[scholia]

They accumulate. Every day there are two or three pages you intend to read later, so you leave them open. A month later, you have an extra 100 tabs loaded. After six months, you have 600. There are also clusters of tabs associated with some research you were doing but didn't quite finish.

Then the problem is it would take a couple of days to go through all the waiting tabs and shut them down, and you don't have a couple of days to spare.

Eventually you just save them all out as a session and start again, and hope you will learn from your mistakes ;-)

I've switched from FF/Chrome to FF/Vivaldi because it has much better ways to handle tabs and bookmarks than Chrome does. Vivaldi does tab stacking, for example.

[c22]

I'm having the problem right now of hundreds of tabs open on my phone, I context-switch out of the browser when I'm done and end up leaving dormant tabs all over the place. Unfortunately whenever I try to scroll through them to close the non-relevant ones Chrome crashes, usually restoring several of the tabs I'd successfully closed.

[scholia]

There are extensions like Session Manager that list all the tabs after a crash, so you can uncheck the ones you don't want to reload. I don't know if there is one for Chrome on mobile, but it might be worth a look....

[hga]

Session Buddy for non-mobile Chrome works very well and allows you to do roughly the same thing. I.e. take an saved session, maybe after copying (I think you can do that), and delete the tabs you're not interested in (it does have one level undo), and then only start the remainder, perhaps window by window (on the desktop, at least).

[c22]

I love session buddy on the desktop, though with javascript off on most pages and 32gb of system memory I have yet to crash chrome from tabs there.

[nightcracker]

Maybe a 'read later' extension could help you? Something longer-term than a tab, but shorter-term than a bookmark.

[burfog]

That would imply taking a positive action to do something about the tab. I want to just ignore the tab until I need it again. I don't want to treat the tab specially.

My real desk is messy. I mostly know where stuff is buried because I put it there and nobody messes with my desk. I clean it about once a year, usually when a big project is fully done forever. I want the same functionality from my browser.

[scholia]

Yes. What I do now is save the page as an mhtml file so I can read it later without having to find it again. (Chrome should really offer better mhtml support.)

[burfog]

not going to touch an extension

Extensions tend to break with browser updates. Extensions tend to cause slowness. Nobody wants your bug report if you are running an extension.

[aexaey]

They sure do accumulate, to the point where by the time you go back to some old tab, and that tab just so happen to be replaced with a window.opener trick, [1] there is no chance of you remembering what was there in the first place, and spotting the fake.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11631292