Every now and then, I declare tab bankruptcy, mass bookmark them (to get over the feeling that I'll be closing something important), and close them all.

I've never, ever, once, in 15ish years of operating this way, looked at any of the bookmarks.

And here we find the Tab Hoarder ...

- History includes tons of ephemeral shit, like search result pages (useless, will be different the next time you load it) and redirect pages, or things I've actively decided not to care about. If I looked at 20 shirts on a store-site but only had 3 still open, odds are good I already firmly rejected the other 17. Straight history loses the information of which ones I cared about the most.

I was quite annoyed when I realized that since I was hoping to find something from many years ago.

It's possible to edit history, but it's easier and more useful to edit bookmarks: removing (as with history), but also tagging, annotating, and/or organising.

Heap'o'clothes on the floor vs. a well-organised bureau or closet.

[0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/rudolf-fernan...

[1]: On my desktop. Unfortunately, the extension is not available for Firefox for Android, so on mobile I tell Firefox to discard tabs that I haven't used for a day.

Sidebery or TreeStyleTabs lets you see the titles no matter how many you have. ... Well, you have to scroll, but it's so much better than having to go through tab-by-tab with a typical horizontal tab bar.

> Every now and then, I declare tab bankruptcy, mass bookmark them (to get over the feeling that I'll be closing something important), and close them all.

> I've never, ever, once, in 15ish years of operating this way, looked at any of the bookmarks.

Even though I can see the tab titles, this is exactly what I do(n't). I threw together a couple scripts to extract all the tabs (including which window they're in), and export that all to an org-mode file.

It's also useful to start new projects in a new window, and let the tree structure build up in that as you progress. You can close parts or all of that window as you've concluded with them.

Then, I can search or clear the list, or bring back from the stash whenever I want.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-stash/

> Are people using tabs as a soft bookmark of basically anything interesting?

Yep, that's as good a description as any. I have a lot of tabs that I'm not "finished with" in any finite amount of time.

Case in point: currently shopping for a steam generator for a steam shower. I have about 30-40 tabs open to different models, stores, reviews, data pages etc. Once I'm done with the purchase, I'll close them all.

I sometimes use sideberry's ability to have tab groups, but not much.

To be honest, it's a not a great system in that stuff falls off my radar. Most of the tabs at the bottom of my sideberry tab list are ones I have not visited in many months. There's very little point having them there. However the cognitive cost and computational costs are close to zero.

https://zen-browser.app/

Arc (macOS) is ridiculously good though. It's become difficult/impossible for me to use another browser happily the past few years. I wish they were focused on it instead of their mediocre AI browser project. They decided to claim Arc windows was out of beta when it's still vastly worse than the mac version in just about every sense. But at least they got the core tab management features locked down (from what I've heard, I don't have a windows machine to try it on.)

> Miller said that Arc "isn't going anywhere" and would continue to receive stability updates and bug fixes

https://www.androidauthority.com/the-browser-company-plannin...

> computational costs are close to zero

Is that true for normal Firefox tabs (I usually use chrome/safari) ? Wouldn’t each one still use up some memory, keep any background tasks running etc. If some tab starts playing audio how do you even find it?

Sidebery, Tree Style Tabs, and Tabs Outliner (for Chrome) all go beyond just adding a linear/flat vertical tab bar to your browser. They preserve a nested hierarchy for child tabs and allow you to restore the entire tree (or just parts of it) on another device, which is super handy if you often switch between desktop, laptop, etc.

Firefox unloads tabs that haven't recently been used, or as memory approaches system limits. You can also manually unload your least-recently-used loaded tab.

I've found myself using Sidebery and the manual 'unload' tab option quite a bit.

But I have only ever used it on Windows and Mac. So no idea about Linux. You can do About:memory to check out which tabs are using more memory as well as manual memory compact.

Firefox also allows unlimited History, unlike Chrome which I believe you cant even have history for more than 90 days.

Is this a user setting / tunable for aggressiveness?

I use this one: https://webextension.org/listing/tab-discard.html

So 90%+ of the tabs are just bookmarks really.

I have a tab group in Simple Tab Groups for a perl project I've been working on. The group is basically just a bunch of perl docs (metacpan, etc). I haven't touched the project or the group in a few weeks and I've in that time restarted both FF and my PC several times as well as having updated my FF install several times.

I just switched to that tab group and opened up a random cpan docs tab and it loaded it back in half way down the page. The scroll moved a little bit (only a few lines of text worth of scroll) but that was it.

