It seems like many people basically use open browser tabs as history/bookmarks. If they don't close it, they want to remember it forever.
I believe browsers have had to adapt to this by basically converting tabs into auto-bookmarks that have advanced caching or something. So they automatically unload and have logic to determine when they are actually supposed to be active.
I wonder if eventually tabs, history, bookmarks, and tab groups will be completely merged into one flexible and intelligent feature.
On wider screens, a left sidebar might open by default with tabs stacked vertically.
Not sure but it seems like people don't use tabs as originally intended.
Maybe if they just made history more obvious then that would change the equation.
In spite of your conntrarian phrasing you've kind of only sold me on tabs being a more advanced hypermedia bookmark than the simple bookmarks we've been given.
> they keep sessions (a)live (audio/video, chat, where you stop reading)
I'd also note that at 7500 tabs your computer almost certainly is not keeping those sessions alive. It's stunning how far we can get but wow, watching Chrome over the years claw it's way towards being fast to load & staying responsive, in spite of being many 100's of tabs in on a mid-range 201X phone was an incredible saga of improving software architecture. It got better and better.
There's whole means of backgrounding & persisting pages (and of preloading new pages) that's just amazing.
> In spite of your conntrarian phrasing you've kind of only sold me on tabs being a more advanced hypermedia bookmark than the simple bookmarks we've been given.
Unfortunately, I'm not sure I understand your phrasing.
> I'd also note that at 7500 tabs your computer almost certainly is not keeping those sessions alive
The person I was responding to was not talking specifically about the article, but "many people". And some people may use the tabs for one, more, or none of the reasons I listed. I was not trying to sell anything. I don't even think that tabs are a good product, only the best so far, with regard to those considerations.
> in spite of being many 100's of tabs in on a mid-range 201X phone was an incredible saga of improving software architecture
Those tabs were and are just screenshots, and reload when clicked, you could realistically not have more than around 5 open at the same time without reloading.
>- they keep sessions (a)live (audio/video, chat, where you stop reading)
in a way, yes. I'm one of these users. My 6000+ tabs with ~10 windows load in an unloaded state. I have addons that unload already-clicked-by-me tabs if I need the RAM or if some JS script is running wild on FF but I still might need that tab.
I simply treat it as: I might come back to that topic later. 70-80% of the time I rarely do lol. or it takes me 2 years.
>they (at least on desktop) have better ux than bookmarks and history
it simply is easier to click on the list in the sidebar than having to go through a bookmark window and wait for the UI to load the tabs itself.
what's funny is, with Firefox, when I close a window with 1000 tabs and were to restore it, it takes Firefox way longer to restore that window than if I were to load my session from zero/Windows.
Firefox does this when shutting down and starting back up. Tabs get "frozen" and "thawed" upon activation after startup.
This is superior to bookmarks, as the server respose is saved along with scroll position etc.
I've long wished I could actively trigger this similar to making a bookmark. Bonus if they saved some embeddings too so I could search the contents of the saved pages.
It also shows that people want transient bookmarks. They bookmark a few things they care about, but the rest is bookmarks for the next week or month, then they don't need it anymore.
Well sometimes I kill the browser (Firefox, Chrome) rather than closing it because upon starting it again it will automatically recreate the tabs. Where otherwise I lose everything.
And I do keep a text file with interesting links, so I don't have to keep 100+ tabs open. Seems much easier to me to skimp through a text file looking for something I remembered seeing than using bookmarks.
If you close it normally, restart it, and then do "reopen last closed tab" (cmd/ctrl+shift+t) it will open the entire last window you had open. Press multiple times to open all previous windows.
Sites like Facebook or Reddit do indeed do a full reload, but most sites I frequent do not. Nice to be able to pick up where I left. If I want updated content I just hit F5.
I think it rather depends on the page (some pages with lots of dynamically generated content might mark themselves as no-cache/no-store), and in any case if you don't use a tab long enough, sooner or later it'll be evicted from the browser cache.
You're almost there. To get what I and others have, take everything you described then add:
* Ability to unload tabs and prevent tabs from unloading, by domain (youtube) or picking from the context menu for one-offs. (Auto Tab Discard) (Unless it's changed since I got this addon, the built-in discarded tabs won't unload tabs, it only does anything when the browser is restarted, preventing all but the current tabs from loading)
* The left sidebar is actually a tree, where links opened in a new tab are automatically children of the tab they opened from. The whole thing becomes self-organizing with context, and the parent tabs can be expanded/collapsed. (Tree Style Tab)
* The left sidebar also auto-collapses to ~3 favicons in width (userChrome.css manual modification, originally copied from something shared online), so it works fine even without a wider screen.
