[hiram112]

I know everyone has there own work flows, but how can you even keep track of that many tabs?

After about 8 or 9, I find myself tabbing through half of a dozen tabs to get where I'm going, and at that point I realize I've added like 5 new tasks to my original stack of todos or research or whatever I was originally doing. At that point it's time to shut some tabs and concentrate on the original item.

Also, once I've logged into, for example, GMail or Facebook, I do not want to be browsing other sites while under their eye. I instead usually open multiple Chromiums / Chrome, each app for a specific task.

[Sylos]

> I know everyone has there own work flows, but how can you even keep track of that many tabs?

You don't.

You just push new tabs onto the stack. When you're done with a topic, you start popping those tabs until you're back at the previous topic.

Then that previous topic is either something unrelated which you wanted to read later, so you just leave it there. Or it's whatever you were researching before you had to look up something that's mentioned in the text, meaning that you now know this thing and can continue working on the previous topic.

You never have to know what your tabs to the left contain. You only care for the last handful of tabs to the right, which you can use as if those tabs to the left wouldn't exist (well, on Firefox at least, on Chrome they become unreadable).

As for GMail and Facebook, check out these:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/facebook-cont...

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-contai...

Or the more generic variant:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...

[superkuh]

I've been doing large sessions ever since Opera introduced tabs in my teen years (2000). It's how I grew up and second nature now.

Tabs are great because they provide context both as a span of tabs showing how I got from point A to point B and as individual tab due to tab history backwards. I've been regularly saving my session files since ~2001 although I only have data from 2003 onward. It's great to load up an old one and see what I was doing on some old date.

http://superkuh.com/number-of-tabs-vs-date-2003.png (2003-2006) http://superkuh.com/number-of-tabs-vs-date-2017.png (2013-2017)

Nowdays the first couple hundred are almost static over a year or two. They are things I always want to have open. The most recent ~300 or so are in flux from week to week. There is a gradient. The older tabs and their favicons/etc form a landscape I know and can navigate just by a glance. The newer ones I can see the general topic of a group/span of tabs by clicking in and using tab search. I also use minimal browser skins/layouts to pack the max amount of tabs in.

Every couple months I'll go through and "clean" up a session by closing some and bookmarking others. The tabs that make it through this are added to the static landscape of useful things for current projects. Kind of like how sedimentary rock is layed down in layers.

Every year or two I'll start a new session. It always feels so directionless.

I do not use 'web app' sites like gmail or Facebook.

[wlesieutre]

Tree style tabs addon makes huge numbers of tabs useable, you really rethink the whole tab workflow.

For logging into sites like gmail and Facebook, consider using Containers https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-facebook-container-...

[Izkata]

Hoo yeah, before TreeStyleTabs, I limited myself to somewhere around 30-40 just because there wasn't room to see everything.

Nowadays I'm up somewhere around 300 and it's not a big deal, because they self-organize into related groups that are expandable/collapsible.

[bzbarsky]

> I find myself tabbing through half of a dozen tabs to get where I'm going

Why are you tabbing at all? If you type "* foo" in the url bar (without hitting enter), you will get a list of tabs whose url or title includes "foo". You can select one to jump to it. Much faster than linearly going through tabs.

[hiram112]

that's not working in latest Chrome. I'll do a little searching around as that would help my own workflow quite a bit. Thanks.

[bzbarsky]

> that's not working in latest Chrome

Oh, I was talking about Firefox. Chrome's tab management is ... much worse.

I also typo'd. "* foo" searches bookmarks with "foo" in them. "% foo" searches open tabs.

[ams6110]

I'm the same. When I have enough tabs that I can no longer read the titles/know which tab is which, I start closing tabs.

I don't understand how hundreds of open tabs can be necessary, even if there are tools that make it manageable.

But, to each his own.