"% foo" will search your open tabs for foo. See https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/awesome-bar-search-fire... for other characters that will filter the search results for other data such as bookmarks, history, tags, etc.

And even if you don't use %, the awesomebar will include open tabs in results if it thinks them relevant!

Cool trick... But I wish it did a full text search as it appears to only search URLs and tab titles. (maybe there is a different symbol that does full text?)

Add a '#' to further restrict the search to page titles.

You can also configure the character used to search only tabs (I use ",") with "browser.urlbar.restrict.openpage" in about:config.

Wait, Chrome doesn't have tab search built in?

Jeez. TIL. Couldn't live without it.

It's unfortunate because back in ~2010 I used to open over 1,000 tabs in Chrome at a time. It's very useful when doing research: each window represents a topic, and each topic can spawn 30+ tabs.

Nowadays Chrome keels over at around 150, like you say. It also leaks memory like a sieve, so if your hard drive is anywhere close to full you'll end up with a lovely OS X popup saying all your running programs have been frozen and that your system is out of memory (since it can't page to disk because it's full).

I frequently play a little game with Chrome:

1. Open up Window->Task Manager

2. Sort by CPU

3. Tap back and forth between tab clusters with single digit+ CPU usage and the "End Process" button as they bubble to the top of the list

4. Try not to kill extensions

5. When I'm not seeing too many >1% processes, sort by memory usage

6. Kill everything over 99mb

7. Continue enjoying Chrome

Every time I do this little dance, I think: this would be much more fun as a little Space Invaders style video game. Wave 1 of enemies would be processes that bubble above 1%. Extensions would be friendlies. Wave 2 is high memory processes. It'd be fun to get a little score every time.

Of course, Chrome should just have a "use less resources" button that did all of that for you.

I have a bash script called `kill-chrome-helpers` that kills all Chrome processes without terminating any Chrome windows. It kills extensions too, but whenever that happens Chrome pops up a bubble saying "click here to restore the extension", so usually I just run the script and then click a few times. The script is dead simple:

   killall "Google Chrome Helper"

This has the annoying effect of turning every page into a crash symbol, but it's pretty easy to just refresh a whole row of tabs.

A couple things. First, it's best to avoid using `killall`. On Linux it searches the process list, but on Solaris and possibly other nixes, it kills all processes system-wide. Using `pkill` is a better habit, but read the manpage first because it matches a little differently.

Secondly, check out this extension for Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspende... . It auto-suspends tabs that haven't been opened for a given time period (I think the default is 60 minutes). Can also whitelist domains, etc. I've been using it with great success for a long time now.

No, that is rather a Solaris quirk. That's ancient (literally) sysv behavior and killall in neither OpenBSD, nor FreeBSD work like that today.

So in practice, what you're saying isn't relevant to majority of *nix users today.

I also use many 100s of browser tabs almost all the time. The Opera browser in 2009-2011 used to handle 500 tabs easily for me. These days I am often sitting at >200 tabs in both Chrome and Firefox on same machine.

I'd like to see a command line interface to manage my open tabs, so that I can see which tabs are going to be "expired" soon (unloaded into a stale tab, or converted into bookmarks as long-term cold storage) so that I can manage which groups of tabs I would prefer to continue to be running, and do bulk maintenance on what's "very cached" and "mostly cached" and such. I would imagine something like buku/jotmuch that has HTTPS API access to some extension in my browser. (I mean, the right way to do this is DCOM/RPC but see lkcl's eternally ignored pleas...)

One alternative I tried for a while was xmonad + a plugin to label individual windows. Instead of using browser tabs, each page would be loaded in a new window, and each window would be given a list of tags by me when leaving the window first time. With a keyboard shortcut, I was pulling up a list of possible browser windows that matched a search query about tags. I don't really care about tabs/window distinction as long as the interface gets out of my way.