Of course this doesn't work consistently for all pages. I know for a fact that social apps like bluesky don't tolerate suspends all that well and force a reload but most "vanilla" web pages like docs sites tolerate suspends quite well.

Sidebery offers a hierarchy of tabs, supports group-tabs inside the hierarchy and also has panels, which are basically groups outside/parallel to the hierarchy. With this, you can have very diversified organization-tools.

I also oscillate between 1k to 3k tabs, and I see them more as a process-state. I use tabs for my working-memory, and bookmarks for permanent memory. So any projects, I organize into groups, for every area I have a panel where I collect the corresponding groups. And if the project is over, I close them.

With bookmarks on the other side, I collect links to websites I might visit at some random time, but not necessarily because of a specific project, or with multiple projects. For example, I have bookmarks for my bank, my provider, video-sites (Youtube, Netflix...), Social Media, but also resources like Wikipedia, or self-hosted apps, etc. Those are links I never want to delete, unless the service itself shuts down, or I switch to a different one. So in that sense, they are "stateless".

I'm just here to report that Firefox + Sidebery continues to work perfectly well at 14571 "open" tabs.

All but a few hundred are unloaded, and I block JavaScript fairly aggressively. Currently measuring 1992 MB, explicitly allocated.

I won't argue with anyone who tells me that I have a problem, but I will say that Firefox and Sidebery make my problem not a problem!

Since task manager has been introduced, making it easy to unload whole related tab groups its even easier to reach absurd total tab counts. ;-)

Its is more tricky with technical projects, as you might and up with a big reference tab hierarchy that ideally you should first all read before closing it (maybe, just maybe, someone in one of those forum posts you opened in a tab without looking yet solved your problem!) or get back to the interesting tabs when working on the project.

Worst of all are fiction or world building sites... Like, you end up on some page on Project RHO or Orion's Arm or a WH40K wiki somehow and that page has links to some other interesting topics. And those pages have more links - oh, interesting!

Those can get to hundreds or even thousands of tabs easily and you just can't close them - they are just so interesting and there is that one topic/megascale engineering project/story you did not read to the end yet and you can always get back to it - as long as you keep the tabs open!

And lastly, it is a sort of a diary/history log - sometimes you see a forgotten tab tree you did not touch in a while - oh, right I was researching that thing, how nostalgic! :)

Firefox tabs are a zero-cost, and far more usable, implementation of bookmarks.

Chrome tabs are terrible -- the UI and memory demands are absurd.

Firefox (vertical) tabs are great, convenient, fast, easy, and cause no resource drama.

I have bookmarks too though. They serve three purposes: a) remember this forever but get it out of my way for now, b) put this in a managed hierarchy easily accessed from my bookmarks toolbar, or c) save out this big hierarchy of tabs that I haven't looked at in a while but were each probably the culmination of some level of manual navigation that I don't want to repeat.

I'll open tabs for any possibly-interesting HN story, for example, and then come back later and read maybe 25% of them, often when the comment threads are still short, and almost always when only one hemisphere has had time to weigh in. Then I'll come back the next day and reload the page for new comments. Or I'll close the tab if the topic wasn't as interesting as I hoped, or if the comments are dominated by a boring tangent.

Periodicaly I sweep through the older tabs that I've never read. Some have expired in their currency. Some are reassessed for interestingness and dispatched quickly. Others are left for future sweeps.

It may not be neurotypical, but I don't think it's ADHD. :)

I should note: this is on my personal/non-sensitive browser profile. My primary work profile is usually fewer than 1000 tabs and is more actively-pruned, but generally reflects things that are still in current ongoing work. And my personal/sensitive profiles only contain a handful of tabs each, things like pending order invoices, etc.

I guess what you are attempting is "the internet in a fox"...

...fascinating!

That's a feature, not a bug. A system that doesn't let things fall off your radar is a taskmaster, not a servant. You have to let things fall off your radar.

I currently have 867 tabs on Firefox desktop, and 495 in Safari mobile on my phone (I need to start cleaning safari, because weird things happen at 500 when a new tabs is opened).

Safari on desktop also keeps tabs unloaded when re-opening a window.

I just wish safari would allow me to hide the top tab bar when I open the vertical sidebar (if someone knows how to do that, let me know!).

When you have many folders in the bookmarks toolbar, an ">>" icon will appear at the end to the right of the bar, which will expand the rest of the folders vertically, that I scroll with the mouse wheel. So I have my at first sight folders of common use, and also the other ones by pressing ">>". I like much such dynamic (first sight horizontal, and ">>").