* Addon for vim-style controls (Tridactyl), which in addition to everything else includes a way to search and jump to tabs by matching title and url.
I'm somewhere around 1500-2000 and it has replaced my bookmarks.
> It seems like many people basically use open browser tabs as history/bookmarks
For me I'd say I use it as a To Do list. Open tabs are things I mean to get to, and when I'm done with it I will close it. Bookmarks are things I might need at some later date.
I tried using Safari's reading list for this long ago, but it's too out-of-sight, out-of-mind and stuff went in there to be forgotten about. Tabs and windows are in my face cluttering up my screen the whole time, begging to be finished.
A friend of mine has 2000 tabs open. He says he uses it not only for history, but also the tabs remember the position of video playback in movies, series, etc. so he can continue from where he left.
If the tabs are remotely organized (by window), and you use a plugin to change the title of the window (it shows up with a title then in window managers), it's pretty much an instant on and context switch if you need to switch between projects, and leave them in a good stopping point, and can pick them up instantly from where you left off.
I often have used separate browsers for this. One for each project, one for personal, etc. Can work well too.
Sounds overkill: I am fairly sure all streaming services I have been using already keep position and in the first page have a list of shows you have started and might want to continue watching...
My preferred youtube frontend, freetube, also does that.
Yes please! Firefox used to have a fantastic feature where I could crash it, and it would have a tab that contained my previous session within it. It would be there forever, between restarts and restores. I could have a kind of chain of sessions. Sometimes, I would deliberately crash the browser because there were too many, but I still had this bunch of tabs which I wanted to be nearly active. At some point, they deleted the feature - you get one chance to restore your previous session, and after that poof - gone. (I think that decision was pure evil on their part - who goes around and decides to delete a users data? And what's wrong with letting me decide how much of my drive I want to dedicate to storing open tabs? But whatever.)
The experience made me realise that what you describe is exactly what I'm trying to do. I have pages I care about. I want them findable when I get back to it, even if that means three years hence. And there are other pages which I just visited once, like a news article, or which occupied me for three weeks, like documentation for a problem I've now solved. The act of closing a tab is a communication to the web browser. I wish it would listen to it.
I could also do with a searchable, browsable list of open tabs. I was recently searching for a car. Then I bought one. So I need to go back and find all the tabs about cars and close them. I want a fully interactive window like an oldschool history window that lets me find all my open tabs about cars and close them, no matter which window they're in - unless I see that it's my car's user manual or my service schedule, in which case maybe I want to keep it open for the next five years.
On the other hand, when I learnt about % in the searchbox, it was a gamechanger. Finally I could find and reuse the tab that is open, instead of the way by default Firefox prioritises search results over open tabs.
(The other thing I would like, is something in mobile Firefox that tells me how many tabs I have open. I hate the cute infinity sign. What's the point? Because their designer couldn't handle the idea of a slightly smaller font each time an order of magnitude is exceeded? Why not let me live with the costs of my actions? Also, an easier way to manage tabs on Firefox mobile. But maybe just better tab management in general.)
The "Tab Session Manager" add-on probably will address the majority of your gripes with firefox's inbuilt session manager :
- It backs up your last 10 (can be changed) sessions.
- You can save specifics sessions for perpetuity. In your example, you can save some or all of the windows under a single session named "Car". You can add/remove tabs/windows from it at any time from within the menu. And it is always there ready to be restored when you need.
- For the rest of my unorgranised miscellaneous tabs (like random hackernews articles), i send them to OneTab rather than save them in a session.
- Overall, very friction-less, intuitive UX.
>(The other thing I would like, is something in mobile Firefox that tells me how many tabs I have open. I hate the cute infinity sign.
Two (rather cumbersome) work-arounds :
- Save all tabs as collection - will tell you how many tabs you have
- The "Clear History" option also tells how many tabs you have currently. (Just don't accidentally click "Delete"!! )
It's a great plugin. I just wish a few of my sites didn't have issues with Firefox... most of which can be easily addressed when it doesn't find a browser it's biased for.
Managing my tabs in Firefox mobile is such a pain in the ass. Couldn't agree more with needing a big improvement here.
Even simple things like putting already open tabs at the bottom of the list when typing in the address bar makes things more painful than it should be. I almost always want the matching open tab, put that first!
As if Chrome is an abandoned project, as if people realize that it is spyware, and that using it gives enormous power to a company that is actively working against the trust of their users...
As if users have stopped using Chrome... what a sweet dream.
This is a different set of users here. I assume most people on HN realize that it's spyware and a Trojan trust-proxy, and abandon it when feasible for one of the many other trust-proxies. The end game looks the same for every browser one way or the other, the trick is to sidestep the end game. Of course, that also results in Facebook and TikTok, but one can sweet-dream
Firefox does have an excellent setup for multiple spaces, groups of tabs, etc.
