Honestly, this system sounds dysfunctional and unproductive. I know HN rules discourage psychological analysis, so I'll stick with some useful generalities - Avoidance and procrastination generate anxiety. Anxiety has a way of distorting reality by magnifying the worst outcome (often even the improbable). And thus it creates a dysfunctional behaviour-emotion loop that feeds itself. To break out of it you have to face your anxiety and change your behaviour. Just begin by closing the oldest tabs. You'll find the world doesn't end (if you haven't read something in 5 years, do you really think it's important enough to read in 2022?). And start bookmarking (and tagging) web pages that you want to read later instead of keeping them open. If you want to see a list of bookmarks whenever you open your browser, use this extension - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bookmarks-sta... . Remember that you can export and backup bookmarks. That is way safer than keeping 100's or thousands of tabs open as a unexpected shutdown or crash could result in these tabs being lost and not recoverable.

Thanks for the unprompted psychoanalysis.

I don't have any anxiety / ADHD / any other "disorder". In fact I'm far more organized than most people. Information doesn't just "outdate" itself in a mere five years.

Also, for firefox you don't need to make bookmarks of everything -- it muddies the search suggestions. `places.sqlite` and the sessionstore are the only two files that need to be backed up, and can be accessed trivially. None of this is possible in Chrome (AFAIK).

I really like this feature that's in the Vivaldi browser that's called Reading List (Link: https://help.vivaldi.com/desktop/panels/reading-list-panel/) and it solves my bookmark and tab collecting.

My following question is to gain insight and understanding rather than anything malicious and or any sort of judging.

Questions:

- When you've gone back to a tab that has been unloaded, how often has the site been changed when it reloads the data and or just not worked anymore? If you get that a lot, have you considered saving as a single file html or something?

- In your daily life, do you collect and find it difficult to throw away items that you think you'll need at some future point?

- How would you describe your organization style of non-digital items/goods?

- Since you have so many tabs open, how do you search for the things you care about in opened but unloaded tabs?

>is to gain...

Ah, don't worry about it, his comment put me off a little and I didn't want subsequent comments to snowball.

My browser is messy because it is not my primary organizational structure. It's a dumping ground of sorts that I try to organize by date (tab # in window) and window. The info in most open sequences of tabs is usually saved somewhere, so I don't need to go back to that tab but it's very convenient for quick "reminders" of how I reached a certain position / conclusion / found some info.

> When you've gone back to a tab that has been unloaded, how often has the site been changed when it reloads the data and or just not worked anymore? If you get that a lot, have you considered saving as a single file html or something?

From my OLD tabs (2017 and before) almost everything has changed. I do preserve the cache folders, so occasionally the old version of the website will load (when I enable networking but don't connect to a network). I don't see why it wouldn't work, URL deprecation isn't a very big deal for that time frame. I did use an addon to save some pages as HTML files. I don't remember its name, it was a XUL (pre-webextension) addon.

> In your daily life, do you collect and find it difficult to throw away items that you think you'll need at some future point?

> How would you describe your organization style of non-digital items/goods?

I'm not a hoarder :)

I throw out stuff I don't want / use

As far as information goes, I maintain backups although I usually never go back to them except for very broad file name / tree searches / greps. Storage is cheap and plentiful, what's a few gigs?

> Since you have so many tabs open, how do you search for the things you care about in opened but unloaded tabs?

I use a tabs sidebar extension, and a tab search extension if one isn't natively provided by the sidebar extension. It's also possible to search open tabs from the FF omnibar. Also, the windows / tabs form an ad-hoc organizational structure that's very helpful. Anyway, like I said before, the browser is just my dumping ground. I could lose all but the last 500 tabs and still sleep like a baby.

Thank you for your response and insight