I do not like the folder-icon on such first sight bar with folders, I find it a bit distracting and takes up valuable space, so I have a css in userChrome.css to hide such icons (only there, not in the ones unfolded by ">>") leaving this way only the folder name, where I use short names.

This in combination with another css to show only icons for some bookmarks placed at such first sight (bookmarks with no name was the easier way for this). I also had to reduce the separation between such first sight bookmarks.

In addition, I also have the bookmarks button to the left of the url bar, which unfolds another group of different bookmarks vertically.

Sometimes I get the feeling that people are using tabs for what bookmarks were designed for, which is why the number of tabs open is so high.

About the OP, I often search several topics at once, and/or a topic with several sub-topics where the open tabs of different topics sometimes get visually mixed up or I lose the track/focus, for what this new tabs groups sounds ideal.

I've got to confess that my FF memory management is a run-as-needed-or-think-it-should-be-needed shell script which arbitrarily kills the top 10 Firefox processes by memory utilisation. If I'm leaving my desktop for a while I'll run that several times.

Tree-style Tabs keeps the slots open, and can reload tabs as needed.

I'd really like to have the capacity to unload all tabs other than, say, a specifically-specified set. Though on balance, the tabs that are likely to be most usefully kept open also tend to be the worst memory offenders.

If I fail to prune, MacOS falls over early and often, which is somewhat unpleasant.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc...

Also, some sites, and especially app-like sites, are terrible at preserving your state if you close and navigate back. This could be something as simple as highlighted text in a document, or as advanced as the settings for the piano practice app session I'm in.

Think of it like organizing papers on your desk vs putting them in the filing cabinet.

I had previously used the Pin Tab feature to collapse them, but Tab Groups allows you to have essentially unlimited videos that only take up a single favicon-sized space when collapsed.

[0] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2021/10/tab-unloading-in-firefox-9...

I use bookmarks for infrequently used items that I know I will come back to at some point, the tab groups are more transient.

I wish browsers had better APIs to get history and bookmarks out, so if I did decide I had to find one of out 100 images I looked at on a particular site yesterday I could write some script to download those images and show all of them on one page.

ycombinator.com - 2025-04-28 10:35 google.com - 2025-04-28 10:30 youtube.com - 2025-04-28 10:25

If you go to google.com again the next day, it just reorders the list:

google.com - 2025-04-29 11:30 ycombinator.com - 2025-04-28 10:35 youtube.com - 2025-04-28 10:25

This can make it hard to reconstruct groupings of tabs from the history alone if two or more groups shared a given link. It’s not an issue for most users, but it is the reason some users prefer to hoard tabs.

This is such an obvious one.

It might have been an unreasonable request in 1995 when these concepts were coming into form but maybe we can move on...

I use groups when I'm really deep in a topic, but the rest of the time I forget which groups I have and that I ought to use them, just end up putting it all on the default group until it hits 500.

I just use the “Bookmark All” feature and save it to a folder with the date that I made the bookmarks, then I copy the folder to Joplin and export it as plain text to my computer. I never review these bookmarks, it’s just a compulsion that allows me to feel like the information is still there if I need it.

Basically, bookmarking webpages has been broken since the 1990s. It was (still is?) too difficult to bookmark something with a meaningful name so that you can find it again. Bookmarking is (without extensions... there's one that saves them to Nextcloud) local, so you have them stranded on a work computer or a home computer or your phone. And, they go stale (likely, a proper bookmarking system could check that Wayback saved it at least once, and also save a link to that just in case).

Many of the tabs I open could be closed soon after, certainly a few days on. Perhaps even most. But they're mixed in with tabs that I would like to keep that content longer-term (weeks or months), and it's tedious to go back through closing them. Giving me tools to have ever-more-complicated schemes to arrange them would only make the problem worse, not better.

>Is this more an issue with bookmarks and history not being as useful as they could be?

History is even more fucked up than bookmarking, which is saying something. If I do start closing tabs carelessly, they'll end up in the closed tabs list, which is so full of junk (all with similar page titles, more often than not) that finding them again will be impossible. If we use full history, then it's so spammed up with hundreds of pages per day that I'll never find anything in that. I don't have a team of forensic data technicians on staff to help me find that one doodad I saw while searching for something else on Amazon last week. Bookmarking is salvageable as a concept, if someone were to truly nail the implementation, but history hasn't been useful since 1995 when Grandma would browse the web for 10 minutes per week.

