Holy shit... 500 tabs? I thought I was bad about accumulating tabs but had no idea ~500 was even possible. I'm trying to even but I literally can't--You might say I literally can't even.

Honestly, I don't know how you all stay so low, I'm down to 1172, and getting it even that low feels like a bit of an accomplishment.

What are you doing with these tabs? Are they a reading list? Things like gmail that you could reopen whenever?

Two things: tabs as bookmarks, and groups/windows of tabs relating to different projects so you can easily pick up where you left off.

Zen. And MaxTabs. I limit myself to 5 tabs by force. Anything more, it means I'm becoming scatterbrained and need to revisit what I already have opened and think more linearly rather than in a spastic manner.

I tried saving tabs for reference material, but I prefer something simpler. I shutdown my PC at the end of the day. I have a dump.txt where every link that might get needed tomorrow gets pasted.

This is intriguing. Do you happen to have a blog post or similar documentation about your process?

I don’t understand what’s so complicated about this. I’ve also never allowed myself to have more than 5-6 tabs at a time because it just seemed reasonable. I’m not sure what I could possibly be doing that requires more tabs. I have an organized bookmark folder structure for things I absolutely need to get back to/visit regularly. I’m using my browser for no more than a couple streams of thought at any given time.

That's a pretty aggressive and unhelpful response. While your brain might be tuned to perfect tab management, I've worked with very talented people who hang on to tons of tabs (amongst other idiosyncrasies). Some want to change (I deign to consider myself one of these people), others don't and still go on to be productive, awesome developers.

You seem to have mastered pure focus which is an amazing, coveted trait, but we don't all have it.

I'm not trying to come off as aggressive. It's that I don't understand what more than 15 tabs could realistically be used for. I don't think I could find a use for more than 15 tabs if I tried at any given time. At work as an engineer I usually have a tab with Bitbucket, at most 3-4 tabs for pages/documentation I'm reading, a tab with Jira. Maybe I have a tab or two on Youtube to put something on in the background. So as I'm reading comments about people claiming to have > 1000 tabs, I can't comprehend what's going on in that situation. The only way that could happen is if I simply never closed tabs when I was done with the task I was looking at it for. It would never make sense to not close it if I don't need it because after 15+ tabs being open it becomes too hard for me to find anything because the tabs are so small. I'm incentivized to close tabs when I don't need the information anymore because the browser becomes unusable quickly. I know how to get back to just about anything I was looking at and if it's important enough that I'm revisiting it often it gets bookmarked.

It's less aggression and more disbelief/shock because I don't understand how it would be possible to use a browser with more than 15 tabs open.

I'm not who asked, but I can explain my own and other's perspective: don't passively accumulate detritus. If you want to remember something , you must write it down or take a note, just like if you were in school. Don't just "throw another tab on the pile". That's like a .txt file full of links you're just pasting and pasting into. Are you really ever going to go and review those links?

Folks who successfully have huge numbers of tabs and who really love that, in my experience, are treating their tabs like a different kind of bookmark, or they just have a ton of bookmarks. They'll usually use a categorization feature of some kind in order to organize their tabs just like someone organizes a library. Whether you're using tabs, bookmarks, written notes, whatever, all these systems in general are just some form of active tracking.

If you're not actively organizing and tracking though, why not free yourself and merely close your tabs aggressively? It's pretty easy, just uncheck the "Re-open tabs on startup" or the equivalent in your browser settings, then just click the "close" button on your window with all your hundreds of tabs. Let them go, and free yourself of worrying about them!

Besides, if you REALLY need them, you've always got your browser history anyway ;)

This. I used to be one of those who opens a tab to read and address this queue later on. I realized it's not efficient (at least for me) because things keep adding up and I sometimes have weeks/months old tabs that I never got to. So I started using a simple task management stuff and it's made an amazing difference for me. Granted that it might be a bit more work, but overall I feel more productive and organized.

Kudos. If I need to do something or return to something it becomes a card in Trello, not a tab which I always need to evaluate if I need it open or not, is it important or not, what did I want to do with this information last time I saw it etc.

And Trello card is an action item which will eventually get to the "DONE" column, will be decomposed into actionable items or will be deleted/archived during the next review event.

Yeah, I've tried the Trello board, and writing down notes, org-mode and other and I have a large graveyard of all of those that get lost. I think for me, tabs remain successful because they are ever-present and insert themselves into

I open tabs in groups in Sidebery. For stuff you plan to return to they are better than bookmarks because there’s no switching between bookmark and tab lists (you’ll always have tabs anyway) and clicking a tab switches to the tab and focuses it’s group of related tabs in the list rather than opening another tab.

I also don’t have to close them to return later or curate them — more time and thinking saved. Sidebery unloads tabs in collapsed groups so even though I have a few hundred open across two Firefox windows, probably less than 20 are consuming RAM and other resources.

I don’t really use bookmarks. I don’t think they solve any problem very well. Both tabs and notes/documents with links in are better.

How do you find a specific tab out of those 1172 though? I assume some might be quite old and any tab-finder isn't going to search inside the tab itself?

One Feature of vimium is maybe T which pops open a box that searches title or url (though as you say I doubt it searches content).

I keep my tabs low and there's no way I'd find anything with that many tabs open but thought I'd call out the feature given the context of this discussion.

I have once went upto 1674 in Firefox.

Is there a count somewhere?

In Firefox: about:telemetry#scalars-tab_search=tab

I have 7-8000 on one machine, multiple thousands on at least two others. Session Buddy + either Auto Tab Discard or The Marvellous Suspender means I don't lose any even in crashes and it doesn't use too much RAM.

