Let's say you're writing a research paper. You start with an introductory review paper that links to dozens of other sources. You want to evaluate whether these sources are relevant to your paper's topic, so you open them all in new tabs. Then they have other references, so you open those too. Over the course of a couple hours, you might have over 20 tabs you've opened. You then stop opening new tabs, and read them one at a time until you're done. A similar process can happen when doing research for an in-depth blog post, opinion article, or essay (except instead of starting with a review paper, you might start with one or more pages of Google search results).

Outside of work, you might sign up for several emailed newsletters with various links to articles per email. If you get about 20 newsletter emails, and you choose to read 10 of them with 2-3 interesting articles each, you end up with 20+ tabs to read through.

However, if you don't need to do that much research for a particular task (or you can get the information you need from just a few resources like a quality book), you may not encounter a need to open this many tabs.

> so you open them all in new tabs

but why ? you can't read them at the same time anyway, why not just save the links and open them one by one ?

When I want to binge watch a whole series of a show I don't open all of the episodes at the same time in separate windows because I'm planning to watch them all in one session.

> save the links

thats how we use Tabs, after browser restart the Tabs dont reload, they are suspended and act as a bookmark that you can constantly see to remind you.

>binge watch a whole series ... don't open all of the episodes

erm, I download whole season/series, so that I do have 'all of the episodes' in a folder under my fingertips.

> thats how we use Tabs

I can understand that, but I would argue that you can just use a separate browser window for that, as I do.

a lot of us use multiple tabs on multiple browserwindows (I'd rather not say how many)

When I’m writing a paper I’ll download the PDFs of relevant papers to a subfolder of my TeX document’s folder and start building a bibliography with links to those PDFs in BibDesk. Much easier to find stuff and not have to worry about forgetting something.

This is how I’ve used the browser for years.

What I don’t understand is why someone will have scores of tabs open _all the time_. And at work these same people are always leaving work for the day while still logged in to shared assets which prevent others from accessing or weekly backups. Same with shared Excel files. Oh! And they leave those annoying app launchers on their desktops like it’s 1997, rather than using the toolbar.

I think if I could see their desk it would be buried with old food wrappers and coffee cups.

> I think if I could see their desk it would be buried with old food wrappers and coffee cups.

Yes. These will pile up for days too before one big cleaning. Or at least did when I went to the office.

The way I deal with information sprawl (lots of stuff I want to read, but I can't right now) is to move it to a Reading List where I can prioritize and archive each entry as I read them. For me, tabs are things I need right now; I close them when I'm done with them.

I usually don't have any tabs left when I'm done with the day and usually don't exceed more than ten tabs.

My main browser is Safari, but when I use Firefox (on my work machine) I also use tab-less and Amethyst to have all of my pages on my screen. This way, I'm more aggressive about only keeping what I need and closing what I don't.

Ill give you one example. Just yesterday I stumbled on https://insanecoding.blogspot.com . Interesting blog, so I opened all of the individual blog posts (~20 going back to 2007) and will spend the next ~week reading them in my spare time. If I just bookmarked instead I would quickly forgot about it.

Tabs are a live TODO list.

You're probably more of a project finisher than a project starter

Many of my open tabs are write-ups of topics that I hope to learn about some day, but I have not returned to in years since opening (cumulatively 1000+)

I have those too. They’re called Bookmarks. Some of them are decades old. I don’t leave them in RAM.

Ditto. I have no idea why bookmarks are so hard for some people to use. RAM is far more limited than regular storage, and bookmarks are minuscule in size compared to browser tabs. This "problem" was solved decades ago and yet I still see tab-hoarders everywhere.

Bookmarks don't store history or context (for Tree-style tab users, what tab was <this> opened from?). Tabs do. Bookmarks solve only half the problem, tabs solve more.

I use a mix of leaving multiple windows with 1-20 tabs in each and Toby to organise them after a while.

My "workflow" usually consists of: open new window for the topic/theme (whatever it may be, research, study, reading news) and go opening tabs, searches, articles. When I get to a point where a window hasn't been active for a few days I close the useless/uninteresting tabs and save the rest as a collection in Toby.

It's been extremely helpful to manage my fear of missing knowledge or closing something I could get interested, the curation after a few days really helps.

Well-written modern browsers suspend tabs. Barely uses any RAM.