>Not judging or anything,

It's ok. Judge me. I know I have a problem.

PS It occurs to me that at least some of this problem has been that I've never found a good note-taking app that could be used long-term. If I had that, then I could jot down notes that would be superior to bookmarking pages... often times there's just a trick to writing a one-liner on the command line that I can't keep clear in my head. I don't need the link to the stack overflow page for that, I need an example with a comment. But note-taking software's probably more difficult to get right than bookmarking. I need to be able to access it from anywhere, but not be held hostage by some corporate cloud. I need rich text, but something around the level of markdown, not Evernote's "paste a pdf into it" crud. I am subscription-averse. And so on.

Joplin? I’m a happy user. There are several (mostly-free) competitors.

You’re going to have to pay for your OwnCloud instance to host the info one way or the other, unless you’re hoping to leech as a free user for an essential part of your workflow.

I have fiber internet at home, and an Intel nuc with docker. I wasn't happy with Joplin. Over the years, I've checked out half a dozen or so note apps that did webdav (and could be hooked up to Nextcloud), but never found one that quite worked. Joplin's notes aren't really markdown, he spams them up with metadata... I think I know how I'd fix that if I were writing it, but I'm too lazy I guess. Keep hoping someone else will do it. Oh well.

>unless you’re hoping to leech as a free user

If I'm not going to trust iCloud for stuff like this, I'm not going to trust some smaller fly-by-night company or someone hosting for free. Nah, I have that part covered.

Basically, though, it's a sign of toxic multitasking, as some others have said. I'm not happy that this feature was useful but it was useful.

In some cases, I'll have 6 or so tabs open about different steps of a woodworking project, for example. Not bookmarked, because it's unlikely I'll need those tabs again; either for never working on a similar project, or for being outdated by the time I need to circle back. So I just leave the tabs open, and when I finish the project, I go through and close all the tabs.

In my head, it's understood as: this is my garage/workbench/workspace; it'll be messy DURING project work, and it'll get cleaned up as much as I can as I go, but it'll be a bit unruly until the project is done. Then it'll get wound down.

Multiply that by the 3-6 projects I'm working on at any given time, and then add in the utility tabs (task manager, email, note app, git repos, npm, cloudflare, etc), the social tabs (only bluesky, discord, and soundcloud), the news tabs (a tab for "news" like CNN/Fox/NBC/etc that I cycle through, and then others like HackerNews and hobbyist news sites like video gaming or hunting or whatever), and the experiment tabs (searches and likely dead-ends that I'm using to try and figure stuff out), and you've already got dozens of tabs. But on top of that, I also tend to curate "entertainment" tabs, like YouTube videos that I'll probably find interesting, or whatever. Things that I will consume and then close the tab.

I've been told it's a lot of tabs to have open, but it's always between around 10 and 100. I've definitely seen worse. /shrug

ETA: regarding the thread topic, I would find groups useful because I can dump all of the project tabs into a single group and that would help me navigate faster. But, I'm not really happy with Mozilla and I don't find Firefox to be particularly good (pages with custom elements are too slow for my taste; too slow on web standards, too - it's well past time for WebGPU to be working), so I doubt I'll use the feature much because I'm jumping ship to the next best thing as soon as anyone puts something out (looking forward to Servo for this; still not sold on the mac-focused Ladybird and everything else - Chrome, Brave, Arc, etc - are either badly built or badly managed). If I'm going to have to go back to non-grouping, anyway, I'm not sure I'll be keen to start doing it in the first place.

I could use windows the same way, but my personal preference is to use tab groups so I can keep fewer windows open.

Right now I also have several tab groups that are each a collection of current documentation and historical context for a particular internal system at my company. I always intend to turn a tab group like that into a list of links in a note, and sometimes I do, but a lot of them are still sitting around. Chrome is reliable enough at restoring them that I have tab groups I've kept for over a year.

I also have groups of documents I intend to read and digest better. They are 90% aspirational, but they serve a psychological purpose. I frequently scan through them, so anything that gets ignored for very long probably isn't important.

To me a browser tab is like an Emacs buffer: although I need the ability to have more than one Emacs buffer open at a time and to switch between them, if some process ran at random times and deleted all the buffers I haven't looked at in the last 2 minutes, I probably wouldn't be significantly annoyed or hindered.

Step two: You just need a little discipline to audit your tasks and admit when something has fallen off the top layer of your priority list and take the couple minutes to archive it into a folder of bookmarks or text file or other format of your choice.