Have you considered doing a quick extension to monitor your tab usage stats? At minimum you could track details like: Open/close rate, tab revisit/reload rate (longer than a second), tab lifetime, groups of tabs (such as tab creation relationships) and their lifetimes. Once you have this information, you could probably tweak your browser's build configuration to more closely match your habits.

vimperator aka pentadactyl. works really well and if you press the alt key you get the "standard" menu back. it increases screen real-estate, and i love it. it's by no means perfect but i won't go back to standard key bindings in firefox... ever. yes i also have 200-300 tabs open in firefox, and maintain them there for months at a time. firefox continues to eat memory (i got a laptop with 16 GB of RAM just to cope with how insane firefox gets) so a restart is necessary on a regular basis... that's done inside pentadactyl with ":restart".

ok clarified with you later that i meant xpcom bindings not keyboard bindings :)

There has got to be a better solution to this problem than having 1,000 tabs open in a web browser. That sounds like an absolute nightmare.

I don't understand this perspective. It's similar to saying "Surely there's a better solution than having 1000 files on your file system. That sounds like a nightmare."

It's not like you're actively monitoring every tab at once, you just have the knowledge ready to go and at a finger's whim. You use extensions like Tab Hunter to jump directly to the tab you care about.

Yeah, you could do the same with using a bunch of profiles and bookmarks... but then you need to copy your login cookies and such and it just becomes a mess. I've tried many, many other solutions over the years and simply having a huge number of tabs is the one that continues to Just Work.

> It's similar to saying "Surely there's a better solution than having 1000 files on your file system. That sounds like a nightmare."

No, it's similar to saying "Surely there's a better solution than having 1000 radio/tv channels tuned on at once, waiting for you to decide which one is relevant"

Like why not open what you need when you need it rather than squirreling all those "maybes"?

Different people are different. When researching a question without a direct answer, it's more effective for me to open up tabs as I read a page and then search the most likely candidate. Whenever I reach a dead-end I can just switch tabs as opposed to pressing the back button N times. zzalpha's comment sums it up nicely: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14824086

I know I'm a power user, but I miss how effective old Chrome was at this.

The same approach works well for forum discussions. One tab representing the forum, and child-tabs to track the comments section.

For instance with HN, tabs provide quick navigatable references back to discussions that are relevant to my interest, and that might contain lead-off liks/references after they have fallen off the front-page.

I'm a chronic tab abuser as well, often with over 100 tabs at once. 1000 tabs still sounds insane to me.

Well, I'm running 600+ in Firefox for no particular reason. I guess that makes me only 60% insane.

I'd compare it more to bringing a stack of books to your table at the library. Just because you could notate the name and position of each and fetch them as needed doesn't mean it's not helpful to have them all handy. I've never personally used that many tabs for research, but vetting sources often requires taking a look at a lot of different links for any given subtopic.

Or that you don't know which tabs will be useful until you open them, and your qualification process is multi-pass.

It's not the same as having 1000 TV channels turned on at once.

No, it's like having 1000 radio/tv channels available at once, which you can tune to any one of in a mere moment.

Ok let's say you remember seeing something on a tab but couldn't remember which one it was on. How do you even begin to find that tab? With 1000 files on my file system I have any number of ways of searching not only the filenames, but also the contents of the files, visualizations based on size of the files, etc etc. I don't think it's a good comparison.

So what do you suggest is a better way to find the information, that would end up being less total work for the user?

I don't think the person you're replying to was referring so much to implementation details, but rather more to function for the user. What if the browser had better support for finding items that are open in tabs?

Given the limits of human memory, I wonder how many of those 1,000 tabs are duplicates?

I'm not sure that there is. Bookmarks don't work as well because you can't preserve a session as easily. For example, I can just create a new tab group for a project that I want to work on, and then it will stay in the background until I have the resources to work on it.

I don't know about other people, but I find it really useful to research a project and then leave it alone for a month or two before working on it. When I do this I often have a better perspective on the project than if I were to just jump in. With my setup, when I return to it my session is just as I left it; making it very easy to get up to speed.

You can bookmark tab groups (at least in Firefox) that's what I do to save a session.

With a lhs vertical tree-style tab-manager, I'm at around 100-200 tabs. It works the same as an expandable chapter/section navigation metaphor, except I control the content and nesting.