Bookmarks are buried in a toolbar and may as well be deleted. Tabs visually remind you of their presence.

To be fair, Firefox starts up quickly even with hundreds of tabs saved, because only the pinned and current tabs are loaded on start. I used to think it was awesome how it kept memory use efficient by leaving unused tabs unloaded, but it has gotten too good.

I use Sidebery to classify my dozens of dormant tabs, but the net weekly balance is a few tabs positive because I've become less selective with this power.

Tabs are not in RAM in Firefox - they don't get loaded until you click into them, so you can effectively have a nearly unlimited number of tabs open. (My primary browsing PC has only 8 GB of RAM, but handles thousands of tabs with ease.)

As I said above, this is how I work, and it's not negotiable. If it bothers you to have that many tabs open, then fine, kill off your tabs. That's fine with me. And my way should be fine with you. (You're probably one of those persnickety inbox zero people, too :-), aren't you?) (My Inbox has 38K unread messages, and I reset them at the start of the year. That's after the many thousands that Google already threw away. It's just not worth the effort to throw away all that stuff one message at a time...)

BTW, I have probably 100K bookmarks, but have no good way to merge multiple old bookmarks files and convert them to the new format, so unlike the tabs, the bookmarks are now useless. I stopped using bookmarks in favor of tabs years ago now.

Now let's talk about power tools for handling large numbers of tabs!

It means (for those of us who can't let go easily) going through every tab, opening all the interesting pages it links to, bookmarking them, preferably with screenshots, downloading any videos, etc. I'd rather they weren't in RAM but there's no easy way to move them to disk (automatically would be ideal)

The problem with bookmarks, for a lot of us anyway, is that they're very much "out of sight, out of mind". You bookmark something, and never come back to it.

Its probably the same case if you have thousands of tabs and mechanisms to hide them, but maybe 30 tabs or so spread across a few windows gets crowded, your forced to prune them regularly, either by doing the thing you had the tab open for or deciding its not worth your time right now.

I wish there was something better, but I've never found it.

You can search tabs in Firefox by typing % in the url bar.

My PC has 64Gb of RAM.

Why should I ever have to close a tab if I'm not ready to?

They aren't in RAM in a decent browser. Mine are written to disk, possible to use session after session, and they are also suspended, thus aren't using resources.

I collect these in pocket.

personally i have found that pocket is like a black hole for articles. ive saved so many over the years but only end up reading .01% of them

Correction: You have chosen to give Pocket your most personal data. No thanks.

Online bookmark services are quite common, and not very personal.

I will never have more than 5-8 myself. For me, focus is the key of accomplishing a given task. If I have to do a research, I collect by clipping in Obsidian, then tag and reorganize. If a given project needs a series of webpages on startup, I create a new profile in chrome (with different colour) and move along.

Searching trough open tabs is way more inefficient than searching trough topics/folders and tags in Obsidian. Working against complexity is a habit, I guess. It comes with realization that time is precious:)

Don’t you lose saved passwords / bookmarks in new profiles?

My passwords live in an encrypted folder with contextual information, then are used in the browser with per site rules. Bookmarks are collected in Markdown with tags/notes (Obsidian), or clipped with a bookmarklet.

I use this script: https://bit.ly/3vyA9on. Big thanks to the Author.

Usually at the end of the day, I refine all collected information with tags or specific folders/links.

If you want to export your clipped content, there is a plugin called Obsidian Enhancing Export (requires Pandoc) https://bit.ly/3cZFmzl

P.S. This approach has saved my skin many times. I can sync to my Obsidian folder, which I sync with Synology NAS.

>My passwords live in an encrypted folder with contextual information, then are used in the browser with per site rules.

Can you explain this a bit? How do you use the encrypted folder in your browser?

Maybe I have not explained it clearly, sorry.

I usually generate my passwords with pwgen (you can install on Mac with brew and use this command pwgen -s 20 -1 -v -y -c -0) then store in plain text within an encrypted folder on my NAS.

In some cases, I use 2FA. In some, a lengthy "mumbo-jumbo" passwords that are easy to remember. :)

P.S. This is just an old habit and I have nothing against using a password manager like https://keepassxc.org/

Very cool, thanks for explaining your setup, I like the organization of it.

