One of the Test Pilot attempts in this area was Snooze Tabs: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/snoozetabs/

The engagement on that experiment wasn't very high, but I later went and read some of the user research and felt like there was some unmet potential: the concept was understandable, the functionality matched at least some real use cases, but it still didn't work, people didn't use it.

Obviously Pocket is intended for this purpose as well. It's personally what I use for this purpose, though there's always a kind of in-between state where you aren't quite sure what you want to do with a tab. If you make it easier to save the tab, there will always still be a point when you aren't sure if you want to save it or not...

As far as I'm aware Mozilla hasn't done deep-dive research into tabs. Not all of our research is public, but we do post a public index of the research: https://firefoxur.github.io/

I would _love_ if firefox handled lots of background tabs better, my biggest complaint is how the browser UI lags with lots of background tabs open. This seems like its a scheduling issue, operations in background tabs should be lower priority than foreground tabs and should be pre-emptable so the user interface never lags. I'd be ok with manually pinning tabs I needed to run javascript in the background.

This is on a high spec dual 8 core xeon workstation with 164gb of ram and a radeon rx480 running latest kubuntu. Less than 100 tabs open, most of them basic references. If there was a bit of hardware I could buy that would fix browser lag I would.

I use uBlock with fairly aggressive settings (so lots of scripts probably don't run), but Firefox handles 100+ tabs on a fairly average Thinkpad fine for me. Worth checking if it's running in multi-process mode as it should.

Back then I had regularly around 150 open tabs in my old Opera on a notebook with 4GB RAM without any problem. But those were the times without big js-heavy webapps/sites like these days...

Hah! A hardware browser accelerator as when you buy a hardware audio dsp. That'd be fun.

I was thinking more ram, faster ssd or better gpu... but a browser accelerator that worked would be pretty cool :)

> Less than 100 tabs

Find a way to organise your stuff better? Whip up a page of links and use that? Dirs of shortcuts or something?

Having 50+ tabs open can't be an efficient way to manage your references.

Tabs will likely be grouped by task as they are opened either around the same time or often as as a new tab from one of those windows. Another key advantage of open tabs is they save the state of the page you were on when compared to bookmarks.

There's obviously benefits to a more robust way to manage your work state. I'd view it in a similar vein as the advantages of a tidy desk: Some people lack the discipline to keep that state and can somewhat compensate for some of the disadvantages i.e. by application of spatial memory and the advantage of having everything to hand.

If people are going to do things the wrong way regardless providing them tools to improve their situation can still make sense.

Its not unreasonable, people frequently talk about hundreds or even thousands of tabs open here on HN.

I have 8 virtual desktops with different projects open, R studio and Jupyter notebook windows plus reference reading material. The work I do typically involves long running tasks and checking back on projects or doing some add on analysis. It takes way too long to get everything aligned right and started up on different monitors so this machine is always on.

I'd expect web browsers to be able to handle this without ui lag if the hardware is good enough. At this rate, I might run firefox in separate docker containers per virtual desktop just to keep it smooth. Would benefit security too...

As to the tab management, older version of Opera had tab stacking, which I've found pretty good for tab management. You could stack tabs into themselves to create a cluster of tabs that could then be rolled, so that just one of the tabs was visible, and later unrolled for using those tabs. I think Vivaldi copied the feature as well.

> there's always a kind of in-between state where you aren't quite sure what you want to do with a tab.

It feels like that's the state I'm in with regard to most tabs. It also feels like these tabs are more important than those I've already bookmarked, which seems paradoxical.

One user research task is often to give names to ideas that we don't otherwise know how to describe. Like in bookmark research they distinguish between bookmarks that represent something you saved, vs. bookmarks that represent some navigational shortcut you are creating for yourself.

For tabs, I can imagine different ways of thinking about them:

1. An activity you have to complete. Or start. 2. A piece of information you think you may need to be aware of. 3. Something that interests you, but you are leaving for when you are in some particular state of mind (e.g., ready to read something long and involved). 4. Something shared with you, that you feel obliged to respond to. 5. One of a set of things that represents some pending task. 6. Something information you may need to revisit. Or you may have finished it, but it's yet to be "garbage collected". MDN pages usually fall in this category for me – I'll quickly come back a couple times to the page, but I only know I'm "finished" because I don't come back. So it sits there.