I tried once on my old 2018 i9 macbook, and was able to get to 2100 tabs without needing a plugin to unload a tab.
Having tabs organized in groups for projects is really useful. Especially if it can be paired with a window manager to keep groups of tabs ready to go between multiple spaces/workspaces.
> Maybe if they just made history more obvious then that would change the equation.
Session history presented as a list that loads the session in a new window if mid-clicked and/or expanded if left-clicked from which each tab could be imported in the current one would solve this problem.
On Firefox there's a function to bookmark all tabs which roughly does a similar job but it's less immediate.
Save it + state as a bookmark sorted by days.allow nn to sort it topological " your obsession with frogs" finally on return to the topic "search frog" allow for a revisit of the past im chronologoc order giltered by topic similar to a search result.
I despise this behavior, they also love to unload the tab with my mobile boarding pass that I so neatly prepared at home, and attempt to reload it when I'm trying to fumble in front of the TSA dude, and inevitably crap out because the session cookie has expired.
They should at least maintain a "last known good" screenshot.
I am kind of in awe of people who have this much trust in their browsers. I guess being raised on tech when just having a single OS session booted for longer than 8 hours was an achievement - it starts to train you to never trust these things. For instance on Windows 95, you would write something out in Word, go to save and then it is like the whole system was just day dreaming into a blue screen. That quick creates a behavior were you do not true the stability of anything.
But I guess its not like that nowadays. The other day I checked the uptime on my system and it was 130 days and that is nothing abnormal. I feel like some people only reboot their systems on major OS updates. Like M1 Macbooks that have only been restarted 3 times. We take it for granted now.
Can't care to lose it if you place little stock in it, you know? Nice to have, not required!
I do this, if I lost my dozens of windows with an order of magnitude more of contextual tabs... No matter. They're still in history, and partially, my memory.
The Jira tickets or whatever begetting that information still remains. There is a reason calling for it, if that's lost in the process - hurray! This can be a good thing, too.
For what truly matters, context can be recreated - the workspace was disrupted, that's it. That can happen to nearly anyone/anything. Singling out browser state is interesting.
I'm in awe at the people who curate things to never look at them again. Eg: bookmarks. Maybe there's an exhibit I missed. I have no FOMO; there's plenty to mind.
My position is aided by the fact that my operating system includes a window manager. I don't have to shuffle things, just get back to work. Window class "work-firefox" is always run on business day login, appearing on the assigned workspace
If something ever happens I can restore ~/.mozilla/ from backups and lose no more than a day, which includes all the tabs and addons to support having that many (Tree Style Tabs). It's been a very long time since I've had to do that though.
Interestingly, since I installed a solar system, and hence got access to real-time electricity consumption, I now shut down my machine every night.
To be fair I use it as a terminal to my work PC, which stays on, so it has very little "state" of its own. And it boots in 8 seconds. Both attributes which make this fast and convenient.
This is a desktop not a laptop so it's as fast to shutdown as it is to hibernate so nothing failed from hibernation or sleep mode.
It doesn't save a -lot- but it's saves enough that I can measure it. (Couple kw/h over 14 hours).
I tend to also shutdown m laptops most of the time, unless I have been interrupted while doing something that I plan to continue a while later. They boot so fast these days and in contradiction to the 7500 tabs user mentioned in the article, I like starting from a clean sheet.
that's an expensive desktop power wise (especially if used only as a "thin client"). Even 50w would be a lot for that. (I'd agree still measurable, but measuring in multiple kwh over only half a day, is mid tier gaming pc territory)
Eh, there are Zen+ APUs that'll use that much by themselves. I think you can expect 75W from any given full-size/wired PCIe slot.
One can have a desktop that's as efficient as a laptop... but you lose part of the exchange; mobility for power. The consumption/heat is less of a concern, solar aside. Plenty of room for cooling and components :)
I had a system that would idle at over 150W, not counting the three displays that cumulatively match that. Transceivers use mildly less power than 10GbE Ethernet... but still consume a bit of your budget.
The extension “OneTab” is a great solution for this, at least in reducing the technical consequences of so many tabs.
It dumps all tabs in a window into a list. You can just as easily send those tabs back into a window, or “export” (copy+paste) the list into a text file.
Though what I really need is something that can I can dump a link into from either mobile or desktop (or consume lists of links) and produce a self-hosted searchable archive on my NAS. For example there are many HN threads I’d love to have something to archive both whatever the link was, and the associated thread with all of the comments, with increasingly rare checks for changes, saving the differences in case of censorship. Finally, being able to add both automatic and manual tags for the listing, and a way to search either the tags or text content so I can find that cool project I want to get back to, or they insightful comment.
