I've got a little under 200 tabs open right now in my main browser -- split into ~15 different groups with a plugin. I treat each as a little workspace for a project or subject I'm interested in and flip back and forth as needed. Keeping them open (although not necessarily loaded) is useful for preserving context (e.g. back button history, accounts logged in in the proper container, tabs arranged next to each other in a particular way for spatial memory, etc.) so that jumping back into something later is easy.
Open-new-tab is faster than finding your old tab (… is there one still open?) for enough things that they stack up fast. Add a dose of “I’ll come back to this after the current distraction…” (you don’t) and “I’m not sure the current distraction is actually over, better leave those open” and it quickly becomes a self-reinforcing problem. Eventually you just mass-bookmark all few hundred of ‘em and close them all (that’s what I do anyway)
I don't understand "tab hoarders" but I also don't understand why Mac users pollute their desktop with a thousand icons either. I guess some people like clean workspaces, and some don't mind clutter.
Windows users have had screens full of icons since at least the 3.x days... and you can easily search google images for tons of Windows 98/XP screenshots from the early 2000s of desktops completely filled to the brim with shortcuts and such.
> when you can easily get back to that page in less than a second in most cases?
How? Tabs preserve the navigation history too. Bookmarks don’t. Searching for it doesn’t work when you don’t remember which website it was. Following links from search results and links from those pages (from the search results) to get somewhere that seems like it could help…that’s just one of the ways tabs get accumulated.
My work machine usually has 5 to 7 workspaces open at a time each with 2 or 3 browser windows that each have anywhere from 3 to a dozen tabs open.
I visit every single tab multiple times a day and closing them out makes no sense. I need multiple windows for Jira, dev environment, testing, production, misc corporate intranet sites, servicenow, etc.
All of them have information updating live continuously. Why would I close them?
It's not even 100 tabs, but it's definitely a lot.
Because often you can’t easily get back “in less than a second” as a tab is the culmination of a large stack of combined thought+browsing.
I keep it open because I can more conveniently context-switch back to it when I need to, rather than attempt to retract my steps from a search query all over again.
An open tab is state in suspension - it’s sleep mode. A bookmark is hibernation.
To me tabs are like a queue of things I plan to review or consume. Does a link look interesting? Open it in a new tab, then I'll look at after I finish with the current one.
Saving 100s of tabs isn't going to work either, unless you can remember the name of the window and then tediously look through the list of open tabs. In that case, just search through your history instead of having the tabs.
Isn't that a good use case for the bookmark function?
To answer the actual question: I don't. Either I read it immediately or will never get back to it. There is always enough fresh content. I don't need another backlog.
And let's be honest, if you have a backlog of 7400 pages, neither do you.
I go to the same set of pages all the time, and the browser has it in the search history. So usually only have to type a few characters to navigate to it.
Do people often seek out obscure pages without entering from a more common context?
the primary difference between bookmarks and tabs is that bookmarks are static and tabs are dynamic. the best example is tracking a webcomic. the tab will stay open on the page where i stopped reading. it then allows me to go back and resume reading. when i follow links to the next pages, then the tab will be updated.
if i were to use a bookmark, then every time i'd advance a few pages in the comic, i'd have to delete the old bookmark and create a new one.
it is quite ironic that a browser feature called bookmark does not actually function like a physical bookmark for printed books.
They consume more than bookmarks because they have the current page content and context and the navigation history. Firefox does a good job minimizing the memory this takes, but it's non-zero. For that reason I rarely go above about 400 tabs in a session. My wife, on the other hand, is OK with swap to a fast SSD that I'm not OK with and has several thousand tabs loaded at any given time.
That's because of the Javascript running on them. If I have a dozen youtube tabs that are not suspended my FF becomes very janky and if I look in FF task manager, sure enough, they're consuming lots of CPU. I suspend them and FF becomes snappier again.
You can have thousands of unloaded tabs, but loaded tabs can gobble up memory and your computer may start swapping. It will usually recover from that but it can take a minute or two. If you get that often, you can open about:processes , sort on memory use and kill a few of the largest processes, which will unload their tabs.
“average person has 7400 tabs” factoid actually just statistical error. average person uses bookmarks. Tabs Hazel is an outlier and should not have been counted
You sure? From what I've seen over the years, bookmarks are not a very heavily used browser feature. I think most people don't have more than a few dozen, if they use them at all.
If I really wanted to keep a record of all the sites I've been to for historic reasons like this person there are far easier/better ways to do that. I'd even set it up to download a local copy of the sites I visit so that they'd be there even if the sites went offline.
I have 298 tabs across 8 windows open right now and I can already tell firefox is about to crash at any moment. I go to about:memory and mash the buttons in the "free memory" box to buy some extra time, but eventually firefox goes down in flames and I lose all my open tabs. When it does finally crash Firefox can never restore my tabs, but I blame myself/my settings for that.