And for each of these there's the state of "maybe". Maybe I'll need this. Maybe I'll need to be aware of this. Maybe I should reply to my friend about this.

I use tree style tabs with auto tab discard and use suspended tabs as ephemeral bookmarks. Since Firefox opens all of my previously open tabs whenever I restart the browser they can survive reboots. If a tab sticks around long enough and I don't end up reading it I'll throw it away. I've always felt like browsers were missing something in between a tab and bookmark; kind of like a scratch pad for internet rabbit holes.

Most of the time, my tabs are holding information that I'm using to complete a task. Once I complete the task I close any tabs related to it. Sometimes I leave a URI in my code as a reference to find the ideas again.

In this case the tabs act as both a reference, and a "task" waiting to be finished. If I finish the task I can close the tabs. Gives me the incentive to finish what I'm working on.

Also thank you for Python's Virtualenv, paste, and webtest. I know your not much into the Python scene anymore but your contributes still effect my day-to-day activities.

>more important than those I've already bookmarked, which seems paradoxical.

It's not paradoxical at all - bookmarks are long-term persistent storage, tabs are short-term volatile storage. Data stored on disk isn't less important than data stored in RAM, but any given datum stored in RAM is a lot more likely to be accessed in the near future.

Same reason my physical desk is full of papers. That's exactly what all my open tabs are, all the various papers and pamphlets etc sitting on my desk.

Doesn't mean I really will look at any of them any time soon though, it's not exactly a _succesful_ information organization method in either case. Which means, yeah, it might be ripe for some clever UX. It's not at all clear what this should be.

> It also feels like these tabs are more important than those I've already bookmarked, which seems paradoxical.

Maybe they're not more important but they're more urgent? Since they're ephemeral whereas your bookmarks are still going to be there when you reboot.

Well, my tabs are also still going to be there when I reboot; For any modern browser that currently works and I'd consider "just losing" the tabs as a serious bug.

Yeah, but we still think of them as ephemeral. I mean if a colleague lost work from open tabs I'd put a larger portion of the blame on them than if their hard drive dies and they lose bookmarks.

I built an extension for chrome called Lovely Tabs about 10 years ago that allowed snoozing (amongst other fun features). What I found was that while very convenient, I over-relied on it and just continued to resnooze over and over again. It built up to the point where it was unusuable.

The real issue is that (many) people are bad at managing state, particularly for things they want to theoretically read later but never will. Giving them an unlimited snooze mechanism is not the answer. Either it must have constrains to force clean up, or another “solution” should be attempted instead.

Was the snooze time exponential? If it would e.g. double every time it might just work

I fear that one big advantage, that tabs kept in working memory, including pages in the back history, makes it very fast, just can't be helped beyond a certain mass of tabs. Tab suspension sure would help with crashes at the limits of memory, but with a small, full SSD only, it's limited too.

For a large amount of tabs, it is more important to have them visible and easily accessible than to have them loaded in memory. It's ok to keep only recent tabs in memory and reload older tabs, but it's good to have both shown in the same way and avoid "out of sight, out of mind".

Except if I have changed the site through interaction, or entering text in formfield. I imagine that's difficult to save. The browser can't even tell the difference between unwanted loads like ads. This way a save file could grow quite fast.

Snoozetabs and tab need to make a baby so i can snooze a group.

You could do this with tab snooze and OneTab. OneTab compresses all open tabs into a list of HTML links, and you can then pull those into a tab of just one OneTab group, and snooze that. Maybe 3-4 clicks.

I love Snooze Tabs!

I keep lots of tabs open because of "projects".

For example, let's say I'm planning a trip. I will have tabs open for Google Flights, Airbnb, Trip Advisor, Google Maps and so on. A single window is one "project". It doesn't make sense to have those tabs open all the time -- just when I need them. Yet I have to keep them open because browsers don't have a way to treat a single window as a kind of persistent tab set. The best browsers can do right now is to bookmark multiple tabs as a folder and then later restore them. That's not too useful since there's no way to update this folder the same way.