Actually that’s another thing I’d love is the ability to highlight specific comments or sections of pages and give them their own set of tags for searching.
Such a thing would clear up my “need” for so many bookmarks/link lists, because it would actually complete the task I want to accomplish.
OneTab is my solution to tab hoarding as well. Its "send all to onetab" button is like flushing the toilet of my ADHD brain, and if I ever need a tab back, it's searchable!!
(I've been using onetab for almost 3 years and never gone back and actually re-opened a tab I sent to onetab. But it's kept my open tabs very clean that whole time!)
I’ve actually gone back successfully several times, just enough to convince my lizard brain that “yes it was all absolutely necessary and worth it”.
Unfortunately many times this isn’t successful, and I would absolutely get more use out of it if I could just type “VFIO” or “Linux security” and pare down the search space to find that cool project, documentation or gotcha in a comment that I wanted to refer back to that’s now just a fuzzy blur in my mind.
But I do agree, the vast bulk of it is just coping mechanism to try to soothe the panic of potential loss resulting from the fire hose of novel information falling through my colander brain.
At that point, how different is it from just searching your actual browser history?
It’s an honest question by the way. I don’t think I have ever felt the need to have more than 10 tabs open at the same time - that was when cross-referencing things in Jira - and I generally have no more than 5 open. I would like to understand what I am missing.
My open tabs constitute a much smaller percentage of my total browsing than the history, even though there's useful stuff in both.
Speculating (extrapolating?) for someone who keeps a lot of tabs open: tabs represent desired history, closed tabs represent stuff they might specifically want to ignore.
It's almost useful to think of creating two "close tab" buttons -- one that sends the tab to the searchable service, and one that just ditches it.
> Speculating (extrapolating?) for someone who keeps a lot of tabs open: tabs represent desired history, closed tabs represent stuff they might specifically want to ignore.
Yes, it's basically an effortless replacement for bookmarks. Especially if you have Tree Style Tabs or equivalent, opening a link in a new tab creates a child tab that treats the parent as a folder. For example, the way I use it, all HN posts are children of the homepage, and the homepage can be opened/closed like a folder in the sidebar. These go arbitrarily deep, so interesting links from that thread become children of the thread, etc etc.
I also wonder this. I feel burdened if I have more than 9 tabs open.
W.r.t. the difference to browser history though: I literally never find stuff when looking through my browser history. I either forgot on which website I found something, or what the name of the tab was. I sometimes wish that searching the browser history also searches through some additional metadata, like the sites description meta tag or something like that.
I made for myself a rather crude solution, that works very good for me. Basically I run a simple HTTP server with busybox-httpd and serve my own new tab page. The new tab page is a bit hacked EasyMDE (markdown editor) with live preview. It saves automatically to disk so I can use Syncthing to distribute the file. I need to add automatic Git commits, but for now it works good enough for me. I managed to cure myself from extensive tab keeping.
For mobile it is more crude as Firefox extensions are more limited. I just use Markor to see the file and Syncthing just works.
I think about making a WebExtension out of this just so I could automatically sync links from the markdown file to a specified bookmark folder.
I prefer Simple Tab Groups for roughly the same purpose, but it took adding some mouse gestures (in particular a simple one to switch to the next/previous group) to really make it useful. Annoyingly firefox is a bit hotkey/gesture hostile at this point.
To keep on-top of tabs in Firefox, I use 'Auto Tab Discard' [1] to discard tabs after a certain amount of inactivity. Then when I need to clean up my list of tabs, I click on any discarded tabs I want to keep, and then use my extension 'Close Discarded Tabs' [2] to clear the rest.
Firefox has a decent task manager view that I use to identify rogue tabs like that. Shift+Esc -> sort tabs by CPU usage (it lives at the URL about:processes and can be found under 'More tools' -> 'Task manager' too). I imagine that's how you discovered it was LinkedIn? Though if you're not a tab hoarder it might be fairly easy to discover just by trial and error...
I kill LinkedIn tabs via task manager all the time. Yes, that is how I had figured out that it’s the culprit in almost 100% of the cases.
In fact just killing the tab and refreshing/reloading it helps, when I need that tab.
This (and some of the comments here) is so wild! Sometimes I think I’m the only person who closes his browser completely at the end of the day, and doesn’t have -any- long-lived tabs. Everyone browses in their own way, I guess!
> Currently, Firefox users can create different user profiles to segregate workflows and open tab sets, but more granular tab organization is on the way. Mozilla says it will roll out an improved profiles system and new tab management capabilities later in 2024.
