I'm being using Total Suspender. it's a complement that auto suspend unused tabs, using the tab discard API described on the article.

I don't loose anything. It preserves the state. The usage of ram it's fantastic. And I'm only have around 40 tabs open any time.

This new native auto unload, don't loses anything and preserves the state. it uses the same API!

I can never understand people that have more than 10 tabs open :P When I reach that number I start closing. Seems to me just a waste of space and the whole tab bar is useless and messy (yes, I know about tab extensions).

People should really get back to bookmarks, thats what they are for.

Besides my usual bookmark folders, I have folders to hold temporary bookmarks (ToRead, ResearchSupport, etc...). These I know I will delete after going through the content.

But I wonder if the whole bookmarking thing got frozen in time, and is not sufficient for most people. Perhaps new features are needed in order to become more useful again and replace the whole "keep-tabs-open" behavior

I'm constantly hovering around 100. If you're a developer this is very easy to achieve, as you quickly have to go down rabbit holes of documentation and exploration. Then you have tabs of your app itself, and potentially other things like Figma designs, JIRA ticket, etc.

1404 tabs open here.

Tab bar is indeed messy, I use Tree Style Tab in the side bar. And dozens of categorized windows, each with a name.

I don't need an alternative or better way. It works great and I hope this use case remains supported.

I'd be fascinated to hear how it works in practice to have that many tabs active? Are you able to digest them in any reasonable fashion or even find content later on when you need it?

I can't relate to that amount of tabs, but do have an upper limit of around 100 at which time I start actively trimming them down (either dismiss as having lost importance, digest or bookmark for later digestion).

My bookmarks steadily grow, but are categorized, tagged and labelled in such a way that I can easily find and digest certain types of urls later on when I feel ready for it. They do grow faster then I can consume them though.

I find it much easier to use than bookmarks. It's a great for research, when you have disparate bits of information spread out over dozens of sources. I close tabs as they become irrelevant. A window may have a lifetime of a few days to about a year. When I'm done I save its state using Tab Session Manager. By that time it's a 'best of' on that subject.

I also used 'New Tab Suspender' and 'Total Suspender' add-ons for a while in an attempt to reduce memory usage, but stopped due to Firefox crashes I assumed were caused by them.

You had me at "My bookmarks are ... tabbed".

Please tell me I'm missing something and that there's a way to do this in Chrome so I can access the tags on my phone????

I have about 30,000 unsorted bookmarks.

Yes.

Because I need tagging.

I'm not sure about Chrome, as I use Firefox.

Sadly Firefox does (for some peculiar reason) not give acceess to the tags on the mobile browser.

So I navigate by folder hiearchy on mobile; read > professional > development > android > db for instance.

Mobile Firefox (Fennec) doesn't support tags, but the text descriptions are searchable when entering URLs, so you can key off of those.

Effectively full-text-search tagging.

> Sadly Firefox does (for some peculiar reason) not give acceess to the tags on the mobile browser.

Oh. TIL. That's... a bit of an unexpected shortcoming I wasn't aware of. Hmm...

(My Chrome session is big enough that I don't quite have the RAM to play with Firefox, which I was coincidentally last playing with just as the WebExtensions update kicked in and broke my UI setup. Welp.)

same same for 20+years

i just don't have the time and energy to manage bookmarks it seems. web content also feels kinda temporary so i guess that is a good compromise.

sadly since quantum there is no more tabkit and the alternatives have a LOT less vertical density and the tabgroup-features are not on par.

While I can understand that point of view, Microsoft did studies and found that people learn static UI elements better than dynamic ones that shuffle around. How ironic then that they remade everything with dynamic ribbons, then re-remade everything with static ribbons, going back to their studies from the 90's. Sometimes you just have to change for the sake of change, I suppose...

I would use bookmarks extensively, but the UI elements to add, organize, and manage them have not kept up. We need something more akin to the Windows Explorer, to be honest - it's a great file manager that has stood the test of time since the 90's. Once I hit about 12000 bookmarks, I just stopped collecting more - it was taking way too long adding them with conventional UIs.

That's where tab usage comes in. Bear with me while I explain a use case, as this might take a few paragraphs... I'm also unsure how to word it in a way that avoids sounding arrogant. I'm in IT, but I handle support requests primarily from other IT people and businesses in my little corner of BC, Canada, and regularly handle a thousand or so support requests per week. (with no mistakes or missed details.) My colleagues have dubbed me a hyper-tasker due to the level of sustained speed and detail. But that'd be absolutely impossible without static UI elements. In this case features like tabs and Windows are basically UI elements for the tasks or data required.

I better get to elaborating...

Things that shuffle around slow people down, as now you need to search for the thing rather than go straight to it. Microsoft has published extensive good-UI-design whitepapers... and then proceeded to ignore their own research, a lot of the time. A good example is Alt+Tab - it rearranges previews based on what was last used, so if you have a few hundred things open, good luck ever finding what you want on the first attempt. I use 7 taskbar tweaker to fix that behaviour, plus taskbar behaviour. Alphabetical lists, thank you very much - with no previews. I decombine window stacks for that very reason.

