With Firefox's tab-groups, the fact it doesn't load tabs at startup until you switch to them, and the TreeStyleTabs extension I can easily and efficiently have over a hundred tabs "open" and everything still stays fast and efficient and uncluttered.
Basically, I never use bookmarks anymore - when I'm researching some topic, I do a bunch of searches, open a bunch of interesting results, and when I need to task-switch to some other topic I shuffle them all off to a tab-group, name it, and come back to it weeks or months later.
Another good application is having a tab-group per project - I can have a collection of tabs with API docs, SQL docs, specifications and such, and stash all that state and restore it almost instantly. As added benefit, since Firefox's AwesomeBar will prefer to complete from the names and URLs of open tabs, an easy way to switch to, say, the "CREATE TABLE" docs when I have a dozen identically-iconned tabs open is to just say Ctrl-T, "CREATE T", Down, Enter.
I personally experience this problem. However, I "solve" it by opening up a few windows. I use specific windows for specific content. So, window #1 is random articles I set aside to read, #2 is work-related research, and so on. It's still not ideal, but better than nothing. I think the issue is that there is only one convenient way to organize open documents -> VERTICALLY. It's just much easier to scan and scroll through (and can't get the issue where the tabs are quickly indiscernible due to lack of space).
Ideal solution (IMO) is multiple browser windows horizontally and tabbed content within each vertically.
Rather than multiple windows, I prefer the tab groups feature from firefox. Keeps all my tabs in one window but keeps the other groups isolated and away.
I will second this recommendation. I'm a big surf fanboy.
Not only does it force me to focus a bit more, but in my experience it loads pages significantly faster than Chrome or Firefox. Which I wouldn't have thought possible, but there you go.
Also, make sure you use a recent version if you need the Web Inspector.
Wow, thanks for this! Didn't realize that the suckless project had a browser. Finally I can get back to controlling web pages with my OSs window manager instead of the weird in-application mechanism that tabs are. I've been missing that since the days of ie6 (seriously).
A friend recommended I try The Great Suspender* (Chrome extension) for dealing with tab overload. I tried it and then disabled it - just didn't seem to work for me for whatever reason. Might be of use to others though.
My current method is to split tabs across various windows. I have 61 tabs open across eight windows (general, project, travel research, accounting, time tracking, articles, etc). It was 80+ last night but I made an effort to cull a few.
Sometimes I use tabs like bookmarks, storing things for later. Articles to read, Wikipedia pages I want to explore, music mixes I plan to download or stream, something I will buy when I can be bothered remembering the password for that store account, etc. It's quite pathetic really.
I always have 2-5 windows open with 5-30 tabs in each. This is an interface problem that needs to be solved, nobody really needs that many tabs open. It becomes ridiculous when you don't want to update your browser incase you lose all your tabs.
I noticed that I am really using tabs as a form of nascent bookmarking. Each window is a group or project and serves as a reading list, and then each tab is an item to read.
With option + click it is easy to add items to the reading stack that you can go back to later.
This could all be replaced with a simple plugin that manages these stacks in a sidebar. You could then go back to using only a single window and the tabs as collections.
Bookmarks are too permanent, while tabs are too temporary - browsers need something in between that is a way of arranging what to read next.
I think the real issue is that back and forward do not work.
They destroy state. They lose their place on the page. They're still not immediate. They've broken server sessions so often that I have (as most have, I imagine) conditioned myself to completely avoid using them.
Tabs were invaluable in the days of slow connections. But new pages load pretty fast these days. The problem is getting back to the original page is fraught with trouble.
At any given time I usually have somewhere between 80-120 tabs open across 3-5 windows. Back when I used Firefox the problem used to be even worse - with the scrolling tab bar, I could easily end up with 200-300 tabs open. That's why I actually consider Chrome's constantly shrinking tabs as a feature - when I can't see the favicons anymore, it usually means it's time to close some tabs :-)
And since one window is rarely enough, I now have different windows for different contexts - HN and related reading have their own window, projects have their own etc. All in all it works out pretty well.
You might want to sit down for this. Are you sitting down? Good.
The browser you want is Internet Explorer.
(I know, right? But I'm serious!)
IE lets you turn off tabbed browsing completely with a simple settings change. The following steps are how you do it in Windows 7/IE 10, they may vary slightly for other versions of Windows or IE.
1) Go to Control Panel > Internet Options.
2) Go to the "General" tab.
3) Click the button labeled "Tabs".
4) In the dialog box that pops up, titled "Tabbed Browsing Settings," un-check the box labeled "Enable Tabbed Browsing."
5) Click "OK."
That's it, you now have your 1998-style tabless browser! Enjoy.
But smacktoward, I'm not on Windows! What do I do for a tabless browser on other platforms?
Despair, mostly. You can turn off most tabbed-browsing features in Firefox (go to Options > Tabs and un-check everything), but all that does is suppress things like new windows opening in new tabs; you can still manually open new tabs if you want to. AFAIK Chrome has no way to turn off or suppress tabbed browsing at all.
But come on, you're looking for a real Clinton-era browsing experience! Chrome didn't even exist back then, and nobody used Macs. So spin up a Windows VM, un-tabify IE, pop in a Third Eye Blind CD and go to town.