I'm curious, do you not have tons of tabs open? Do you just use a few at a time? A typical day at work will require at least 50+ tabs for each customer that comes in, plus Google/StackOverflow/Slack for whatever I'm researching, not to mention a few SoundCloud/YouTube tabs for music, while browsing Reddit or HackerNews, and then whatever I have racked up to read later. I'm open to another solution though, but can't think of one.

I typically have 5 - 30 tabs open at work depending on what I'm doing

A breadth-first search of the web is likely to do that kind of thing. Nothing wrong with it.

Maybe the Web is as much to blame as Chrome.

Average webpage size has ballooned in the past 10 or so years.

Damn, I should have waited to comment. I even phrased it the same way.

/me smh

Ha! Echo chamber indeed.

Worth noting that average page size has ballooned ~5× in that same time period.

only 5x ? I would have said over 10x maybe even 20x.

I have never opened 1000tabs in chrome but I can manage 100-200. I've noticed that a lot of this responsivness comes down to extensions. If you have only one bad extension it kill the performance of chrome. Another thing are ads ofc or sites with lots of (poorly written) javascript, but with ublock origin Chrome works fine for me.

Also by 200 the GUI of chrome starts to annoy me so much that it forces me to close some stuff. I've tried a few extensions to deal with this but I've chosen to keep it clean and below this threshold instead.

I hesitate to say that Chrome leaks memory because of what you're seeing. Webpages have exploded in size over the years (both with high dpi images, css, and javascript). I'm not sure I have quite as many tabs as you, but I generally work the same way (window per topic, tens of tabs per window).

Would a plugin like The Great Suspender fix your problem? I really liked that you could collapse a page of tabs into a collection of bookmarks and open a new page of those tabs just as easily.

Out of curiosity, and because the article doesn't delve into it, why do you have 150 tabs open?

In the course of my regular browsing, I usually have 3-4, and never more than 10-15. It's not something I've ever considered to have that many tabs open

As far as I can tell it's all about depth-first vs breadth-first.

I find the same people that like to open lots of tabs also prefer tabs that open in the background.

Why?

Because the browse breadth first. They'll be reading something and in the midst of it, see something they want to dig into, and open a new tab while continuing on the page they're currently on. This repeats a few times, and then once done with that content they go the next level down. Then lather-rinse-repeat. This causes a queue of pages to form (and BTW, for you programming newbies out there, this is a great way to visualize how recursion-less breadth-first tree traversal works).

I tend to be much more depth-first. When I open a tab, it's because I want to start exploring what's in that page. So I always have my browser focus new tabs (and screw you, Chrome, for only making that possible through an extension...). Then I'll pop back out and continue. In that model, you can just throw tabs away as you're done with them.

This is broadly my process, too.

I'll do a search, and background-open all of the results that seem responsive as I skim them, to read in depth once I think I've found "enough". Most of them of course get closed quickly upon ... uh, tabbing to them, because they weren't as material as I'd thought from the summary.

Then, sometimes (read: often), I'll recurse.

This way, in my experience, I tend to find more (as in quantity) relevant info, from which I can sieve quality of info, than if I were to serialize my search, going depth-first.

YM, as always, MV.

I strongly suspect this depends on a) the person and how they process information, and b) the kind of research being performed.

Usually when I'm researching, it's typically because I'm searching for the solution to a problem. In that case, a large quantity of information isn't useful. I just need an answer, not a survey of all possible answers. So once I find it, I can abort the search. Researching breadth-first may cause me to build up a queue of tabs unnecessarily.

If, on the other hand, I was researching to synthesize large quantities of data from multiple sources, absolutely your workflow makes a lot of sense.

> Usually when I'm researching, it's typically because I'm searching for the solution to a problem.

I find that when I'm searching for a/any solution to a (specific) problem - "depth first" will be ok. But I'm usually searching for the best solution to a problem - and then I find that I normally have to "skim wide" - partly to figure out if I'm looking at the wrong problem (it's just a symptom of something else), and partly because something like 80% of stuff that I find online is outdated, wrong, not-well researched or all of the above.

