Do you find it a normal use-case to have 40+ tabs open in a single browser window?

I only ask because that seems like it becomes unusable ~20 tabs, maybe this is heavily subjective but I cannot maintain anywhere near that number of tabs in a single browser window.

I rarely have fewer than 40 tabs open... I usually have about 80-110 but I would like to bring it down to about 60 or so though. Tree Style Tabs makes it easy to gather up tabs but when it comes time to delete them I hesitate or they're hidden under a top tree node where it would take too much time to clean it up.

I think I just found an extension that could replace Tree Style Tabs. I was looking for something like this last month didn't see it. This puts the Tab Groups in the sidebar. .

Pano: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/pano/ https://github.com/teramako/Pano

What I like about this extension is that the tree would only allowed to get 1 level deep. With Tree Style Tabs, many tabs I don't want anymore can hide under a top tree node. Also, it looks like it will play well with Tab Mix Plus and I can keep the top tab bar.

Honest question -- why?

The only time I have more than 2-3 tabs open is when I open a bunch of articles at the same time (like on HN), to read through one-by-one, closing them as I go along.

How do you keep track of all those tabs? Why not just use bookmarks, open what you're interested in, and then close it?

I'm sincerely interested in this from a UI point of view...

And if your interest is speed in visualization, if the answer isn't a special list of sites that browsers might pre-render in the background, so your favorite sites always "loaded" instantly?

I have tons of tabs open mostly because I hate the back button. Every time I open any new page it goes in a new tab. Any time a page will be relevant for more than the next five minutes, it gets moved to the front or back of my list (depending if it's for business or pleasure). If it might be interesting, it floats in the middle, otherwise it gets closed.

Admittedly this is probably a strange way of working with the web, but I like to be able to easily find things that I've been working on recently. Only at the end of the day do I fully scan through my tabs and bookmark anything I'll need to reference later.

My pal has this usage pattern, as well. Seems nutty to me, but it goes to show everyone has their best way of working.

My primary complaint about Tree Style Tabs is that the nesting gets unwieldy. I have been meaning to check out Vertical Tabs (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vertical-tabs...). It's by the same developer who made BarTab. Some of the reasoning behind it is explained here http://philikon.wordpress.com/2010/05/01/tabs-tabs-tabs/. It similarly limits the tabs to a single category. I'll have to try out this Pano extension too.

I sincerely did not know about the tree-style tabbed browsing feature. I attribute this to my initial apprehension in adopting tabbed browsing to begin with, thanks for the info!

I also think this has a lot to do with browsing style as well. For purposes like my own I rarely need to have more than 5-10 pages actively open. I make extensive use of bookmarks and generally group my tabs in separate windows for organization purposes.

With tree-style tabs (a fantastic Firefox extension) opening large amounts of tabs becomes more common because you can manage different lines of thought, and everything else sort of collapses down. I commonly have about 100 tabs open.

I could understand a tree-style view to help categorize, I will have to check that out as it sounds very nice.

I was asking from a perspective of standard tabbed browsing that doesn't have a form of organization like this; IMHO under such circumstance so many tabs would be unmanageable or confusing at very best.

I've never observed Chrome to choke when upwards of 50 tabs are open, while firefox, back when I used it, would fall over with around that many. So experiences vary.

I'm in your boat. I was stress testing it earlier (probably Chrome 11, under Linux) and I could put 100 tabs with actual content up without too much trouble. Switching tabs was slower, but not unusable (~700 ms to switch).