Works perfectly for me. I have a tab group for every possible activity on my computer - Banking, take-out food, one for each research topic, one for each software or hardware project I am working on, and so on.
Altogether thousands of tabs, and STG manages them without a hitch.
I do the same. I think I have about 50 different tab groups using Simple Tab Groups.
I wouldn't call it working without a hitch. It's not crashing often, but it does occasionally, usually associated with a Firefox update. There's something wrong with the way either that addon, or Firefox itself, manages updates that have been recently applied. I've started making sure I make a backup of my tabs before Firefox does any updates, because it's almost certainty something goes wrong.
Usually I just need to restart Firefox and nothing else, but sometimes Simple Tab Groups has also lost the containers I'm using. That is a real pain in the ass to recover from.
Mine is set to back up automatically every day, but I never had to restore, touch wood. Occasionally the icons go wonky until the next restart, but that's the only issue I've beer seen.
Quick warning to all the folks here praising OneTab. The extension is wonderful for easily, quickly saving, importing and exporting tons of tab links, but for me at least, it has crashed more than once over a couple years of use and completely erased all the links I had saved to it.
I learned to periodically export all my OneTab links in the extension's export option and save them to text files named by date range. I'd suggest the same or similar to anyone using OneTab and obsessive about saving tab links.
> memory impact of running that many Firefox tabs is actually "marginal." The session file containing all 7,470 tabs is only around 70MB in size, and Firefox optimizes things by only loading tabs into memory if they've been opened recently.
Tabs were not actually loaded. It is like saying there were 7500 bookmarks.
My use case is about 200 tabs, with memory savings disabled (open weekly news at once, no waiting to page load). Firefox was quite unstable with this, until a few years ago.
I am a broken record on this.
"Tab Session Manager" + "OneTab" people!!!
- Save all your tabs and windows which come under a single topic (say "Buy car", "Learn OpenCV", "Work") as a named session using Tab Session Manager
- You can restore, replace your saved sessions at any point in the future. You can also edit sessions, add/delete tabs, windows from the drop-down menu.
- It also backs up your last 10 (can be adjusted in settings) sessions.
- Very frictionless and intuitive UX.
- Send all the rest of your unclassified tabs (interesting hackernews articles, your readinglist) to OneTab
It opens as a pinned tab but yeah maybe about 10 - 30 seconds when opening it for the first time in a new session. I am patient with it since i figure it probably takes a while to load my 5,000 or so tabs.
That's nothing. I have 10000 tabs in 24 windows (according to winger).
Its an amazing technical feat to handle that ...
But a total UI failure because this isn't what I wanted.
In comparison, my Safari session is well managed in several tab groups.
Interestingly, the 'Close Duplicate Tabs' things made the situation worse, because it takes ~5 seconds for the overflow menu to show. I guess they are doing some work on the UI thread.
Not the OP, but I also have a lot of tabs. In every browser I’ve tried the bookmark manager is rather primitive. I once ran into a Floccus bug that duplicated tens of thousands of bookmarks and discovered bookmark managers also don’t scale very well.
The bigger problem with bookmarks for me is the inability to manage relationships. With the Tree Style Tabs add-on in Firefox and vertical tabs in Orion, child tabs are opened in a tree. It codifies my search context and makes tab management quite easy. The analog in bookmarks is using folders, but they’re rather tedious to create when bookmarking and I can’t think of any browser that will auto-create nested folders when bulk bookmarking tabs.
Will it automatically create the folders based on the ancestry of tab open events? I acknowledged that you can nest folders, but find it incredibly tedious to have to do it manually. If you know of a way to carry the tab tree over to bookmarks I’d be very interested in knowing how.
Absent that, it’s considerably easier to leave the tabs open. The tree will even be restored when the browser starts should I need to reboot.
It seems like it would be awfully easy to lose a lot of "links" when you inevitably have a crash and the browser loses all your tabs forever whereas ff and chrome both have sync which can restore your bookmarks.
Why can't tabs just be a visualization of browser history with the most recently used entries cached and bookmarks can go to hell (aka just be used for a hotbar)
For me not really. Open tabs are a TODO list, that are organized by work session. They get opened next to each other while I am working, and when I come back to that work, I find the tab group. I clean them up when I no longer need certain pages, and only leave open the ones with unfinished business. I visit literally hundreds of pages that are closed per open tab.
It is like I have a huge desk with papers that appear to be strewn across it, but actually are organized and the layout is important to my train of thought.
Support different groupings, regexp renaming, persistent original date order + additional last used orders, etc. (I have a longish list of wants).
I want better autofiltering on history (eg: dump all map url's that proliferate on every slight viewport change; dump all (say) HN links unless explicitly saved; save type XXX, quesry type YYY's for saving, etc) and overall more thought on easy organisation and "restoring" a particuar view of the internet from X time ago.
