Just curious to know why you, or anyone else, need 100+ tabs open. Especially when you say you can have up to 400. Can you remember what's in each? I'm not judging, just trying to understand because it's so different from how I use browsers. When my tabs start to become so small that I can no longer see the titles on them I start to clean up by either bookmarking them or close them. I rarely need to bookmark so I don't have a million bookmarks.

I'm a sysadmin and need to troubleshoot a lot of different services. I use firefox with tab groups (the best thing since browser-sliced bread). I will have one group open for my AWS pages, for example, which will have separate tabs for ec2 instances (and maybe) ec2 volumes, ec2 snapshots, memcache, database 1, database 2, instances in another region, pricing page, monitoring, access management, so on and so forth. All separate tabs, because it takes 5-10s to load a new page in the AWS console, and then you also need to subnavigate that page. Troubleshooting will open up new tabs in-between those tabs. Throw those all in one group. Then, when I need to "do AWS", I switch to that group.

So why bother closing a tab when I can just switch out of the group when I'm doing something else? Another group does mail and google docs, another group does 'Atlassian stuff' (ticketing + wiki), another does build and CI, so on and so forth.

The only problem with this approach is memory consumption, because the modern web developer includes approximately 3/5ths of the entire internet on every page, and I 'only' have 8GB on my machine (non-expandable). Performance is fine for a while, but eventually (a couple of weeks) it starts to grind. Restarting FF at this point doesn't autoload the tabs, so it gives you a fresh slate, effectively.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-groups-pa...

I don't have 400, but I do have 200+, spread across three windows.

I use Chrome's profile feature, to have separate Google accounts signed in.

And my tabs tend to be in "clusters". E.g. I'll have one cluster (5-10 tabs) where I'm doing research on IPv6, another where I'll have a cluster on some JS, another on say, Python list performance etc.

I remember where each cluster is, and even some of the tabs within each cluster - so I just page quickly to that cluster if I know I need to retrieve that info.

Also, I tend to not be that disciplined when bookmarking or filing stuff - so there's that as well.

I'm still yet to find a good lightweight note-taking system - Confluence as a wiki isn't bad, but is still quite heavyweight.

It's actually because I'm so terrible at remembering certain types of things that I keep so many tabs. They are essentially an accumulation of "what I need to work on" for the next few days or weeks, along with the supporting research work I've done to accomplish those things so far. By grouping them in separate windows per task I'm basically keeping all of that context. I could also do the same with bookmark sets, but I've found when I do that I tend to forget about the task itself entirely.

There are probably more efficient workflows, but this one works fairly well for me.

Extensions can impact performance dramatically.

How do you manage hundreds of tabs in Chrome? I used to use hundreds of tabs in firefox, but firefox had an effective tree-style tabs extension...

I tend to partition them into windows once the favicons go away. Otherwise mostly based on the ordering (which I adjust regularly).

Much of the time they are effectively a queue of things to review/skim/familiarize myself with while I'm authoring some code or a design doc. The ones with different favicons tend to be things like bugs where I owe an update, so I scan through them regularly (I'm extremely forgetful when it comes to lists of things to do).

Honestly I know how tree-style management would go for me: I'd group a bunch of things together in a tree and forget about them, largely defeating the purpose of having kept the tab open for me.

For me it is multiple windows, you can shift-select multiple tabs for easier sorting. As in, if the tab bar starts to get illegible I shift-click a sub-topic or other logical range and pop it in a new window.