When things get to this point where I know firefox will die soon I end up bookmarking them all or even copying each URL into a text document with dreams that I'll go back to them after my browser has been closed and re-opened, but I almost never manage it. At least I have the option I guess and I know that if I ever do I'll find things that are of interest to me. There's just no shortage of other things that are of interest to me online so the newest stuff tends to win out.
As long as you don't have private browsing windows open (these won't be restored), you should be able to close Firefox and have it restore all tabs after a restart. It will unload all tabs, i.e. they won't use memory until you focus them again.
Have you tried Auto Tab Discard to reduce memory usage?
I have Firefox set to reopen tabs when it starts and, on the very rare occasion it does crash or the power goes out, the tabs are back when I reopen Firefox.
I've had 7000 tabs open as well (currently 3700, I backup the session file and start again every half year or so). What I think would be handy would be if tabs would be auto-grouped by domain name, and that I could define domain groups (like work, newspapers, computing sites, youtube, etc.).
I see manually managed groups in Sidebery but nothing automatic... it doesn't look like you can move more than one tab into a group at a time, or even move a single tab into a specific group without manually dragging through a huge scrolling list to find it.
Something I'm still looking for is a way to manage "browser stuff" which would fit my workflow.
Basically I want to be able to turn a window full of tabs into some kind of document, where I can add metadata about the window and tabs, organized into sections, and which creates an archive of each page while maintaining the option of reloading the latest version if it still happens to exist.
This would also involve a better way to select a bunch of tabs at once and move them to the window they belong on.
If anyone knows of something which works this way, I'd love to hear about it.
I like Session Buddy for Chrome. It saves all of your tabs & windows as dated collections. You can also manually save and label sets. When researching, I will often have 100+ tabs open sorted into different windows, and it's nice to be able to save the session for later.
"Firefox View", accessible via a pinned-tab-like button at the beginning of the tab strip gives a good way already to manage lots of tabs. It allows to search tab titles from all Firefox windows and gives access to tabs on connected devices and the browsing history.
Wow, I never crossed the 2000 line, 7400 is quite a feat. Also Firefox doesn't suffer visibly until 800~ on my old laptop, and it starts to show above 1500. Thanks for supporting hoarders like us.
I don't want to keep any tabs open, but I haven't found a better way for my workflow and I've tried quite a few.
My tabs fall into the following categories:
- unfinished/long running projects/topics/research: for these I use a version of the Tabs Aside! extension that I've modified, which converts them to bookmarks.
- tabs I will want to look at someday and further categorize and/or take action: for these I implemented a babashka script that when I click on an URL it fetches the page, extracts the title and displays it and asks me if I want to open it now, or save it for later in an org-file. This doesn't work, unfortunately, for URLs that I open from another FF page. For these, my long term plan involves archiving the text and doing RAG on them, as they relate to my long term interests/projects/curiosities.
- tabs I need for the actively running projects/tasks
Why do people open 100s of tabs when you can easily get back to that page in less than a second in most cases?
Seems the clutter and organizational requirement is more of a productivity loss than gain.
Never understood this.
I've got a little under 200 tabs open right now in my main browser -- split into ~15 different groups with a plugin. I treat each as a little workspace for a project or subject I'm interested in and flip back and forth as needed. Keeping them open (although not necessarily loaded) is useful for preserving context (e.g. back button history, accounts logged in in the proper container, tabs arranged next to each other in a particular way for spatial memory, etc.) so that jumping back into something later is easy.
Open-new-tab is faster than finding your old tab (… is there one still open?) for enough things that they stack up fast. Add a dose of “I’ll come back to this after the current distraction…” (you don’t) and “I’m not sure the current distraction is actually over, better leave those open” and it quickly becomes a self-reinforcing problem. Eventually you just mass-bookmark all few hundred of ‘em and close them all (that’s what I do anyway)
If you regularly do the 'bookmark them all in a folder and close them' behavior, you should try Simple Tab Groups.
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I don't understand "tab hoarders" but I also don't understand why Mac users pollute their desktop with a thousand icons either. I guess some people like clean workspaces, and some don't mind clutter.
> Mac users pollute their desktop with a thousand icons
This is a strange generalization to make. I think it's more of a subset of computer users in general, not just Mac users...
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The real answer would be to help address their desire while making it manageable.
I wish I could have virtual desktops or similar, per project. Any application I open for that project would be specific to that desktop.
In other words, my "taxes" tab might have:
- A browser for my bank.
- A browser for my 401k
- email messages regarding taxes
- a notepad for tax notes
- a todo list for tax steps completed and upcoming
This could alleviate the tab problem.
