I'll add to the chorus of "only?"<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>But I'm in a lot of projects, some stalled, some periodic, some active, some tiny, some technical, some more blue sky-y.<p>I'm always reading the book that is the internet - tabs are all pages.<p>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.<p>[1] <a href="https://justinmiller.io/links/" rel="nofollow">https://justinmiller.io/links/</a>
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.<p>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.<p>[0]: <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/panorama-view/" rel="nofollow">https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/panorama-view...</a>
This used to be a built-in feature of Firefox, which I used until I was forced to switch to the addon.
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?
It's great your browser can now scale to hundreds of tabs, but can your brain handle that many? Can you focus with 200 tabs open?<p>Personally, I feel much better when I close a tab, rather than leave it open. It feels like I'm freeing up RAM in my head...
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.<p>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...
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.<p>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.)<p>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.)<p>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"<p>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.<p>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.<p>(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.)
Tabs == To-do's<p>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.<p>The problem is that it's still too hard to save and organize things as you go without the right tooling. My approach FWIW:<p><a href="https://braintool.org/2022/01/28/Browser-based-Productivity-and-pkm-with-emacs-org-mode-LogSeq-and-BrainTool.html" rel="nofollow">https://braintool.org/2022/01/28/Browser-based-Productivity-...</a>
I find tree style tabs very effective in things like oncall/learning/investigation situations because they act as kind of breadcrumbs/grouping solution. Like<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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 recently had over 4,000 tabs opened on Firefox for Android.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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 <i>that</i> 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 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].<p>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?<p>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.<p>I guess this can't be solved by an alternative browser, but instead by an open standard that could be implemented in all browsers.<p>[0] <a href="https://rybakov.com/blog/open_tabs_are_cognitive_spaces/" rel="nofollow">https://rybakov.com/blog/open_tabs_are_cognitive_spaces/</a><p>[1] <a href="https://beamapp.co/" rel="nofollow">https://beamapp.co/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://synth.app/" rel="nofollow">https://synth.app/</a>
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.<p>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.
Simple Tab Groups is an extremely useful Firefox extension: <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/simple-tab-groups/" rel="nofollow">https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/simple-tab-gr...</a>
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...
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.<p>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).<p>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.<p>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!<p>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.<p>I believe my record has been 1100+ tabs on Chrome, and 5000+ tabs on Opera Mobile.<p>The desktop version of these apps can't handle these amounts nearly as well..
<p><pre><code> 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.
</code></pre>
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, ...
Over 1000 (+The great Suspender) <a href="https://i.imgur.com/ESBKggu.png" rel="nofollow">https://i.imgur.com/ESBKggu.png</a> (Session Buddy)
I'm up to 9343 tabs in Firefox. I am adding about 2000 per year. I keep thinking I'm going to get back to the older ones and read then close them...
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).<p>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?
I have about 500 between the two computers in my room atm. Probably 50 on my work laptop.<p>My tab count only resets whenever my browser crashes irrecoverably.<p>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.<p>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!
I was literally working on a computer at work. Was taking too long to shutdown...<p>I wonder why. I could not resist taking a picture.<p><a href="http://dimlight.org/number9/pics/tabs.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://dimlight.org/number9/pics/tabs.jpg</a>
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.
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).
For those skeptical how this can happen, it's the natural situation when two things are true:<p>(a) wanting to create a new browser window when a new "context" is necessary, rather than navigating away from one's current context, and<p>(b) being in an environment where "contexts" are added more rapidly than they can be fully triaged, delegated, or completed.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Tools like <a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/toby-for-chrome/hddnkoipeenegfoeaoibdmnaalmgkpip?hl=en" rel="nofollow">https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/toby-for-chrome/hd...</a> and <a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-manager-plus-for-chro/cnkdjjdmfiffagllbiiilooaoofcoeff" rel="nofollow">https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-manager-plus-f...</a> are extremely useful, but do require that you're willing to suspend your page state, including any state in dev tools or scroll position - so they're simply a way to speed up getting through the backlog of contexts, not a silver bullet.<p>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.
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.<p>(This comment is a confession, of sorts.)
I have 9 windows with 4780 tabs open currently. Not kidding.
I have maybe 150 active, the rest are "suspended".
Firefox.<p>This is my current PC, I have another ~3K on my previous browser, which I gave up on.<p>Have another ~1.5K on the one before that.