Taskbars have tons of horizontal space - no need to jumble icons up and constantly rearrange them. I want the window for stock websites to be in one spot, the window for programming sites in another, the window for news sites in another spot, the window for /. in another, the window for printer remote servicing and on-site reset procedures in another, the window for videogame stuff in another, the window for looking up local business contact info in another, the window for web developer and Wordpress stuff in another, the window for electronic schematics for boat GPS systems in another, etc...

And when they get too many tabs, I just spill them over to another window, which goes beside the first. Since they are largely static, I can always find the right window for what I'm doing in under 200ms.

Then for tabs, I recognize the icons, and turned off all previews, then enabled keyboard shortcuts, so I can very quickly toggle between them. Again, each tab flip is under ~200ms (Depends on PC performance, but with Ryzen and 128GB, tab flips are always speedy), so I can do 5-10 tabs per second. Makes it quite quick locating what I want. Even if I mis-click and end up on tab 86 rather than tab 110 (out of 200 or whatever in the window), just hitting my keyboard shortcuts a few times gets me to the right spot. Since the tabs are basically a chronological history, I only need to remember roughly when I was working on something or looked up some information, and then I can go back in time or forward in time very quickly using the keyboard shortcuts. These tabs end up fully replacing the back/forwards feature built into the browser. Silly, right? Yet it works better.

Honestly, if someone asks me to flip to some task, it's usually about 3-4 seconds at most to get there, even with well in excess of a thousand open. When you're juggling a lot of tasks throughout the day for a multitude of clients and their clients, this shoots your productivity through the roof. 60-80 emails? 40 phonecalls? Oodles of tickets? No problem getting everything done. After all, all the tabs are up in front of you, waiting to go.

And if for some reason you brain-fart on where something is, now most web browsers have a tab search feature too. Takes a bit longer, but you can still get to the right tab in 10-15 seconds typically.

It's really work scenarios like this that drive this sort of need. When you're basically the helpdesk for multiple companies and other IT people and all their clients and their diverse tasks/requests. But I could see anyone that engages in heavy duty rabbit-hole research benefiting from similar UI use, perhaps with slightly less activity throughout the day, but still needing to keep tons of sites open and available until project completion. The difference there would be that they're working on a few larger projects, not dozens and dozens of smaller ones driven by clients.

I think most people that don't do this sort of hyper-tasking have no idea how proficient you can get at it. It's like those secretaries that pull off 200-300wpm on Dvorak or other keyboard layouts. Most of us are sitting in a more reasonable 30-60wpm range. Or those people that power-slide the lambo into a parking stall on a movie. It's way outside the realm of average use and skill, but you can't help but be impressed when you witness that proficiency.

Hyper-tasking is a skill that takes years to build up, as it requires mind, computer and software workspace to all be in sync with one another. But when you sit behind someone and watch them fielding requests and handling tasks that would normally take a team of 5 or 10 people, it's quite impressive.

Honestly, if I could have the perfect web browser for my use and my work, I'd happily pay $10/mo for it, forever - or at least until I retire. Why are pretty much all web browsers free, but don't cater to power user use cases like this? Hmm...

If you bothered to stick around until the end, I hope that explained one use case in a way that is understandable!

Ok, so you basically now have multiple windows to hold N tabs each. Now you need to manage windows AND tabs :D

We agree on the fact that bookmark management hasn't kept up with the times. I think bookmarks need to be re-invented for the modern era, no one uses them anymore.

But it also boils down to how you manage your own work. If I open a webpage, my workflow has only this options

- read it now

- bookmark for reference (long-term)

- send to pocket(read later - ereader usually)

- keep it open for a little while for reference (max 24hrs)

So I clean up the house quite regularly :)

Whenever I need to open something (like developer docs), i just Ctrl+L begin typing the title and autocomplete does the rest. Takes me a second and no clutter in my windows :)

You have 1,530 tabs open?!

Things happen, man.

https://metafluff.com/2017/07/21/i-am-a-tab-hoarder/

Holy hell, I thought I was bad for hitting 200-300.

I didn't even know this was possible.

It's actually surprisingly stable and usable. Which may contribute to the problem ;-)

Tabs only load once directly viewed, so a session restore opens pretty quickly and doesn't actually use all that much memory. After a time, as more tabs are visited (and yes, I really do try to shut some down with time), the session eventually gets less usable, though that can take many days (I've not tracked this).

Moving and searching within the tabset itself is another part of the challenge, though at least Firefox will prompt if you're opening URL that's already open elsewhere. (Chrome ... fails at this.)

And yes, of course I'm using Tree-Style Tabs.

I found that Chrome destabilized and black-screened a lot when I had 1500+ tabs open, but Opera oddly enough did not. Opera seems to have slightly better memory management and background tab handling. (Puts them to sleep better.) That said, it does still take a very long time to reopen that many tabs. That's where stability comes in... you don't want to have to close and reopen your web browser throughout the day, if you can avoid it.

Opera does indeed have switch to tab, FYI - and open tab searching.

For Chrome, I think I usually manage to keep it under ~100 tabs, desktop.

Actually, far less than that as I've stopped using it entirely.