(or it could just explode the problem, I haven't been able to live this dream and it might not be so dreamy)
Windows users have had screens full of icons since at least the 3.x days... and you can easily search google images for tons of Windows 98/XP screenshots from the early 2000s of desktops completely filled to the brim with shortcuts and such.
macOS puts screenshots on the desktop and you can’t change it. So it just ends up looking like that no matter what you prefer.
It's simple really: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoarding_disorder
> when you can easily get back to that page in less than a second in most cases?
How? Tabs preserve the navigation history too. Bookmarks don’t. Searching for it doesn’t work when you don’t remember which website it was. Following links from search results and links from those pages (from the search results) to get somewhere that seems like it could help…that’s just one of the ways tabs get accumulated.
You can read a paper about it.[1]
Keeping tabs around as a reminder to work on them or keep track of progress
Keeping frequently used tabs for quick access; has a diminishing return
Avoid closing tabs in fear of missing out on valuable information
The hopes to process more info than capable; while aware of the situation
Memory and mental model; Organize tasks with windows, desktops, browsers
Difficulties in judging the current and potential relevance of tabs in the future
[1] https://joe.cat/CHI-browser-tabs/
My work machine usually has 5 to 7 workspaces open at a time each with 2 or 3 browser windows that each have anywhere from 3 to a dozen tabs open.
I visit every single tab multiple times a day and closing them out makes no sense. I need multiple windows for Jira, dev environment, testing, production, misc corporate intranet sites, servicenow, etc.
All of them have information updating live continuously. Why would I close them?
It's not even 100 tabs, but it's definitely a lot.
Because often you can’t easily get back “in less than a second” as a tab is the culmination of a large stack of combined thought+browsing.
I keep it open because I can more conveniently context-switch back to it when I need to, rather than attempt to retract my steps from a search query all over again.
An open tab is state in suspension - it’s sleep mode. A bookmark is hibernation.
They just stay open. Going back and deciding which ones to close is a hassle.
Why not one than 72h = auto close?
Maybe add to reading list, close the tab and let it sit in there
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To me tabs are like a queue of things I plan to review or consume. Does a link look interesting? Open it in a new tab, then I'll look at after I finish with the current one.
How do you remember which pages you still need to/want to get back to?
Saving 100s of tabs isn't going to work either, unless you can remember the name of the window and then tediously look through the list of open tabs. In that case, just search through your history instead of having the tabs.
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Isn't that a good use case for the bookmark function?
To answer the actual question: I don't. Either I read it immediately or will never get back to it. There is always enough fresh content. I don't need another backlog.
And let's be honest, if you have a backlog of 7400 pages, neither do you.
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I go to the same set of pages all the time, and the browser has it in the search history. So usually only have to type a few characters to navigate to it.
Do people often seek out obscure pages without entering from a more common context?
e.g. hackernews to any article link
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I agree. Me, I'm into furry porn, but where they're shaved so you can't tell they're furries.
That's really hard to Google, so I keep those tabs open!
Bookmarks. Reading lists. Notes.
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the primary difference between bookmarks and tabs is that bookmarks are static and tabs are dynamic. the best example is tracking a webcomic. the tab will stay open on the page where i stopped reading. it then allows me to go back and resume reading. when i follow links to the next pages, then the tab will be updated.
if i were to use a bookmark, then every time i'd advance a few pages in the comic, i'd have to delete the old bookmark and create a new one.
it is quite ironic that a browser feature called bookmark does not actually function like a physical bookmark for printed books.
>A Mozilla rep confirms to PCMag that having tons of Firefox tabs open consumes "practically no memory whatsoever."
So they are not that different from bookmarks then?
They consume more than bookmarks because they have the current page content and context and the navigation history. Firefox does a good job minimizing the memory this takes, but it's non-zero. For that reason I rarely go above about 400 tabs in a session. My wife, on the other hand, is OK with swap to a fast SSD that I'm not OK with and has several thousand tabs loaded at any given time.
My 100+ tabs consuming 12GB of RAM says otherwise...
That's because of the Javascript running on them. If I have a dozen youtube tabs that are not suspended my FF becomes very janky and if I look in FF task manager, sure enough, they're consuming lots of CPU. I suspend them and FF becomes snappier again.
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I upgraded from 16gb to 32gb of RAM expressly because of firefox.
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Same here. What are the chances of that Mozilla rep actually using Chrome (which actually does auto-unload tabs these days)?
Then why does my firefox freeze my comp if I have too many tabs open?
You can have thousands of unloaded tabs, but loaded tabs can gobble up memory and your computer may start swapping. It will usually recover from that but it can take a minute or two. If you get that often, you can open about:processes , sort on memory use and kill a few of the largest processes, which will unload their tabs.
The tabs are open but not loaded so yeah, it's like a bookmark. Once you click the tab it loads the content.
I thought you needed an extension to unload tabs?
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“average person has 7400 tabs” factoid actually just statistical error. average person uses bookmarks. Tabs Hazel is an outlier and should not have been counted
Bookmark management of browsers is bad.