What I'd like is to have windows be "named". I want to save my window as "Puerto Rico trip" and close it. Later I want to open it again and continue where I was. At all times my tabs and history are associated with the same "project".

I've been longing for this feature for maybe 10 years now. I started developing it as a Safari extension once, but ran into limitations in the API's support for opening windows.

Doesn’t quite solve your issue, but creating a bookmark folder “trip planning” and saving all relevant sites into it and the folder onto your bookmarks bar - then right click on the new folder and click open all. I have a few sets of pages I load like this.

Such a load of hassle though. Double clicking a name section on the title bar and closing it would be way better. Have references to windows all autosave and be accessible from any other window in a window menu.

I found a chrome extension a year or so back called workona [0]. It _kind of_ did this, but was fairly limited and I gave up on it. Might be worth taking a look at for your use cases

[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/workona-tab-manage...

That's the reason for me to use Totally Not Panorama [0], but it seems that Panorama Tab Groups [1] development is more active.

I can have a separate named tab group for every project and also for work. It could be integrated with container tabs.

It's like old Tab Groups/Panorama that was once built in Firefox. It is a bit manual, because one has to move groups and tabs around, but it's quite intuitive.

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/pl/firefox/addon/basic-panorama/

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/panorama-tab-...

Thanks, I just tried them both. They don't work well, sorry. Aside from the terrible UI, if I open a bunch of tabs and give them a name, then close the window, and open a new window, the groups are gone. This makes no sense. The groups must be persistent. Once named, they must never disappear.

If I open a bunch of tabs as a named group, then open a new, blank window, then enter the extension's UI, the list of groups only has my current window. Makes absolutely no sense. The "group" state has to be global (and visible on all devices, which I doubt this does).

The extensions also seem to be doing something weird by hiding tabs, which Firefox was warning me about.

I understand. I don't mind, because I keep single window and use those groups like windows. But I've been lucky with not stumbling upon weak persistency, so I get how it could be frustrating.

Warning about tab hiding is normal. I assume that something that you would find perfect also would have to use tab hiding.

They need more work or something separate, because the manual resizing of groups seems like a busy-work. I would like something more like Simplified Tab Groups, but with good syncing as you said. I'm not sure how would it work with current Firefox APIs though. If extension shows you the same group for two separate widows, what would happen if you would select the group in both of them? It would have to create additional tabs so they would not be shared. Also I'm not sure if tab hiding API allows to mix tabs from different windows. I think that what you want is not possible currently as an extension.

Not sure why tab hiding is needed. I want the extension to track my activity, not interfere.

The only two point when it needs to do something is when I want to restore a "group" that has been saved. If I close tabs or windows, nothing needs to be done; my hypothetical extension would already have saved their state to a database of some kind on every change.

As for multiple windows: An "open" group would be associated with a single window. You wouldn't be able to open a new window for a group that's already live and in use.

Try the Onetab extension. Invoke it on one of your project windows and then name the resulting link group and make it a favorite. Message the Onetab preferences to your liking first. Very clean solution.

Thanks. It's unclear if Onetab does what I want because the UI is so horrible:

- I open a bunch of tabs.

- I click the Onetab icon. It closes all my tabs. What?

- It's now showing me a page listing the tabs I had open. Ok, I can name this group. I name it "Foo". Then I hit "Restore these tabs".

- I now have my tabs back. Great.

- I click the Onetab icon. It closes all my tabs again, and this time my named group is gone, replaced with an unnamed group containing the tabs as they were. What?

- I restore the tabs again (sigh).

- I open another window with some tabs. Maybe I can save this window as a separate group. I click the Onetab icon. It closes all my windows!

It's completely nonsensical. From what I can tell, Onetab is designed to wrap all your current windows into one group that can be saved and then restored later, but restoring it actually deletes the saved group.