1) Just because something is dumb doesn't mean there is any good reason for it to be that way, but also 2) it in fact is that simple for Firefox, with the exception that it kind of forces you to have at least one active tab per window.
For me, i never really liked tab groups. I prefer to organize my tabs under topical windows. Tab groups is kind of an ugly duckling in that paradigm, but thats just me.
It seems to be a cycle. Begin a project, and try to keep the Window dedicated to tabs for that project. Tabs are open for electronic part datasheets, API documentation, etc. Then somehow i pop over to HN and open an unrelated link. Next thing, the window is polluted with project tabs and HN (reddit, etc) tabs. Rinse, repeat.
I would say 90% tabs are unimportant, but I am afraid to nuke the session from orbit because there are some hard to find links / important ones in there.
I solve this by keeping a digital notebook. I have no idea why this is lost on so many people.
Each project gets a new note in Obsidian or OneNote or whatever note taking tool you are using. Each day gets a new #H1 heading with the day. Any relevant URLs get added to the note.
At the end of the day, review your notes and clean them up to be concise. Explain to your future self what you did and why those links are important.
Then close your browser tabs, they are saved in the notes.
If you need the content from the website itself (maybe you are concerned about the site disappearing), use something like Pocket or copy code snippets, text, etc directly into the note. Screenshots help too.
I’m pretty sure the Venn diagram of people who are focused and organised enough to maintain and prune a daily list of links and people who might open thousands of tabs is empty.
Personally, I have stopped trying to understand why people do it. I’m just not wired that way. I am fairly sure my way of organising and sorting through information would be similarly bemusing to someone from the other side. If you are in product, it’s just a good reminder that you are not representative of your users.
> I would say 90% tabs are unimportant, but I am afraid to nuke the session from orbit because there are some hard to find links / important ones in there.
Having moved 13 times in my life, I have the opinion and strategy, which I also apply to things I own, that something is of no use to me if I can't even recall it is there.
Thus according to this strategy I would just nuke my session and start from a blank sheet as I won't be missing it. For the same reason I donated and sold tons of stuff over the year before each move because I realised there is no point owning something you use only every 10 full moons or can't even remember it is hidden somewhere in a storage room. You can borrow/rent that to someone.
Besides, you should still have the links in your history.
Personally I open vast sums of tabs because, unlike browser history, tabs are organized in windows that help you maintain context for whatever you were thinking of when the tabs were opened. In an ideal world, I'd eventually go back and bookmark, tag, and close them. Unfortunately there are very few options for cross-browser tagged bookmark sync.
I suspect the major browser vendors are not incentivized to create a solution for this problem. In the case of Microsoft and Google, they'd prefer you avoided bookmarks and asked their search engine so that they can serve you ads. Apple has never prioritized cross platform conveniences, so that leaves out Safari. Firefox is better about this, but only with other instances of Firefox.
those 10000 tabs are not really open you know? It's just a list, it's like opening a huge file, the better editors only open a portion of the file to memory and not the whole 10 gigabyte file
Question: do people who open tons of tabs ever middle-click to open a bunch of tabs to follow a rabbit hole? If so, how do you keep track of which tabs you've already seen?
Example: When I read a Wiki page, I middle-click on links to open up a bunch of tabs to read in sequence. After I read each tab, I close them so that I remember I've read them.
I can't think of a workflow in which I would keep tabs open -- seems like I would lose track of what I've read and what I haven't. How do many-tab people not lose track?
1. I installed an extension (can't remember the name) that makes visited links (from history) purple (like the old times) so that I won't reopen a duplicate tab
2. After reading a page I add them to bookmarks in a specific (have read) folder so that they're marked by the star in Firefox URL bar and I can easily check if I've already read them just by looking
Nobody is literally _never_ closing tabs. I might open a couple dozen tabs, closing them as I finish or otherwise determine that I won't want to refer to them again, and leave open the ones that I haven't finished or which I _do_ want to refer to again.
Just to follow up, what is your method for finding those tabs again?
Imagine a scenario where you have 200 tabs open. Unlike bookmarks, they aren’t categorized into folders.
I imagine one can keyword search all open tabs, but that’s kinda like googling them again except you have a filter on what you’ve opened. When would you ever want to do that vs just doing a new google search?
I can sort of imagine having open tabs as a kind of “saved state” when doing research without the additional hassle of curating bookmarks (adding/deleting/classifying). But just curious if people think of it this way.
Windows are folders, and they're spread out across monitors and workspaces. My taskbar is a wide strip on the side of one monitor so it can easily list about 20 or so windows.
The organization is basically that of a desk with stacks of papers on it: impenetrable to others maybe, but completely logical to me.