And then you need the discipline to occasionally take the time to audit your archives for things that have fallen even lower and delete them (or archive them more deeply...).

For many, it's difficult to justify spending time you already clearly don't have enough of doing such audits. Same psychology behind procrastination. Hence a self-perpetuating problem.

Logically if your task income is greater than your available time, this pattern occurs.

Task income increases both with curiosity/goals and obligation, and most people have an abundance of those. Time is necessarily scarce. So, logically, many people have a lot of tabs.

Note that learning or researching is one of the most common tasks, is an active task, and usually requires multiple concurrent tabs. I.e. it's not simply one article you want to read later.

*Thanks for your post. It reminded me to go into firefox and unset "Open previous windows and tabs," which I accidentally turned on and has ruined my ability to rage X out of firefox everytime I have too many tabs.

Using bookmarks would not fit here, because I have no intention to access the tabs in future (e.g. a year from now) again.

Reading queue. Unfortunately, every app becomes its own sort of todo list: email, browser tabs, social feeds, RSS feed.

Maybe someone will be smart enough to make an AI agent that collects, cleans (ad removal, de-sensationalizing, summarization), and prioritizes information from disparate sources.

Some context, for starters, I have about 10 tabs pinned, discord, 3 slack instances, my fastmail, my gmail, my work mail, spotify, my task list.

Then, there is the things I left open because I am going to read it, a stack of documentation I'm working on. A few random products I'm researching as procrastination. Any search I'm on, and a tree of tabs from different results that I'm working through.

There are the various layers of those things for the things I was working on 30 minutes or a day ago, that I haven't worked back to yet.

And most importantly, there are all the tabs that used to fall in the prior categories, that I just forgot to close, or haven't gotten around to closing yet.

I group my tabs by project/topic so I can just send them to the background when I'm not working on that project and bring them back up when I context switch back to that project. So I'll have like 20 different groups, each dedicated to a specific personal project, some upstream project I'm contributing to, to an academic topic I'm studying (ex: PL theory, abstract algebra, topology, cryptography, etc), a group dedicated to looking into job opportunities, and then also some entertainment groups that have the youtube playlists I'm currently working through (some just fun, some niche topics, some tech) as well as other "third monitor content".

Each group acts less like bookmarks and more like a workspace you can quickly send to the background, pull back up to the foreground, or rotate between windows/monitors (without also moving pinned tabs which stay fixed to the window they are in).

It makes multitasking easier and you don't really get much memory overhead since the tabs generally all suspend automatically after a certain amount of inactivity anyways (might be due to the tab group plugin or another autosuspend plugin I have).

To give a TLDR: I use it to context switch quickly between projects without having to manually reopen stuff in the order it was in and at the spots on the pages where I was when I left off. So when I tab over on tmux to the workspace for a project that I haven't touched in a while, I can pull up the firefox tab group on my documentation window/monitor and immediately see where I left off and I can pick right back up again.

Doing some EE work last week, I hit my personal worst-case scenario for tab usage. A certain chip manufacturer whose name will not be cited here except by the initials T and I has a particularly nice part that outperforms its peers from other manufacturers. Its data sheet is unfortunately among the worst I've ever seen. Lots of missing and wrong information that is absolutely required to write and debug firmware for the chip.

The only way to succeed with this particular chip if you don't have an FAE on speed-dial is to comb through their customer forum and read every post related to the chip, where one or two hapless employees are actually doing a great job filling in where the data sheet falls short. And the quickest way to do that is to go through the list of search results and middle-click the link to every message thread that looks like it might be important.

I didn't count the number of tabs I had open, but it was easily over 50 and probably close to 100. Rookie numbers compared to some, as has been pointed out, but it's certainly necessary to be able to juggle more than a dozen tabs or so.

Browsers are basically designed wrong. Sort of like how after you learn about the write ahead log (WAL), you wonder how databases could have ever worked before. Or reducers, or Firebase, or anything like that.

Browsers should record everything, including a cache of all data received or sent, so that the user can rewind to any time in history, a bit like Apple's Time Machine. Then pruning history should be a task for heuristics.

I've given up hope that browsers will ever improve now. Although I've dreamed of taking something like WebKit and building a real browser where every tab is truly an isolated process, then attacking it like a video game and getting rendering performance up to multiple thousands of frames per second. With something like Russian doll caching or a hash tree to cache renderings for gigabyte per second throughput. So that page loads are measured in milliseconds and restoring 1000 tabs could happen in 1 second or be skipped entirely since they aren't visible.

