Comment by jdprgm
6 hours ago
I don't think any browsers are really designed for the range of how many tabs people keep open.
I also wonder what the distribution does really look like. Just on my primary profile here I felt like I was making progress trying to get it to under 2000 tabs recently.
It feels like a hopeless battle though. Across multiple machines and browsers and browser profiles i'd reckon i'm stuck at like 12,000 open tabs.
Might be just me but I just close everything at the end of day to start a clean slate for next day (usually around 50). I also just use bookmarks for persistent autocomplete.
If I don’t do this my workday doesn’t feel finished. Close all tabs, close all applications. Done, end of day.
I used to be so good at this, then came Claude. My newest invention is a root Claude that has clear instructions on how to handle me, and it writes handoff notes. Doesn’t help though so mayday.
I think your approach is the general normal one.
> i'm stuck at like 12,000 open tabs
Would you mind giving this a shot and sharing your feedback? https://github.com/TheCodeArtist/firefox-tabs-review
Helps wade through the backlog of tabs to "burndown" one by one or en-masse?
> Too many tabs? Manage them down one-by-one...
Isn't it dead at the slogan already?
Get the "One Tab" extension. It closes all tabs, but saves a list, so it gets over the psychological hurdle of losing the open tabs.
What is the point of having that many tabs open? You just need to close your browser and start over from one. Websites don't go away just because you close the tab, you can come back later.
This is bizarre to me. I close Out my browser completely several times a day lol.
My wife refuses to use bookmarks and instead uses open tabs. It drives me nuts.
I do the same. Bookmarks are a case of “out of sight, out of mind”, whereas I come across open tabs eventually. They are like physical cues to remind me of things, akin to leaving the trash bag in front of the door so you can’t forget to take it when you leave.
Do you actually come back to a tab 2,000 tabs later?
Lately I've tried using an extension to close any tabs I haven't opened for a few days. I haven't missed them, and if I actually want to come back to something, I make a todo now.
I do come back to a non-trivial amount.
The main issue is overcoming i opened a tab for reason and i want to close a tab for a reason, but tabs usually lead to more tabs so even trying to stay on top of it, it just endlessly grows.
Youtube alone is a major culprit and i'm confused on how everyone doesn't have at least several hundred videos they started watching or opened in a tab out of possible future interest.
For youtube, sticking it on 'watch later' is one approach, or some other playlist. Even better, that way you can cronjob a script to save them locally. I'll leave youtube tabs for too long (despite this) and too often I've eventually returned and it's been removed. My other tab-shrinking habits are bookmark folders in the form "year-unread" and a local txt file where I loosely dump related URLs into pseudo-categories/sections.
This feels like a hoarders mentality. You don't have to answer this but do you hoard in any other aspects of life? There's nothing more therapeutic than closing tabs. Worst case, everything is in history and can be opened again.
No I don't think I do. I associate "hoarders" with reality tv and disastrously messy homes though which I can't relate to.
If anything though I would say I associate open tabs in the same vein as an infinitely growing number of books in the to read list or movies in the to watch list. Both usually leading to a tree branch style recommendation of more and more books or movies I might be interested in after consuming.
a mix of digital hoarding and FOMO
Are you on Chrome?
Mobile browsers do it well.
Tabs Georg who has 12k tabs open is an outlier and should not have been counted.