It's as if you had a photo scrapbook in real life that disappeared when you opened it, leaving you only with the photos. Then, when you want to put the scrapbook back on the shelf, you get a new scrapbook and put everything back in.

I actually wrote a plugin that aims on solving similar kind of problem. It lets you name windows and has session persistence. No ability to save/reopen windows, but it's a neat idea. If you're interested it's Window Titler: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/window-titler...

Cool, but not sure how that helps. The whole point is being able to close a (named) window without losing its state, then later restoring it.

There's a Firefox addon called Tab Session Manager.

It's fully functional and does exactly what you say you want. It could use some UI improvements though.

I've tried it. Maybe it's buggy, but it doesn't do what I want at all, unfortunately.

Tab Session Manager doesn't have a link between your windows and the session state. All it does is snapshot the state of your browser.

For example, say I open a few tabs and save the window as the session "My trip". Then I open a new tab in the same window. This new tab doesn't get added to the session. The only way to update it is to go into the session list and click "Add to session" from the context menu.

In fact, it's profoundly stupid: With the default settings, if you open a session, then close a window, it will save a copy of your window state as a new "auto saved" session. You'll end up with an endless list of copies.

What I want: Once I've opened a session as a window, it should track all the activity. Opening a tab should add it to the session; removing a tab should remove it. Closing the window and then click on the session from the list should revive the window as it was when it was closed. In other words, a window's set of tabs is the active session at all times, and the tabs are persistent. It should be transparent, no need to click on things to micromanage it.

Create a new profile for each project?

No, I want my logins, browser history, etc. to be the same between all my windows.

I use tree style tabs (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...) unfortunately it's a bit buggy sometimes, I think the original wasn't but it was rewritten for the switch to the web extensions api.

I prefer Tab Center Redux[1] Even though it has fewer features, it's very polished and reliable. Besides, I found tab hierarchies to be very "messy" in practice. I prefer having a large list of tabs with small thumbnails, with a few full-size tabs pinned to the top.

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

only time tree style tabs were buggy for me in last 6 months was when i implemented css changes (to remove tabs from above the address bar)

I'm kind of amazed desktop browsers don't "pause" tabs when you open more than a set amount (a la mobile browsers). It seems like an obvious enhancement.

If a user only has ten tabs open, pausing them would probably be a bad idea in most cases. However, if a user has 100 tabs open, they almost certainly don't need to have the oldest ones running the background.

Pausing based on time away from target tab rather than number of other-tabs open seems ideal to me. The Great Suspender uses this approach.

I use Auto Tab Discard if anyone is looking for something similar for Firefox.

> Pausing based on time away from target tab rather than number of other-tabs open seems ideal to me.

The two exceptions are audio (including backgrounded video) and messaging/notifications.

If I want notifications from a tab, I pin it. I think that pinned tabs are already a bit more aggressive about keeping that website "active", and it's always on the tab bar no matter how far you scroll. So for my use case at least, the suspender just has to not suspend any pinned tabs.

> I think that pinned tabs are already a bit more aggressive about keeping that website "active"

Just not... around.

Routinely, after both clean shutdowns and system crashes, firefox just loses all my pinned tabs. It's the primary thing that keeps me from using firefox as a default all the time. There's weird 'restore last session' and folder searching you can do to try to maybe 'recover' some, sometimes, but... WTH? I'm pinning things - I want them around. If I didn't want them restored on browser launch, I wouldn't 'pin' them. Unless pinning is intended to be transitory, and I just missed the memo?

Never had it lose them for me in an extremely long time. Restore last session has always happily recovered them too, if necessary.

sometimes 'restore last session' doesn't even come up when loading up. :/

It might be too late for you to see this, but this is an option in the hamburger menu, even if no pop-up window shows up when you start Firefox.

I'm using pining many years and they have been persistent so far. Crashing and losing all tabs is a risk though, but it was a long time ago.

And I imagine that some websites might do things that take a long time, like a heavy upload, download, or something that takes a lot of processing (e.g. loading a game). In those cases, I would think that people would rather just have them keep working in the background while they focus on other stuff.