> I just need an answer, not a survey of all possible answers

For me, sometimes when I need a direct answer, none of the answers found are that direct. Sometimes I look at an answer, gauge the effort it would take to investigate if that would work (code changes, whatever) then move on to see if there's an easier answer to verify. When I run out of those options, then I want to come back to this answer and try it. Doing this it's pretty easy to get my number of tabs up pretty high!

On the other hand, for research, yes, lots of tabs are the norm.

I wonder if Google has enough data to look at the search history of (150+) tab users and make a correlation with mental health searches.

I've often felt that the number of tabs I have open was both a symptom of ADD and something that made it worse.

Yes, this breadth-first description is a good way to characterize my reason for having lots of tabs (though I don't have nearly as many as some people here say they have).

One additional factor is that I think I was trained to do that by slowly-loading websites. If I open a site in a new background tab, it can go about loading as slowly as it wants, and it'll be ready by the time I get around to reading it (I guess this would be ruined by lazy loading tabs...).

Try using Pilgrim[0] if it's breadth you're concerned with. It's a simple reader bookmarklet that also creates a linked map of all links in a page[1], letting you visualize the breadth of linked info in a tree and glide back and forth between them in a simple way.

I just found it today and already I love it.

-

0. http://pilgrim.are.na/ 1. http://i.imgur.com/z78eybj.png

Kudos for the great explanation!

In a lot of ways, my open tabs are my to-do list. Some of them are things that I need to do, some are "I want to read this article when I have time", some are long term research.

I've tried doing things like bookmarking things to read later, or saving them to Evernote or Instapaper or whatever, but I never went back and actually read them. Ever.

So, this workflow actually works for me, even if some people would consider it unwieldy. It actually works pretty well, until Chrome starts getting annoyed. I probably average more around 120, but I've got a couple of projects happening simultaneously right now, so I'm up around 150 at the moment.

I too use tabs as ad-hoc to-do list. In fact I have tab open right now that is open since at least 2011 as the relevant project is on kind of on back burner right now and the tab got in some way repurposed as a separator between stuff linked from HN/Twitter/FB/wherever and stuff that I explicitly searched for.

Also, 150 isn't really that many, resource-wise. A modern computer should be able to handle that trivially. So even if my use case was unreasonable (I obviously don't think it is, obviously), there's no good reason a browser shouldn't still be able to support it well.

Modern webpages aren't just electric paper though. Often they are very dynamic and interactive applications. (Regardless of whether or not the content warrants it)

Personally, I keep generally 1 window per topic and multiple tabs in that window. They're kind of like medium-term bookmarks. For example, I'm shopping for a carseat, looking for a replacement for my front gate, working on a React project, a RaspberryPi project, and playing with Vagrant and Ansible for something else. I start something, but have to set it aside because of something is blocking me (I need to solder stuff together for rPi, verify my kid's hight/weight for the baby seat, talk to the wife about the gate, or I just get in the mood for switching projects).

After I finish a project (or abandon it) I can lose all of the tabs.

Unfortunately, this can end in 100s of tabs open at a time.

At work it's very similar. Especially, because a lot of things are interrupt driven and I'm jumping between short, medium, and long term projects.

I use them instead of bookmarks: with Tree Style Tabs, I can pause a task, collapse it's subtree(s) and come back later with the complete state intact.

I wonder if the 100+ tab people are also the ones who can handle dozens of cups of coffee a day. I guess I'm boring. Whether tabs or coffee, I do 1-2 at a time/per day.

It's not like people are suddenly opening up 150 or 1000 tabs due to hyperactivity! :p. I know in my case I just keep my browser open and things tend to just keep going and eventually I have hundreds of tabs open over the course of ... a week? A month? I'm not exactly sure. Occasionally I just shut the browser down and start over.

FWIW, I use safari as my primary browser and it seems to handle many tabs fine, though I'm sure I don't get up to the thousands of tabs that people are reporting. I can't say I've thought about how many tabs it can actually handle, though, as I do eventually clean things up, bookmarking tabs that are actually worth something and discarding the rest.