Also my exact setup! Have hundreds of tabs and in between Session Buddy and The Marvellous Suspender, I haven’t lost one yet.

I thought Suspender had been taken down due to some change upstream that introduced trackers or something else shady. Great to see it got forked. I’ve been using Auto Tab Discard but it doesn’t feel as effective on diminishing RAM usage.

Has that been your experience as well?

That was The Great Suspender. Marvellous is a fork that seems to work just like the original. I actually have trouble with it with more than ~2000 (3000?) tabs. It gets unstable and slow. Auto Tab Discard doesn't have that problem, but does occasionally disappear and stop suspending tabs until you reload it.

You successfully closed a vim-UX interfaced program?

I'm sorry you lost your tabs but congratulations nonetheless.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11828270/how-do-i-exit-v...

They've said it's a bug. You'd never close anything was it not for this bug

That used to be my solution for managing tabs in chrome. Every few months it would just crash, I'd lose all my tab, and I'd think "probably for the best". Now chrome is a lot more stable :/.

This causes me some level of anxiety. An important end of day ritual for me is to close every tab I'm not 100% sure I will need the next morning.

My approach is to use Firefox Nightly and restart it whenever it prompts me to do so. Keeps me at a low tab count :)

I think this may have been this issue[0], which was fixed in [1]. Seems like the limit has crept up from 3 to 25 at some point in the last decade-ish, but in theory it should be undoable with 25X (or by mashing X to undo as many x commands as required). [0]: https://github.com/philc/vimium/issues/1126 [1]: https://github.com/philc/vimium/pull/1128

is this some kind of modern-day hoarding? how would you even find that useful? why don't you use bookmarks for the earliest ones?

It's interesting, because i've asked many people who have massive tab counts this same question, and it seems the overwhelming answer is that bookmarks are harder to manage than tabs.

It takes more time to bookmark a link, than it is to open it in a new tab. The positioning of the tab is an indication of approx. when that tab had been opened, and the other tabs near it is likely similar in subject matter, or is related somehow.

It acts as a queue to be processed as well.

And for a lot of browsers, the auto-preloading means you can have the tab "saved" and you can view it, even if it took long time to load. It's a form of "offline" viewing.

If bookmarks can achieve _all_ of the above, without having the need for the user to do anything extra, it would actually replace tabs. But so far, i've not seen anyone switch.

I'm a "tab hoarder" and you've hit the nail right on the head.

> The positioning of the tab is an indication of approx. when that tab had been opened, and the other tabs near it is likely similar in subject matter, or is related somehow.

Add in tree style tabs and you get this relationship on steroids - new tabs are automatically a child of the source tab, and you can expand/collapse the tree.

Thank you for this, it's something I never understood.

I have to shut down everything at the end of the day and start from a clean reboot the next or I get overwhelmed. I think it's sort of my way of unloading work stuff from my brain at the end of the day and loading up again at the beginning of the next.

it is. i am one of those who have atleast 100 tab on any workday, more on my personal system. i also use bookmark service like raindrop that have tagging, etc than simple folders.

Main reason for keeping tags are they are a constant reminder of topics to look into. Kinda like postits on your monitor. If I put them away using bookmarks I often forget about them and neder get to them. I have folders with hundreds of links I wanted to look a year back and still haven't.

I do clean out tabs occasionally when I am done with a topic but I mostly only bookmark when having to shutdown the system.

Isn't that just stressful? Are you ever going to look at more than 20% of the things on your backlog?

My approach is to bookmark things and then if I feel like it's time to read up on something or just a good time to work on the reading backlog, I'll just pick whatever seems suitable at a first glance.

> Isn't that just stressful?

No, why would it be? It's sort of my curated list of things to check out when I have a free moment, just like HN is. HN curates the Internet for potentially interesting things for hackers, and I further curate from that (and other sources) for things that interest me, and have them as open tabs. It's no more "stressful" than knowing the fact that there are thousands of interesting HN links on here. They're just options of potential things to look at, not tasks to get through.

I use bookmarks as a more persistent thing, for things I know will be of interest to me long term. Some of these tabs might go into my bookmarks, but many others are interesting enough to look at/read through once, but not worth adding a bookmark for.

Do you have a way of partitioning off what you're currently working on from the rest of the queue? I feel like I would constantly get distracted with hundreds of potentially interesting things sitting at the top of my screen.

Oh, TreeStyleTabs is a crucial element of this, I'd definitely go mad without it. The stuff I'm currently working on is generally at the bottom of that vertical sidebar, and I rarely venture beyond that area when I'm actively working.

The grouping of tabs into trees also helps with keeping them (pretty much self-)organized. Vimium's "search open tabs" shortcut is also very useful, if I need a specific tab right now.

As someone guilty of same (I've got just over half that many tabs open now: 273), I might be able to explain.

Links rot. If I see something on the interwebs that I want to store or remember, I usually copy the pertinent information somewhere else. Be that Anki, or org-mode, or somewhere else. I leave the tab open until I get the free time to go back and copy the information somewhere.

Looking at my open-longest tabs, it seems I've got some Magento documentation open from last summer. I should go clean that up. )) If these were bookmarks, I would absolutely _never_ get around to filing the information away in a useful place.

It might have been a bit of a hyperbole.

If you can't remember all of those 500 tabs, did you really need them ?

my solution to beat the tab accumulation problem is to have firefox simply close all tabs, clear browsing and download history, clear form and search history, and clear cache upon the user choosing to close the program. if the browser or computer crashes the tabs and everything else still exist. if a site meets your interests, bookmark it. note that cookies remain but are usually cleared periodically. also you can setup a folder of bookmarks, or a new tab page, that you can open up everyday and check the websites you want.