You can search tabs on firefox if you add % to the address bar

TIL! That is slick

Awesome, didn't know this!

I am one of the 200 tab people but it's not all in one browser window. I use a Firefox extension called 'Simple Tab Groups' that let me categorize the tabs to get back to them later. I use it as a mini-knowledge base (I'm not that attached to my tabs if I lose them, I use Yojimbo for my real KB).

But just to say it: I also freak out when I see someone with so many tabs open that it's like a little Joy Division cover on the top of their browser.

But to parent's question, what does having them open allow you to do?

I understand the existential dread of closing a useful-or-interesting-but-unread tab. But isn't this what bookmarks were created to solve?

Tabs are a better way to do bookmarks than regular bookmarks in most cases.

Howso? Honestly curious.

They are easier to create and remove. They advertise their presence, reminding you to come back and read them better. They can load faster since. They save your scroll position. They save the state of the site and input fields.

The other use case for bookmarks is creating a new tab and navigating to some website like a blank google doc, twitter, hacker news, etc. This is better handled by history. The most frequently used sites can show up on the new tab screen and show up in the results when you start typing in the URL bar.

I don't see any advantage to regular bookmarks for 99% of use cases. They seem to be a feature that exists due to limitations of hardware and browsers from the early days of the web. It's similar to YouTube. In the old days you had to subscribe to channels. Now YouTube is advanced enough to not require you to subscribe to anyone for it to give you content that you want.

Do people ever come back and read them though?

It seems like for people with 50+ tabs, rate_of_addition > rate_of_closure.

Saving state is a fair a point, but I can't think of many read pages where that's important to me + I'd trust it to a browser.

Do people ever catch up on their bookmark backlog? I don't think it really matters.

> isn't it just faster to do a web search or organized bookmarks

As someone who has a lot of browser tabs, unfortunately no. It's often near impossible to remember the magic query that yielded a particular site as a result and the problem with bookmarks is the overhead that comes with organizing them — most tabs sit in an uncanny valley between long-term usefulness and disposability which would require frequent clean up passes through bookmarks to keep one's bookmarks in a reasonable state.

And as noted by others, these tabs are typically organized by both windows (e.g. one window for apple platform dev stuff, one for android dev, one for shopping, etc) as well as tab groups within those windows.

Idk, I think I use bookmarks similarly to how you use tabs. I don't organize them but I do eventually delete them, just as you eventually (I assume?) close tabs.

The thing that sucks about bookmarks is that you have to open the bookmark manager, find the bookmark(s) in question, and delete them, which is a process that happens naturally as tabs get taken care of. I don't have to explicitly think about managing tabs the way I would have to manage bookmarks.

I usually just click the filled-in star to un-fill it.

Tab Stash is what I use (having had waay too many tabs open)

The reality is that I'm a tab hoarder, I just forget to close them.

some of them I want to keep for "reasons" so every once in a while I do some cleaning.

Firefox has now that beautiful feature that originated in Chrome where each window has a drop down (To right, a rotated "greater than" - or "smaller than" - symbol pointing down) that lists all the tabs ina window, and I can close them from there.

So, cleaning time just got slimmed down greatly :)

I use Vimium, Shift + t for tab search from long time, web search or organised bookmark is not faster when you are reading lot of obscure stuffs.