Safari does. If you don't visit a tab for a while, it gets unloaded.

Wow, in that case, Safari does an incredible job deciding which tabs to pause! Desktop Safari is my primary browser, and I've never noticed.

They probably leveraged this behavior from iOS, so they had a headstart

I use an extension called The Great Suspender to do this. It's not amount based but time based.

If OpenList [1] on Chrome was ported to Firefox (ahem, someone please do this), you could do this trick: * Use openlist to copy the list of URLs that you currently have open. * Paste the list into something. I use sublime because it will remember your _unsaved_ tabs. * Paste back into a new window later with OpenList to open them all.

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/openlist/nkpjembld...

This extension is also really helpful for mass URL-manipulation when you're too lazy to write a full script, but want to mash on some API. Someone please make a 1:1 port :D

Just to let you know, per you request I've ported OpenList to the WebExtension format (so that it'll work other browsers as well). It's really a 1:1 port, nothing removed, nothing added.

It's available on Firefox Add-ons: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/openlist/

The sources are available on my fork: https://github.com/Outpox/OpenList

Holy damn, thanks so much. I didn't expect my cry for help to go anywhere.

I use the Simple Tab Groups plugin for this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/simple-tab-gr...

It allows you to move tabs into named groups. Only tabs from the active group are shown in the tab bar, and you can switch between groups using an icon in the toolbar.

As a pre-Quantum Tab Groups user, I find that Simple Tab Groups is considerably more stable and has a slightly better UX than the old support. So A+ for that. I still feel like there's some missing "secret sauce" here, but I haven't had the time to really delve into the problem to suss out what that might be.

I do love that tab groups are malleable to the user's concept of organization, not some artificial notion such as grouping by website.

Unfortunately Simple Tab Groups (or maybe some internal feature it uses, probably hidden tabs) somehow leak resources and end up eating all the RAM for me.

The end of Panorama (or Tab Groups as known nowdays) was a disaster for me, as I don't hesitate having over 3k tabs open.

I've been using https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sync-tab-grou... for hundreds of tabs.

When I open up a tab group with many tabs in it, the extension loads all of them up (snoozed) in a way that takes a little bit of time to complete, but it works well.

Is Simple Tab Groups the current best replacement option? I still haven't upgraded from FF56!

I use https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/panorama-tab-... and have been really happy with it.

You can also try https://addons.mozilla.org/af/firefox/addon/conex/

Works similar to tab groups, but each group is in it's own container.

There's also Panorama view: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/panorama-view...

IMO yes, and I've tried a few. It's only really now that the new tab group plugins have reached parity with the FF56 versions, but they have done :)

I also use tabs as a way to park a series of items for later consideration. It sounds like we really need a stack or queue for links (or we're treating the tab bar as that). But the tab bar eats up resources (UI real estate if not memory).

Thinking in terms of queue operations, my ideal UI would let me push tabs or links to a special bookmark folder, the queue folder.

You could use menus if you had to, but to avoid menus, there would also be a mock tab permanently open that always displayed the next page in that queue folder. I could bookmark that displayed page to save it more permanently. I could close the page, which would remove it from the queue completely. Or I could send the page to the back of the queue.

A queue folder like that would be persistent across sessions, but wouldn't load every single page on every startup.

It'd be a bit like grouping all unread tabs by default, but also constantly storing that info in a folder as a backup, and having a really easy way to pop() tabs from that folder.

"you are about to open 2,800 tabs, this may take some time, are you sure you want to continue?" Or a similar message I got a few days ago. Been spending time cleaning them up. Yep, I open a lot of tabs. I'd long ago have run out of memory but I never enable JScript, which seems to be what eats memory (palemoon on windows FYI).

I don't know if you meant JavaScript or not, but JScript is an actual thing that is (somewhat) separate from JavaScript, commonly abbreviated as JS.

> A lot of people think that JScript and JavaScript are different but similar languages. That's not the case. They are just different names for the same language, and the reason the names are different was to get around trademark issues.

Douglas Crockford via Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JScript

Yes, and the following paragraph goes on to note differences and even calls his statement "not completely true". At one point it may have been more true than it is now.