I grew up in the 80s with 1 MHz computers, so consider computers today as running thousands of times slower than they should. The web runs millions of times slower. That collective waste puts the onus on the user to be self-sufficient. A bit like how capitalism can only reach low single digits of efficiency because it forces every consumer to own a copy of everything. Alternatives like socialism are little better, because the real problem is that artificial scarcity isn't being addressed through automation, so we can't see beyond economic systems and think they're fundamental.

"Can someone explain what normal people use so many tabs for?" is asking the wrong question. The question should be: what's wrong with browsers that causes people to have so many tabs open?

remember where the term "bookmark" came from. a strip of paper or string that you lay in the pages of a book to remember where you are reading. when you read further you move the bookmark to the new position.

browser bookmarks don't do that. instead every time you remember a location you get a new bookmark. and then you have to go around and search for the old one to remove it.

a tab always remembers the latest state and gets updated automatically as i move forward or backward. the state is also cached as long as the tab is open. that matters for hackernews for example which tells me which messages are new since i last loaded the page. when i go to a tab the page doesn't get automatically reloaded so i get back to the old state, whereas with bookmarks that state is lost.

if bookmarks could keep the state (that means permanently cache the old version until i force a reload) and allow me to update them when that state changes while using the page, then i could use them instead of tabs.

I typically am working on 4-5 projects at a time with some other non-project work categories like status reporting. A lot of my work involves reading and editing multiple web pages or writing updates on web pages based on communications in other channels. I reuse the same web pages multiple times a day and it is not feasible to close and reopen them constantly. Tab groups let me switch between the web pages for projects, read or update the pages, and then switch to another project. If nothing else, it means that I can actually see the titles of most tabs within a project rather than having them all collapse into identical icons. Tab groups helps keep this sane.

I am currently using Firefox-based Zen because its Tab Workspaces gives me the project separation I need. Chrome's tab groups don't offer enough separate between groups for me. I'll have to checkout this Firefox implementation but from what I saw earlier they may be adopting Chrome's minimal separation method of grouping so that may not work. I was using Arc for a while as they have a similar grouping to what Zen does.

I've got 113 tabs on that machine (about:telemetry#scalars-tab_search=tab). I'm using 5 virtual desktop, 2 for me and one for each of my customers. One Firefox window per desktop (maybe my workaround for tab groups), one editor window per desktop, one terminal per desktop. The Slack app on the desktop I'm currently using. My password manager on all desktops. I switch using an hotkey, Windows + the first letter of the customer. No animations, no Activities, nothing. I was OK with Gnome 2.

It's nice to have 32 GB of RAM. 113

I think what kill memory more than having dozens of windows on many desktops is self contained apps and VMs. For example, if you have a browser with 1000 tabs open, you will only have one instance of the engine, and the browser can manage the memory associated with tabs effectively. Now if you have 10 distinct browsers opened with all their dependencies, which can happen if you are running electron apps and you are actually using them, you are going to need a lot of RAM. Also if they all come with their dependencies instead of using what's on the system, you also multiply RAM usage.

Running many instances of the same apps running the same libraries tend to not cost that much, as they only need to be loaded once and are shared. There are a reason we call .so and .dll files shared libraries.

VMs are even worse, as they need a whole fixed chunk of memory that is mostly opaque to the host OS, meaning there isn't much it can do.

I often wonder how other people read their RSS feeds. I open them as new tab for all my interested links. My Subscribed list mostly generate about 400 - 500 links per day. Most of them are news. And scanning through all of them I mostly open about 30 - 40 tabs. Sometimes it could be up to 100s depending on topics. Then I just run through them one by one. The same goes with HN. Normally I get about 10 - 20 tabs opened on HN per day. All Together this could be 50 - 60 Tabs opened. And if you dont have time to read through them all they stayed there. Another day another reading cycle.

Another category which happens to have lots of tabs is Shopping and comparing. Trying to look for the best tools for the best price and where I could buy them. This normally includes opening 5 - 10 Tabs form the like of Reddit or some other specific forums.

Or Researching about a Topic where it leads to 5 other sub topic and every sub topic has 5 - 8 tabs.

I currently have different "Groups" of tabs, MBA, Jobs Searching, People I follow, Surgery operation comparison, Insurance, Youtube [1], AI, Electric Toothbrush and Water and Water Floss ( Any Recommendation from HN ? ), HN, Twitter.

I used to do 1000s of tabs but Nowadays I tend to limit to within a few hundred at most. Although that is also partly because Safari is the worst browser for multiple tabs and Firefox on iOS dont work as well.

