromium) has really bad Tab session handling. They used to lose tabs all the time, so instead of migrating to SQLite database for tabs (sqlite is very crash durable) just like they store passwords/cookies /etc tey did this elaborate Rube Goldberg mechanism of rewriting 5-10MB files every time you click on something :( https://www.reddit.com/r/vivaldibrowser/comments/vbh7zg/viva...
Whats more they store Tab thumbnails as Base64 encoded jpgs in Json text files :( They are burning SSD endurance for no reason :(
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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). 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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...
Chrome and Firefox have a setting to “reopen where I left off.” This will save your tabs when you quit and reopen them when you start a new browser window. Things get complicated when you have multiple windows open at the same time. “Bookmark all tabs” is a good workaround if you’re leery about plugins.
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.
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
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.
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.
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..
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.
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, ...
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.
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.
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.
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?
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".
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/