Same, I can't fathom having more than 20 tabs open, and only if I was tracking the hardest most complex bug ever and had 10 search tabs open.

Lucky you. That means you have a very focused work environment with very little distractions. Unfortunately the work I do pretty much forces me to have 10's, regularly 100's of documents open at the same time and to be able to memorize what bits that are relevant came from which document. This is getting harder with advancing age so I used a scrapbooking plug-in to keep track of the citations. Now it is just a file with a bunch of text snippets and hyperlinks.

Same here. I treat my browser like my desk and I keep it neat and tidy at the end of day.

Heh, I think you might be onto something here.

I'm a tab maximalist, with probably a few hundred open right now.

I also have a very messy desk. In fact, I bought a second desk just so that I could fit the detritus of more concurrent projects.

I would be curious to hear if anyone with a clean desk uses many tabs, or vice versa.

My tabs get as messy as my desk. Eventually, I hit a point where the mess bothers me. So I clear it all out and get back to a clean slate.

With the desk, the “this bothers me” moment is very physical/spatial, when I realize I’m now working around the mess (most often, mail I haven’t yet been bothered to look through).

With the tabs, the mess always builds up when I’m in the early phases of starting or investigating something, but as I get going, the mess becomes a distraction I’m mentally working around. So I’ll start dropping tabs that are no longer relevant. I have a tendency to “group” my tabs in separate windows by topic, and eventually I’ll just start closing a window with a dozen or more tabs at a time when that topic is handled or otherwise irrelevant. It’s like finally going through my mail that’s been piling up.

/me glances at my (cluttered) desk

There are apparently 2 kinds of people...

Four kinds of people. My desk is always a mess, but I close my tabs every day.

Technically, we now have evidence for three. There is no evidence yet for people with a clean desk but messy tabs ;)

But I'm confident they exist, we should put a bounty on the location of a prime specimen and see what happens when we breed them with the third kind to establish if there is a genetic component to this.

Clean desk but messy tabs here. I like the aesthetics of clean interior design, it’s peaceful and inspiring like a blank whiteboard. Also, nobody can see my tabs.

My girlfriend will stop and clean the house if she sees a crumb, but I don’t think she knows she can close tabs. She probably has a tab for everything she’s ever looked at on the internet. They never go away. It’s as overwhelming to me as my inability to spot a crumb is to her.

I used to have a completely clean desk at an engineering company where everyone had piles and piles of spec sheets, documentation, and first articles strewn around. People thought I didn't work, so I piled up a few things here and there to gather dust and look "messy" and kept the working area of my desk clean :)

On my work laptop, I have 152 tabs open right now. I use a Firefox plugins called Panorama tab groups to organize them by projects. These are long running projects where I have web documents, references, reports and action tickets for each project. There are pages that I reference multiple times per day every day. I don’t want to be closing and reopening them. That is a lot of work and sometimes context and state would be lost. The plugin lets me see just the tabs for a given project at one time. I can switch projects and then I am only seeing the tabs for that project. I could do this within separate windows but that would require managing up to 10 windows in the browser and that’s a lot of work. Also it’s too easy to close the browser and lose the windows.

Most of the tabs are not active at any given time and tend to be swapped to storage so they don’t clog up the RAM. If were to try to just close everything every time I switched projects, I would be spending way to much time and mental focus just managing tabs. This works for me.

One of the greatest joys of my life is going on gleeful rampages of Ctrl+w tab annihilation! Lots of times, I'll end up with just two open tabs: devdocs.io and the local development version of my own namesake :)

I don't get it at all. I know how to get back to everything I use. I guess I don't do a lot of researching things, though, where you land on pages you've never seen before and might not remember how to get there since you've only done it once.

I'm the opposite, my work machine has ~740 tabs over 14 windows, my personal machine at home is well into the 6000's... not sure how you get anything useful done with so few tabs.

Admittedly only a hundred or so tend to be actively in memory at a time, mostly they get lazy-loaded as I go to use them.

I'm like you, I try to keep my number of "tabs" small.

And call me insane, but I managed to visually remove the tabs from the web browser I use (Falkon) and I just switch between them with Ctrl+<0-9>, Ctrl+PageUp or Ctrl+PageDown. I have a silly idea for a tabless browser interface (managing and visualizing all of them via the "magic" URL bar) but as I am no developer can't do much.