[1] I increasingly think Youtube should have a Desktop App because the web simply does not provide good enough experience.

Maybe that's not typical tab use though, idk

Why are you qualifying "normal" there? I have thousands of tabs open because I have infinite curiosity and a psychological deficit of attention span.

An open tab is earnest expression of a curiosity one is unlikely to actualize in this short life.

> "A man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for?"

Sometimes they come up in my search results in the Omnibar. Open tabs are in the top rank of results.

But that depends on you thinking to bookmark the page; or accepting that some things will age out of the browser history. So I guess it's kind of like a fragile bookmark: probably reliable, but not the end of the world if tab restoration failed for some reason.

Also, (I assume) tabs retain their Previous Page list, which also has some value.

Interesting. Thanks for the discussion!

That said, I'm pretty sure the Omnibar is buggy at finding tabs. I inevitably have several tabs to gmail "open". It ought to be a lot easier than it is to find /return to the last-used gmail tab, and not one of the several from previous browsing sessions. :)

There is the rare bookmark in my toolbar tabs for undetermined future stuff.

Now, I open o3, write a clearly specified question and let o3 do the research for me. More often than not, it comes back with a perfect answer that satisfies my curiosity. Sometimes, it makes me dig a little deeper, but te time spent is a lot less and I can spend that on more 'physical' interests.

1. Organizing threads of research into context groups. Usually doing heavy deep dives where it’s uncertain if I need to revisit a previous branch, so rather than closing, it’s much more beneficial to group and collapse. It’s also easier to reopen and glance at the topics you looked at.

2. Similarly, grouping tabs by purpose while developing. It lets me organize tabs in a way that makes it so they I don’t need multiple browser windows open. It makes for a much more zen-like development environment.

3. Testing across dev, staging, and prod. Want the same tabs open but grouped so that I don’t accidentally do something destructive on prod that I meant to do locally. Now that this is in Firefox, I can also combine it with multi-account containers for more workflows.

Because book marking sucks as there's no associated metadata on the site behind the link. You have to insert that data yourself by changing the page description. How do I search my links for battery charging if the link that leads to battery charging is joe6pack.com/foo?bla=foiuewyrocv9yetn75y9087wn7y9ewsygbatmobile? History is similar and something I dont want to bother with.

It's easier to just leave the tabs open and come back to them later. I do this all the time with sites like bandcamp, shopping sites, and so on - open a bunch of tabs and slowly work through them. I might have upwards of 50+ tabs open at times but they are mostly short lived, lasting a few days until I get frustrated and go on a tab nuking spree.

These days I manually maintain my own bookmarks in flat text files arranged by subject with my own metadata and just use grep. The link goes on one line, the next lines are "meta data" followed by a blank line. The list is mainly filled with stuff I really want to find again in the future so I put in the effort.

At work and at home, I always have multiple projects ongoing at the same time. I use one tab group per project. I typically have my notes for that project in the first tab and then other tabs contain documentation, reference material, forum threads, search engine queries, and whatever else that I want OPEN and AVAILABLE while I'm working so that I'm not always wasting time closing and opening tabs that I keep coming back to.

This way, when I switch between projects, I just select the tab group for that project and everything is exactly the way I left it last time. Didn't have to remember to manually save anything beforehand last time, or manually restore a folder of bookmarks or whatever.

Why not use bookmarks? For me, bookmarks are only ever used for links that I go to semi-regularly to regularly. I will NEVER add a bookmark to a site that I visit once, or might want to go back to again, because eventually you have to dedicate time to sorting, cleaning up, reorganizing, deleting them. And I HATE curating things.

Why not use browser history? Because it's full of all kinds of garbage which can hard to sort through and because my browser history only goes back about 6 months. I don't need (or want) to keep my history forever because it just needlessly fills up the disk and becomes a liability if my computer ever gets compromised. And sometimes my projects go longer than that.

Now imagine every night while you're asleep, a cleaning crew comes into your building and tidies up. But they don't just sweep the floor and take out the garbage, they also put away all the tools, pick up any open books and put them back on the bookshelf, re-assemble the motorcycle, and put the music equipment back in its retail boxes.

When you come back in the morning, you have to dedicate minutes to hours just getting things back to where they were when you left. And because you're ADHD as fuck, you probably don't remember exactly where you left off and frequently end up skipping some major step or accidentally redoing work that you did before.

That is what my life feels like without tab groups.

