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.