… Why…?

Think of it as a memory aide combined with a to-do list.

I can't. My mind explodes just having 10 tabs open. I need a clean browser, done with whatever, close tab. Reopen if I need that site again.

The implication here is that “done with whatever” happens, rather than “start another thing” while the previous thing is still in progress.

And an indictment of the favorites/bookmarks UX

I think I have found my soulmate :)

Every crash cuts deep if it doesn't resume correctly.

2616. On an iPad pro. I am not updating the os because I am pretty sure that the current behavior is a bug. The hard limit has always been 500.

how do you see how many tabs you have open, an extension? i have tab session manager and it shows i have 80 tabs. about 60 of those are ephemeral, and the other 20 i'd have open on a new browser anyhow (email x3, goog cal, caldav cal, nextcloud files, router, local and remote proxmox, navidrome, the documentation server, etc) everything else is superfluous. although i'd probably be a bit sad if i lost all my tabs right now; hence tab session manager.

Sideberry

Just close them. You're never going to read them. If you really think there's something you need, export the browser state to an archive file, then delete in 10 years after you've never consulted it once.

(Disclaimer: I'm aware that there may be valid reasons for this workflow, but in most cases it's just digital hoarding and the above advice is sorely needed. If you really need 1800 tabs, you know who you are and you can safely ignore me.)

Brave has a function to bookmark all open tabs. I have used that from time to time. Or just made a temp file and written all the URLs to it, in case I want to open a few/dozen of them after rebooting.

I think all browsers have that now. I use it 3-4 times a year with Safari on both macOS and iOS. That way I feel comfortable closing them all without worrying about “losing” anything.

I’ve been doing this, or something similar, for at least 15 years now. Dozens of mass-bookmark “folders”. I’ve never once looked at the bookmarks I made, not a single time. I even have old bookmark files archived here and there, from machines and browsers for which the bookmarks weren’t auto-backed-up to “cloud” storage like my Safari stuff is. As soon as I can get a local llm running that’s up to the task, I’ll probably have it build some kind of table with categorization out of all of them, then have it edit out entire categories of crap until I have something I might actually scan over to recover a few interesting tidbits. Finally make some use of them, now that tools can take enough of the pain out to make that a less-daunting prospect.

The irony is that now, in the LLM age, it wouldn't be that hard to feed a few thousand browser tabs and/or bookmarks into a vector database or whatever and then if some fuzzy memory tickles your brain about something you saw a year ago, you can just query it.

It's the same logic as keeping RAW digital photos. Lightroom is already gaining "find the keepers" AI features. Sooner or later it'll be possible to feed a bunch of burst shots into an AI that just weren't worth the trouble to manually sort through. The AI can do the drudge-work of digging up any gems in the rough...