I often have close to 1000 tabs open (How do I get the count?) I'm also very sensitive to coffee and cannot do more than 2 a day.

I use tabs like I used to use bookmarks. I use tab groups, so I will maybe have a group of rust tabs, C++ tabs, and HN tabs open. This can add up over time.

Honestly, I find that the built-in behavior is good enough: go to the location bar (ctrl-L), type

    "% <substring>"

and it will search through all open tab titles as an autocomplete thing. It doesn't search tab content (probably good since most tabs won't be loaded), but it's good enough for me most of the time.

Great feature, completely undiscoverable.

Not to at all dispute your use case/requirements or anything, but as a depth-first browser user, I can't even fathom a world in which 150 tabs qualifies as "moderately" large, and not "how many tabs???" large. And 1000+ (as cited by a sibling poster)? Wow!

I wonder if this "I want to read this but I'll set it aside for now" model of browsing might be better served with a different UI metaphor...

> I wonder if this "I want to read this but I'll set it aside for now" model of browsing might be better served with a different UI metaphor...

Sure, you're welcome to design it, I'll even give other methods a try occasionally, but for me every other metaphor has proved worse in some way and I'm perfectly happy working this way, there could be something better, but it isn't bad in a way that I feel needs to get fixed.

We'll, I can think of one obvious problem right off the bat: when you accumulate enough tabs they're no longer discoverable.

Many folks here have offered extensions or workarounds for making finding/searching tabs easier, but to me this is an issue introduced by the UI metaphor, and maybe better solved some other way.

Maybe.

I just observe that tabs seem to be a cumbersome tool for a very legitimate use case, and I gotta think there must be room to innovate.

Discoverability is a bit of a weird metric, if you have very few tabs you don't really need discoverability since you just put the tabs there. So this isn't really strictly worse when you have many tabs.

Have you tried tree-style tabs, for instance?

Sure, I think they take up more real-estate and didn't really improve my workflow.

I'm under the impression that no one (or at least very few people) who have 150+ tabs open at once actually use the tab metaphor, at least by itself. I've seen several people in this thread who discuss a tool for searching tabs. Such a person would seldom click on, or even look at the tabs themselves. They would only interact with tabs through the search system. They have already found a new metaphor. Another common system for dealing with large numbers of tabs is building heirarchies. For example, some people have several browser windows open, each wih several tabs in it. One could limit each window to 15 tabs, and only have 10 browser windows open. Roughly equivalent methods include firefox's tab groups and tab tree. Tab tree in particular stands out as a separate metaphor from tabs. While it maintains the ordered list of favicons & titles used by tabs, it adds a new piece of information to each tab, allowing you to more easily determine the correct tab to switch to.

The better UI metaphor IMO is tree-style tabs. It lets one organize tabs in a similar manner to a folder tree in a file explorer. It's great for research, where you'll need to repeatedly reference many different sources, and maintain a chain of how you found each source.

I use Tab Center (now Tab Center Redux), which shows you the tabs on the sidebar (great for >20 tabs). The sidebar also has a search bar to search open tabs!

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-center-re...

Besides that, by default (no addons or settings necessary) Firefox's awesomebar (the URL bar) will search open tabs if you type stuff. This is great because often I'll want to open a site and it will show me that I already have a tab open for that and let me choose to just switch there anyway. I am surprised Chrome doesn't have this yet, really.

Firefox already does this - that's why it's the awesome bar. You can see it in action here https://youtu.be/pKE0Oc3yIBs?t=53

Awesome bar is nice, it's like using a crippled opera from 10 years ago.

Sadly, I have found that almost any new feature of browsers these days is like using a crippled opera from 10 years ago.

Firefox's “Awesome Bar” will suggest open tabs and let you switch to them like any other site.

Yep! No need for extensions, you can see it working here: https://youtu.be/pKE0Oc3yIBs?t=53

Do you have saved sessions with lots of tabs from chrome that you were able to import into firefox? Hoping there's an established method :)

Tabhunter; hugo search; All tabs helper;

there's tab groups and tab groups helper but this will be dropped by firefox in november so ...