I just don’t understand how anyone could have less than 14 tabs open at any time. Just using a search engine requires at least 4 at a time, and I’ve often got four or five searches going at any time. And then there’s at least a half dozen communication tabs.

Even when I declare browser bankruptcy and close whole windows dedicated to some topic, I don’t think I can get my total count below 14.

I mean, I get that my workflow is unique, but I’m apparently truly out of touch with typical browser usage.

I regularly have only one or two at once. When I am done with a tab, I close it - this makes it very simple. Sure I might temporarily open 10 at once when searching, but many will be culled within the first 10-20 seconds of reading the page as either the info I need is not there, or I've found what I need so can close the rest.

Occasionally when cross-referencing stuff I will go up to perhaps 5 or even 10 in extreme circumstances, but then - as before - I close the tab when I am done.

For stuff I want to come back to "later" I just use a bookmark instead of just leaving it open.

At work I tend to leave email chat and calendar open all day, but that is only an extra 3 tabs.

In my experience - both at work and at home - it is better to concentrate on only a small number of things at once and try to work them through to completion (or as far as you can get) so you can just drop it from your head when you are done and not need to dedicate and brain energy on juggling all these differen "in-flight" tasks. I find it easier to concentrate and way more productive to finish a task and then move on, rather than context-switching every 2 minutes and wasting endless time hunting for "that tab with that thing I need" on it.

I have this approach too. When working, I might have up to 20 tabs open at a given time, but most of them are just there passively for things like monitoring and calendars.

Some tips for people who are struggling with their tab count:

* Always close all tabs at the end of the day.

* Use different browser profiles for different types of task (eg work admin/emails/calendars/trello vs work-related documentation/search vs monitoring vs nonwork.)

* If you notice you have enough tabs open that the browser needs to shrink or hide them, cycle through and cull a bunch. If needed, you can always find them again later, either just by searching for them or using your browser history.

All non-pinned tabs are temporary. I may get to over 20 sometimes, but I always aim to deal with them and get back to 3 or so. Usually I do it within the day, sometimes I have some unfinished long articles or something that stay open a few days.

I used to have hundreds of tabs like some people. At some point I started to get very bothered by having too many tabs. I don't remember what happened, but I always keep a low count now. I make heavy use of bookmarks and qutebrowser's quickmarks, and have pretty good luck pulling stuff from my history as well. Some tabs just get bookmarked and immediately closed, like if I find an interesting project on github but have no plans to do anything related to it.

I have 18 open right now, and that's a lot for me. That's where I start looking for something to close. None are search tabs, and usually I don't have any. Looking at them now, 9 are only open due to some definite hoarder mentality. Things I wish I would do, that I'm not going to do. For example, 2 are colleges that I was hoping I might apply to 6 months ago, that I know I'm never going to. But oh no, if I close the tabs it's like the decision is final. Well fuck this noise, I'm closing them all now. Done.

Everyone else is saying bookmarks are their solution to exploding tabs, but I've never used bookmarks. I have six on the bar that are just shortcuts to frequently visited sites. I dunno, I guess I just never find pages that are so unique that I can't google them if I need them later. I'm certainly never going to go back to anything that I didn't have an immediate need for the first time. I might intend to, but I know better.

As answered on a fellow comment, my average are 10.

Anything not being used is closed and kept in bookmarks.

> few people use more than 14

I can definitely say there is a selection bias at play here. Tab management as it is in major browsers by default sucks. At more than half dozen tabs, you start losing tab titles, basically playing "Where is waldo". When you go beyond a dozen tabs you can barely see the favicon. Any more and it becomes a game of "Concentration"[0]. When the experience is so horrible, no wonder people don't use more than 14 tabs at once. Give people vertical tabs with nested hierarchy and watch how quickly people go about operating 100+ tabs without losing sweat.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentration_(card_game)

I had gotten up to 1000 a few times. Just never getting back to things to close them, mostly.

It turned have to have huge performance impact, so I don't do it anymore. I got out of the habit a few years ago. I think since then, browser went to lazy loading of tabs on restart.

If you think your system is running slow, cut the number of tabs to under 100, and try again. You may see a huge jump in performance.

The one thing that helped me break the habit of not closing tabs was just installing a tab counter extension. Now, if I see it creeping up towards 100, I know it's time to clean house.

When you have this many tabs, do you actively manage them or even have any idea what they contain. How do you find the information you need amongst 3000+ tabs. Isn't it annoying to have to shuffle through lots of windows with lots of tabs? I start to lose track after a dozen or so.

Because I can.

Hacker News facilitates me opening scores of tabs a day, that and not being able to find the tab I need means duplicating it; although the browser now serves me up with the original one.

I tend to open a new window for a new line of work, so the tabs are over 40 or so windows.

The limit used to be the bowser crashing, or me forgetting to reopen history and so relinquishing the interesting things.

My point is that I’d greatly appreciate keeping this down. I’m currently down to 800 or so, I think the tab history tool crashes Firefox, without it it could go a lot higher.

ADHD can creep up on you

The OneTab extension has done great things for my tab organization, might be of interest to you as well .

I've started on my own vertical tabs addon that can handle many thousands of tabs. Still work in progress...

once it gets to the thousands it breaks down, but in my experience spatial memory + pattern matching on favicons works surprisingly well to navigate a large number of tabs.

I don't think I've ever had more than 10 tabs. Why on earth would anyone have more than a few open at the same time?