You sure? From what I've seen over the years, bookmarks are not a very heavily used browser feature. I think most people don't have more than a few dozen, if they use them at all.
Context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiders_Georg
I can't imagine not having them - wild
I think we may have a fat tail distribution here.
> Mozilla says it plans to roll out a new profiles feature and a new tab organization feature later this year;
Finally. I hope we get tab groups that work with multi containers.
If I really wanted to keep a record of all the sites I've been to for historic reasons like this person there are far easier/better ways to do that. I'd even set it up to download a local copy of the sites I visit so that they'd be there even if the sites went offline.
I have 298 tabs across 8 windows open right now and I can already tell firefox is about to crash at any moment. I go to about:memory and mash the buttons in the "free memory" box to buy some extra time, but eventually firefox goes down in flames and I lose all my open tabs. When it does finally crash Firefox can never restore my tabs, but I blame myself/my settings for that.
When things get to this point where I know firefox will die soon I end up bookmarking them all or even copying each URL into a text document with dreams that I'll go back to them after my browser has been closed and re-opened, but I almost never manage it. At least I have the option I guess and I know that if I ever do I'll find things that are of interest to me. There's just no shortage of other things that are of interest to me online so the newest stuff tends to win out.
As long as you don't have private browsing windows open (these won't be restored), you should be able to close Firefox and have it restore all tabs after a restart. It will unload all tabs, i.e. they won't use memory until you focus them again.
Have you tried Auto Tab Discard to reduce memory usage?
I have Firefox set to reopen tabs when it starts and, on the very rare occasion it does crash or the power goes out, the tabs are back when I reopen Firefox.
I've had 7000 tabs open as well (currently 3700, I backup the session file and start again every half year or so). What I think would be handy would be if tabs would be auto-grouped by domain name, and that I could define domain groups (like work, newspapers, computing sites, youtube, etc.).
You can do that with Sidebery, at least partially.
I see manually managed groups in Sidebery but nothing automatic... it doesn't look like you can move more than one tab into a group at a time, or even move a single tab into a specific group without manually dragging through a huge scrolling list to find it.
3 replies →
Something I'm still looking for is a way to manage "browser stuff" which would fit my workflow.
Basically I want to be able to turn a window full of tabs into some kind of document, where I can add metadata about the window and tabs, organized into sections, and which creates an archive of each page while maintaining the option of reloading the latest version if it still happens to exist.
This would also involve a better way to select a bunch of tabs at once and move them to the window they belong on.
If anyone knows of something which works this way, I'd love to hear about it.
The easiest way I've found to move a bunch of tabs between windows is with Sidebery. It also lets you organize tabs into panels.
I like Session Buddy for Chrome. It saves all of your tabs & windows as dated collections. You can also manually save and label sets. When researching, I will often have 100+ tabs open sorted into different windows, and it's nice to be able to save the session for later.
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/session-buddy/edacc...
I don’t need 7400, but I do have about 50-100 open in different spaces (personal/work/hobbies).
What Firefox lacks for me, is the ability to sync these open tabs to different devices seamlessly.
The only browsers that do this well right now are Edge and Arc browser, and this is the reason I abandoned Firefox about 1 year ago.
What is it in particular, that Firefox Sync lacks?
"Firefox View", accessible via a pinned-tab-like button at the beginning of the tab strip gives a good way already to manage lots of tabs. It allows to search tab titles from all Firefox windows and gives access to tabs on connected devices and the browsing history.
Wow, I never crossed the 2000 line, 7400 is quite a feat. Also Firefox doesn't suffer visibly until 800~ on my old laptop, and it starts to show above 1500. Thanks for supporting hoarders like us.
My ex- once commented that had half the internet bookmarked. He suggested it might be faster to Google for things than to hunt for the bookmark.
Okay, I thought I was pushing it with 300 open tabs, but I know now that I'm a lightweight.
That person is my soulmate.
Lol, I have 15000+ tabs across 13 windows.
There are lots of browser extensions like onetab that allow you to keep as many tabs as you want without having to navigate a mess.
I don't want to keep any tabs open, but I haven't found a better way for my workflow and I've tried quite a few.
My tabs fall into the following categories:
- unfinished/long running projects/topics/research: for these I use a version of the Tabs Aside! extension that I've modified, which converts them to bookmarks.
- tabs I will want to look at someday and further categorize and/or take action: for these I implemented a babashka script that when I click on an URL it fetches the page, extracts the title and displays it and asks me if I want to open it now, or save it for later in an org-file. This doesn't work, unfortunately, for URLs that I open from another FF page. For these, my long term plan involves archiving the text and doing RAG on them, as they relate to my long term interests/projects/curiosities.
- tabs I need for the actively running projects/tasks
Who needs bookmarks anyways... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
"Power user."