Lets you, among other things, archive however many tabs you have open and re-open them later.
I flush my open tab once a week with it, and whenever I search for something I was looking at a couple of weeks back, I can just grep through the list of URLs
Mind you, it won't solve the problem that the website content might have changed in the meantime.
For that, archive.is is your friend, but it requires conscious effort to archive a specific site so not ideal either.
Both latest Chrome and Firefox does really well with lots of Tabs. Spending a lot of time to optimise the Browser for Muti tabs environment all while being responsive and causes less Jank. They will freeze and unload old tabs from memory. A List of Tabs that let's you close them with a single click. And Search for Open Tabs.
Compared this to Safari. Not only does opening Tab Overview will reload most of your Tabs, meaning you will either crash your browser due to memory pressure, or you create so much paging Data you write from 100s to 1000GB to your SSD. Quite literally killing your SSD. It also does not freeze old tabs or unload tabs. The only way would be you quit Safari and reopen it often. It is also the slowest browser once you have multiple tabs opened.
These issues had been with Safari for at least 5 - 8 years and even in Safari 18 it doesn't seems to be improved.
I've recently had about 30 tabs open, both in Firefox and Firefox-ESR, on Debian Testing. After over 10 years on Debian, my system has begun to freeze somewhat dependably and predictably when either browser has more than 5 active* tabs.
Sometimes, but mostly not, I'm able to Ctrl/Alt/Backspace to kill X and then resume with startx. If I can do this, I'm able to rescue my session without a hard reboot. More often I must hard power down. And when Ctrl/Alt/Backspace does work it's after at least 20 attempts. I tried reducing the priority of FF, but not sure if it'll help.
Anyway, as a compulsive tab horder, this is a completely new bug for me. But I will never give up, and if necessary I will fight to the bitter end.
*Active as opposed to merely open
Edit: maybe if Ubuntu releases Tabular Tyrannosaurus I'll change distros.
Yeah Firefox has been utterly unusable on my 4GB (with 20GB of compressed swap on sata ssd) daily driver. Just so much locking up & unresponsiveness, input just going missing at points. But I got one of the auto-tab-discarders and it works fine for me now!
It could be anything. Personally I'm a bit freaked out by how much effort has been poured into Storage Buckets, into stronger isolation, and have a fear that there's significant overhead to doing so. But this is a reflexive concern; it could be anything, or just lots of everything.
7500 tabs? That's it? I at times have more than that on a single Firefox window on just one machine, and each of my machines usually has several windows open at a time. Where's my TechSpot article? :)
I keep about ~10 tabs open on a single browser instance. I might run 2 or 3 instances, depending on what I'm doing. I have 2 tabs always open, mail and calendar. The rest are all ephemeral and task specific.
At least once a week or so, the browser loses my tabs (this usually happens after a forced update at night). No biggy, the browser will recover them for me. Oonce every couple of months the browser fails to recover my tabs after losing them. Annoying but no biggie, it was only 10 or so tabs.
How on earth do people keep thousands of tabs alive for years, and never lose them? I do not understand how this is possible. Or do they lose their tabs regularly, but reinstate them manually from browser history?
I don't recall the last time I lost all my tabs. The only big annoyance I've had in recent years is when something caused my tab tree to flatten so all my arranged nesting was gone. I'm more curious how you end up with a system that destroys your session semi frequently?
What do you mean by "lose them"? They are in the browser, stored for next session. Why would they be lost?
Firefox is very capable of managing this many tabs. You can also use things like % in the address bar to quickly jump to any ob those tabs, even, if they are not loaded, which most of them will not be.
I ran around with 4k tabs for quite a while. It does slow down startup of the browser a little though, and that is what made me close most of them.
> What do you mean by "lose them"? They are in the browser, stored for next session. Why would they be lost?
From time to time, usually when Chrome crashes, it restarts without the tabs history saved so you cannot restore them. I also can't remember the last time this happened tho, it's been at least a few years.
Actually, it probably simply closed the wrong window. Just like you can reopen the last tab, you can also reopen the last closed window. I run into this issue all the time when I open a second window and close the main window first.
What are you doing that causes it to forget your tabs? I can't remember the last time that happened. You can use sidebery and let it do snapshots and recover from that. I'm sure there are other ways, but sidebery is a Swiss-army knife for tabs.
The lack of tab groups on Firefox is a major lapse in their product planning.
It's an essential feature and the reason I use chromium-based browsers at my job rather than Firefox.
I've tried the add-ons that attempt to workaround this fundamental lack of tab management issue (Sidebery, Tree Style Tab, OneTab, etc.), and none of them function like tab groups in chromium.