I'm pretty sure the ordering of my 4 firefox windows used to stay fixed (i.e when clicking the tray icon, and seeing the 4), but this stopped being the case a few years ago for me.

So I live with 3-4 windows; I don't think having 10 windows would help me because their arrangement is not consistent.

(I hover between about 600-1100 tabs open; I do cleanup when I notice I'm near or above 1000; I don't reliably do cleanup after e.g. opening 5 ebay tabs and deciding what to buy; nor do I reliably finish using those ebay tabs in one sitting; multiply that by the dozens of things I might be researching/comparing, going back many months :) )

(I keep my work Linux laptop Chrome browser to under 50 tabs, and often don't bother restoring tabs after my laptop is rebooted)

I can imagine that other people who have different contexts, and some web apps like mail, im and socials, that can easily make use of tab groups. Grouping and coloring them makes it really easy to not get lost in the bunch that is open at the same time.

Suddenly, meeting was scheduled again, I simply clicked on the group, and got all the tabs open again.

I think tabs are just the better user interface.

It's not that I'm afraid I won't find the page in my history and bookmarks, it's that I don't want to have to do that because it's painful. History is full of irrelevant pages. Bookmarks make me lose my flow constantly wondering if I should bookmark a page or it's not needed (and in which directory!).

Tabs have a very simple workflow with low cognitive overhead. Everything is preserved by default (middle click/ctrl click is my default click in a browser), unless I'm clearly in a linear workflow where I don't want to keep the page (left click). Self-organizing due to the way they open, but very easy to manually reorder (or close) if needed. Kept in memory so going back to a (recent) tab is instantaneous.

They just... get out of the way and let me work. Tabs make browsing feel like one continuous task, where history/bookmarks feel like constant interruptions.

I've always wondered if this kind of thing is just embarassing to talk about.

Sort of like admitting "the trunk of my car is full of unresolved stuff" or "my refrigerator is where things go to die"

it's just recently that lots of tabs has become normalized and people talk about it.

Maybe telemetry normalized it ("lots of people use 100's of tabs")

Me neither, and I find groups very helpful to me!

Generally, it's tracking the in progress process.

Keeping tabs open for me is a physical token of a path not complete.

I assume people who have many tabs open are the same sort of people who have 100s or 1000s of unread emails in their inbox too.

I was trying to help someone debug and issue at their desk the other day and they were a tab hoarder too. Literally 75% of the time spent debugging was them trying to find the right tab. I prefer to work with organized people (...who also read their emails!) - to me, someone with hundreds and hundreds of tabs open is a sign of someone who is easily distracted and disorganised and doesn't complete tasks before moving on to the next shiny thing.

Looking at my FF right now I have 7 tabs open from something I've been working on all week, and 3 more tabs open for something I'm doing just this morning. Soon I'll close those 3 tabs and return to the 7 to continue working.

And that's how it goes for me, every day, every week. 7 is a mild example. During more hectic periods I might be pulled away and end up having several groups of tabs, related to different tasks that I had to pause.

>Is this more an issue with bookmarks and history not being as useful as they could be?

If you want to put it in hardware terminology.

- Tabs I am immediately interested in: registers

- Tab groups minimized: RAM

- Bookmarks: Hard Drive

- Pocket: cloud storage

- History: My attempt to restore something I put in the recycle bin

Tab groups are a good intermediate to store knowledge I don't need immediately but still need quick access to, likely within the day. It's often some tangential research that I won't need to save or lok at long term, but not my immediate attention.

In my head, bookmarks are more for items I know I want to reference for weeks, months, years. Stuff I know I would want to pluck out and share as popular/general knowledge if others fall down a similar line of research as me. I only tend to refer to the history tab when desperate and my judgement failed to realize something was bookmarkable.

as a current example, I have this tab and a few open researching work stuff. I have a tab group collapsed regarding career advice and job app stuff.

In a similar vein these people also postpone system updates and restarts as long as possible, never shut down their machine (always hibernate) always click keep all in office apps for recovered files from the machine over months of this abuse getting some resource exhausted leading to an inevitable forced reboot.

That moves them out of sight, yet within easy reach. Psychologically it feels different from a group of bookmarks.

E.g if I want to review a PR I need to have the jira ticket, the figma designs, the API dashboard, the PR link and the actual app open. That's 5 tabs for a single PR review + more if I need to go over some documentation.

And since a review takes its time and I often have to context switch a lot, being able to quickly collapse 5-7 tabs under a "Foo PR review" group is super helpful.