It'd be nice to have them slowly fade away so I didn't have to make a decision because most of the time, I don't need the tab and wouldn't even remember that it's gone lol.

With `%` to search across open tabs, and an unused tab not really taking any meaningful amount of resources (especially with Auto Tab Discard) I open a whole load of tabs, close them if I realise I'm done with them while I'm looking at them, and if I don't close the tab then that's fine -- it's probably scrolled off the left of the tab bar where I can't see it and it'll get cleaned up in due course.

...No way. That's my TIL for the day. Am I the only one who didn't know about this!?

While bookmarks accumulate over years and lose relevance and context, my tab collection acts in a revolving manner where old ones fall off as often as new ones are added. Their arrangement also forms an informal categorization system that requires very little effort; I hate trying to organize bookmarks, but organizing tabs is almost automatic. And while I do keep a lot of tabs (300-500 on average), the fact that they’re not free (they take up screen space and memory) prevents me from going overboard and encourages me to frequently cull tabs that have lost relevance.

All in all, I think my usage of tabs has come to reflect the way that I think and work, like an extension of my medium-term memory. That’s why I keep a cache of them.

The fear of not being able to recall information is a classic busy-syndrome feeling. Sometimes I also have to tell myself “I’ll probably remember what I worked in yesterday, so maybe there’s no need to panic after all”.

That works for the general case but sometimes I search a solution to a problem (possibly without even knowing how to search for it so lots of experimentation) then find a possible solution after much sleuthing. But then... I'll have to record this somewhere so that when I encounter this problem again, I know what to do, where to find help and won't waste another 30 mins of my life to the same problem. That record keeping has friction, needs a commitment and I'm probably busy. And there are probably a couple other valuable sites I found that would help with the problem's domain in the near future. So I /may/ need to reference them in the future. So better record it somewhere, but I don't have a good "system" so don't know where to put them. Bookmarks are already a cesspool. I have documents for projects and note taking but it will need some explaining before I describe the problem to make the result searchable. Did I say I was busy? I'll do it later... but now another problem pops up. More sleuthing, tabs accumulate, same problem, twice the size, twice more procrastinated debt.

Yeah, I can close them all. But I /emotionally/ want to avoid the pain of finding myself in the exact position of a few hours ago, having that annoying problem without a solution. I don't want to waste more time on this. I will eventually forget the solutions I found. I need to keep track of all this. But don't have the time or motivation.

Then, path of least resistance is accumulation of tabs - inaction.

What if you're never done? I have so many tabs open about things I was researching or studying. Something else came up and I had to prioritize... Eventually I forgot about the tabs.

Bookmarks for frequently visited recurring links.

Bookmarks that I visit multiple times a day (Calendar, Email, etc) get pinned.

The problem is when I have stuff that sits around for longer like the Fast AI course I'm doing. That window is taunting and mocking me.

Edit: Looks like I have this in a tab because I meant to finish reading it. 7 months. I have a problem.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24737026

  #pageActionButton {
    display: none !important;
  }
  .urlbar-history-dropmarker, .urlbar-history-dropmarker:hover   {
    display: none !important;
  }
  #TabsToolbar { visibility: collapse; }

I also separate the issue by window too and also use tabs and windows as temporary bookmarks really. not worthy of a full bookmark but not finished with.

I created an webextension to deal with handling those tabs because having a bunch of tabs across a bunch of windows is not the most ergonomic without one. might be useful for someone here I suppose: https://github.com/fiveNinePlusR/tabist

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

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

Anything unpinned is temporary, and I only pin a few tabs. I also heavily bookmark and quickmark (qutebrowser) things and can usually get back to them easily.

I don't remember what changed my behavior, but I had incidents in the past with running out of RAM and swap and my whole PC hanging despite having 16GB of RAM, so I probably just scared myself straight.

Things feel cleaner when I have fewer tabs, which I think contributes to my mood being better. If I'm ever partway through a deep-dive or project that involves a lot of open tabs, I find I feel stressed. Sometimes I even decide enough is enough and close them all, feeling near-instant relief.

(I'm abundantly sure the correlation isn't 1, so simply citing your own experience, alas, won't do much.)

Add in a page of search results, 3 or 4 of those opened, HN and some article I'm reading during "clear my head" time, and I'm at 20.

I'm usually working on multiple tasks, many of which take multiple days. I have tried to group tabs in windows thematically, but browsers are shit about respecting that (for instance when opening new tabs from other apps).

I'd rather read what's in my tabs than mess around with them, so I tend not to fight it.

How do you open these pinned ones? I used to do this as well, but since browsers got better at fuzzy matching (or whatever it is called) in the address bar I figured this keyboard-only approach gets me to commonly visited sites faster. Ctrl-T (or Alt-D to reuse current tab), yc, Enter -> I end up on this site.

And multiple day tasks, I still can’t imagine why you need all the tabs. For me, I get in, get what I need and get out again.

They are things like GHE, monitoring, DNS, our CA. Things I use/change literally every day, some of them I'm in constantly. I don't pin things I don't use all the time.

Multiday tasks are typically research-heavy, closing things is equivalent to "loosing my place". I suppose I could use "bookmark this group of tabs", but it hasn't really mattered when I can just... leave them there until I come back.

Someone should develop an actually good Alfred like tab finder for Firefox and I’m golden.

In the last week it was down to 157 a day. Because I've spent more time in head-down coding.

5 tabs an hour, hah.

Generally 300+ tabs in firefox. Mostly in chunks corresponding to home or work projects that take months or longer to finish.