Also, the incessant Firefox crashes on Linux with nvidia drivers when one has hardware acceleration enabled has me often wonder why I bother being ride-or-die with Firefox. (Then again, nvidia drivers f up many a thing on Linux, except chromium apparently)
To overcome the hoarding I use Simple Tab Groups[1], that has auto backup, combined with Auto Tab Discard[2], to completely inactivate open, but unused, tabs.
I reject the use of the term "power user" for someone who keeps 7,500 tabs open.
Reminds me more of those newb users who had several dozen toolbars (and stuff...) running on Internet Explorer[0]. Or... current newb mobile users who need help closing the hundreds of tabs they have running:
Wow, that is a lot of tabs. I always thought it was funny when people would say they have "a lot" and it was dozens or hundreds at most, while I was in the 1500 range.
I like Arc because it auto-closes tabs you haven't touched for 12 hours. I have not missed a single tab because of this behaviour. If I didn't need it for 12 hours, I probably don't need it. And if I do want to go back some time later, it's better to restart the discovery process to regain the lost context anyway.
12 hours is the default. You can also configure it for 24 hours, 7 days, or 30 days. I stick with the default of 12 hours because it pretty much matches my pre-Arc tab pruning habits, just saves me the effort of doing it manually. Arc is great.
Even in the middle of heavy research, I will periodically tidy up my unused tabs. I treat them as completely ephemeral. If I need to recall something, I'll bookmark it or find it in my history.
I genuinely cannot understand people that have hundreds or thousands of tabs open. It seems bonkers to me; almost pathological, like digital hoarding. I would probably hate to see how they keep their filesystem or their home.
or back down to reality: Firefox power user kept List of 7500 tabs open for two years. Those tabs were never all loaded at any point during this period of time. I use sidebery to manage around as many tabs and it backs up the "sessions" and I've never lost anything
How do you navigate 7500 tabs? Like I struggle to find the tab I want when I have about 15 open because they don't all fit properly on my monitor. Do they have the widest of ultrawides or something to be able to read all of the tab names?
Tree style tabs extension, nesting in a manner that makes sense to them, probably other extensions too. I only have about 600 tabs at the moment and am impressed by someone managing more than an order of magnitude more than I.
I had also always a lot of tabs open, but since there is Firefox Focus on mobile, i do the same on the PC by hand. Just open the browser in anonymous mode for everything always. I wished there would be a Firefox Focus version for PC.
meanwhile, some overworked analyst is freaking out deciphering event logs where a single users idling tab is refreshing into a dead link or a dead session.
True story. During this investigation, we learned that the vast majority of users (at least for our product) refresh/close tabs every two days, but takes 40 days to get 95% of users. Two users have had a version of our page open for over two years at some point in the last 5 years.
... which brings up a simple text listing, one URL per line, of all tabs you have open. This would allow you to quickly, easily, checkpoint (or, bookmark) your open tabs.
I, personally, and rsync.net as a firm have offered bounties for this simple feature for over ten years now. I think we offered up to $2k at one point ?
This doesn't need to be a plugin - it is so dead simple and so necessary that it should just be built in.
not sure if still relevant because I now practice responsible tabbing, but in the not so distant past the more tabs that were open in chrome for android on a phone, the faster your battery would die.
Does this mean that this person was using a browser that was 2 years old with no updates run on it? Can you apply updates without restarting the browser? If not, that doesn't sound very smart at all.
no, browser will keep all those tabs when you close, there is a "keep all session tabs" option in every modern browser (well I guess firefox focus is the exception). just don't ever close them. there are session savers too, to back it up.
I'm a shocker for this... periodically i get the shits with it and use an extention to save them all into one HTML (oneTab), then almost never refer to that onetab list...
On most of my computers keeping more than ~300 open seems to eventually lead to a crash, usually seemingly related to out of memory or something. I believe that it happens because tabs have code running in the background that wastes memory - I usually need a PC with 32gb of memory to not have Firefox occasionally crash or trigger a whole graphics stack crash (on Mac, Ubuntu family, and Arch family installs).
On Android,after about 70 tabs it starts to fail to open the tab navigator at the current tab consistently, often starting at the beginning tab, necessitating closing and reopening the tab navigator until it decides to open next to the current tab.
I believe browsers have had to adapt to this by basically converting tabs into auto-bookmarks that have advanced caching or something. So they automatically unload and have logic to determine when they are actually supposed to be active.
I wonder if eventually tabs, history, bookmarks, and tab groups will be completely merged into one flexible and intelligent feature.
On wider screens, a left sidebar might open by default with tabs stacked vertically.
Not sure but it seems like people don't use tabs as originally intended.
Maybe if they just made history more obvious then that would change the equation.