Thanks! If you enjoyed this comment be sure to check out my upcoming book, Smells Like Tweak Spirit: The Grunge-Rock Guide To Browser Configuration Settings.
K-Meleon[1] also provides an option to turn off tabbed browsing. Just go to Edit > Preferences > Browsing > Tabbed Browsing and uncheck the "Enable Tabbed Browsing" checkbox.
NOTE #1: K-Meleon's last update was 3 years ago.
NOTE #2: If you are using multiple proxies it has a built-in menu to switch between them. This is its "killer" feature
What you need is Tab Wrangler. It's an extension for Chrome. It will close inactive tabs for you. This means:
- Tabs you don't care about will get closed. Even ones you think you care about but you don't really. If you cared you would have access the tab recently.
- Tabs you do care about you will action appropriately. Either by finishing the task or by putting it into some kind of todo list/kippt/bookmarking/read later/etc.
I find having too many tabs open is taxing on the brain. It makes you feel stressed because you have so many unfinished things to do. It also prevents you from focusing on what is important.
Just kill the browser and restart it. They were useful at some point yesterday. You don't need them today, or if you do, you'll soon find them again. Chill out.
I'm building something (simple) to help with part of this as I known I face the same thing on a daily basis as well, but one thing I can recommend now is using http://www.one-tab.com/. It works well and I find myself not saving things off to read later, but instead just using it to find it.
I have once used OneTab. In the end, it was totally useless for me since it completely destroyed my external memory in the form of browser tabs. Hiding inactive tabs was definitely an wrong solution.
My two cents: The human behavior on tabs is surprisingly akin to garbage collection. Therefore I think we need some solution inspired by the incremental, generational GC. Gradually disappearing tabs may be such solution, for example. Many tabs are created in a group, and such group is garbage-collected altogether; pinned tabs behave like a statically allocated memory; the GC has to be able to determine if the tab is created in the context of other tabs or it is independent to others; if I don't want tabs to be disappeared then I can go to the tab for the extended period to signal the GC not to hide this tab for now; etc.
I do this too, like everyone else, but when I notice there are too many tabs opened, I just bite the bullet and close everything except for the currently opened tab (and sometimes close that too). Manual garbage collector.
If you aren't using it already OneTab is an amazing chrome extension:
http://www.one-tab.com/
"Whenever you find yourself with too many tabs, click the OneTab icon to convert all of your tabs into a list. When you need to access the tabs again, you can either restore them individually or all at once.
When your tabs are in the OneTab list, you will save up to 95% of memory because you will have reduced the number of tabs open in Google Chrome."
1. Read Later/Instapaper.
2. Manual garbage collection.
3. Tab Ahead. Sublime Text's »Go To Anything«-like Chrome extension to help me navigate through the unavoidable mess of my open tabs. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-ahead/naoajjeo...
Opera had multitab browsing before Firefox did (or Phoenix). But then again Opera was paid software at that point.
Nowadays I have a personal rule: If there are more than 10 tabs per browser, close until 10 tabs remain. Unless one of the tabs is this: http://i.imgur.com/9yacZ5b.jpg
Opera wasn't the first browser with tabbed browsing by far. There were a lot of Windows browsers that embedded the Trident engine, and some of them used variants of MDI for browsing. A few of them used tabs, the first well-known one being NetCaptor. Interestingly enough, it put the tabs on the bottom, which makes a bit more sense from a Fitts' Law perspective than putting the tabs near the other controls. This was a few years before Opera switched to tabbed browsing.
Fun to see NetCaptor mentioned here... I wrote it. The first version was released in 1998. I put the tabs on the bottom because HomeSite, the HTML editor that inspired NetCaptor, had tabs on the bottom.
Opera doesn't have multiple tabs so much as little mini-windows in the main window. You can tile and overlap Opera's windows, which is nice, but they're not quite the same as tabs.
I use http://kippt.com/ to store things I want to read later.. I still end up having 50+++ tabs but that way I can close things I haven't read and put them into a queue.. some day I might read them.
The part I don't get is the slowing down of the system. Even with 100+ tabs open chrome rarely gets above few gigabytes of ram combined and hardly utilizes more than a core.
My tab coping strategy is - just keep them open, every few days close all. If I havent checked it in 24 hours chances are it is not important.
It does slow down my system. I'm using MacPro i5, 4GB RAM for development. In my case machine gave up when you try to debug JS/watch video on youtube when you have so many tabs open.
i'd like it if the browser would download the page,
and save it to my hard-drive, with a summary title
(which it might have to generate after an analysis),
and then re-load it whenever i wanted to view it...
(and delete it entirely when instructed to do that.)
in other words, use disk-space instead of memory...
Basically, I never use bookmarks anymore - when I'm researching some topic, I do a bunch of searches, open a bunch of interesting results, and when I need to task-switch to some other topic I shuffle them all off to a tab-group, name it, and come back to it weeks or months later.
Another good application is having a tab-group per project - I can have a collection of tabs with API docs, SQL docs, specifications and such, and stash all that state and restore it almost instantly. As added benefit, since Firefox's AwesomeBar will prefer to complete from the names and URLs of open tabs, an easy way to switch to, say, the "CREATE TABLE" docs when I have a dozen identically-iconned tabs open is to just say Ctrl-T, "CREATE T", Down, Enter.