I genuinely did not know that! I've always presumed JS = JScript = JavasSript = ECMAscript. Hmm. In this case I meant the native scripting in palemoon (which is an FX fork I believe).

I have an extension that I wrote because I am similar to you and always had a hard time finding the tab I wanted. You might find it useful:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabist/

also chrome https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabist/hdjegjggiog...

Source code: https://github.com/fiveNinePlusR/tabist

Something I have been intending to write whenever it bubbles up on my list of priorities is a "melting tab" extension, which would let you open a tab with a limited lifespan. The vast majority of tabs I open don't need to live more than a few seconds, until I read the content and move on. If I had a simple mechanism for spawning a short-lived tab, I could consume content this way and have it melt away after a few minutes without any bother on my part. I think this would solve most tab proliferation. If I want to recover the content the page would be in my history anyway.

Have you considered OneTab (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/onetab/)?

It lets you put tabs into groups. The groups are really just a collection of links. I've found it useful for not having tons of tabs open. If you have tabs open for a long time you want to get to eventually, simply dump them into OneTab. In practice, I've found that most of the links I dump into OneTab never get read. Which turned out to be quite alright for me - I've wasted enough of my life browsing the web. I now aim to dump all open tabs into OneTab at the end of each day, so I start the new day with a clean slate. If there was any important link, it's always still there in OneTab should I want to access it.

It is not open source. Someone seems to have made an open source equivalent (have not tried it): https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/better-onetab...

> I usually keep lot of tabs opened and I known I'm not the only one to use Firefox (or any other browser) like that.

I'm surprised nobody's taken a cue from Apple's Stacks[1] to automatically group them by source.

[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT209101

Tree Style Tab[0] automatically builds a tree of which tab opened which, and allows you to hide stuff based on that.

[0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

I use this add-on and it's great. My overall tab count has only risen a very small amount since I adopted this tool and I feel like I actually "work through" the open tabs in a more timely manner. It helps to see something like "(4)" to denote Child Tabs, and to know I have a bunch of Stuff waiting for me to sort through.

As long as they don't make it unchangeable. Of all the tab management systems I've tried, none of the automatic sorting mechanisms have worked for me as well as manual tab management.

I like overflowing tabs into multiple rows, ctrl-pgup and ctrl-pgdn to go left or right, and ctrl-tab and ctrl-shift-tab (with the ability to hold ctrl and keep tapping to skip to the next tab without counting intermediaries as visited), and I've never gotten that from any browser but Firefox (and I think Opera in the past).

One of my use cases for long-living tabs is short-living content: pretty often I have a time to take a quick look at it but not to dive deeply nor to stash it (preferably in HTML or something that's just friendlier to grep than quick screenshots). For quite some time I'm reminding myself, among other things, to look into why Ctrl-S in browsers sometimes initiates redownloads that result in pages with comments that differ from what I see in the browser at the same time.

I recommend you try the extension "Auto Tab Discard": https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc...

It uses the native tab discard method to automatically reduce memory usage of inactive tabs. This way you can have lots of tabs without slowing the browser down.

For other extensions I use: https://galambo.wordpress.com/2018/12/25/firefox-extensions-...

A very long time ago, there was a third-party macOS bookmark manager that did "smart" URL sorting, which was so much better than alphabetical sorting. Basically, it was something like sorting by:

TLD -> domain -> subdomain -> string

For example, www.metafilter.com and ask.metafilter.com would be sorted close to one another, as opposed to the former being in the "w"s and the latter being in the "a"s.

Really wish that had become the standard ...

Well, I had a go at this problem with Tab Jump List addon. It creates temporary window-specific bookmarks. Might be handy at times, https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-jump-list...

> Bookmarks are hidden behind menus

Alt + View + Toolbars + Bookmarks bar

I don't really get why this defaults to hidden.

Pocket is what I use for this: https://getpocket.com/

(Unaffiliated, just a user.)

Pocket still isn't open source after being acquired by Mozilla two years ago.

I use tree style tab along with tab suspender.