[jlokier]

I lost Firefox sessions so many times last year! As I have a few thousand tabs over several windows, some being placeholders for things I regard as important, that sort of thing is really bothersome.

Every so often, after a system restart due to running out of battery on my laptop, I'd start Firefox and get the dreaded "only one window, home tab".

I was able to recover by going through backups, but it was a fiddly and manual process, and for a while last summer it happened annoyingly often. There were a couple of times I couldn't recover what I'd been working on the previous day.

[Onawa]

Good lord, what possible workflow leads you to having that many open tabs without bookmarking them or using some other plugin that allows you better tab management? Seems like a recipe for disaster, especially since you said you end up having to dig through backups to restore state.

[jlokier]

You answered it yourself - they play the role of bookmarks.

If you were to tell me to use bookmarks instead of tabs, I'd find that weird: Bookmarks are like a less useful version of tabs. I used to use Bookmarks and found them less useful; it's that simple.

Yes, I do use a plugin that allows better tab management, thanks.

With regard to digging through backups: Bookmarks would have exactly the same problem if they got wiped, would they not.

UPDATE: I'm with jml7c5's comment: There is a middle ground betweem traditional Bookmark use (archived) and live (current issues). My open tabs occupy this middle ground as a kind of medium-term, time-ordered backlog of issues to take another look through when time permits.

Some of them are articles containing information I want to extract to notes, some of them contain specific technical bugs, solutions or discoveries I need to incorporate having found out about them, and generally many serve as useful reminders about some issue or other to get to in due course.

The ability to visually see their time and association structure that grew passively is quite useful, as is the ability to visually see the actual content at a glance, because that helps me remember why that content is in my queue.

Bookmarks are almost useless for this. The URL is not enough by far. If Bookmarks had large thumbnails, retained scroll position, and it was possible to highlight particular text, then Bookmarks would be much more useful for my needs.

No doubt there are various clipping tools such as Evernote that would serve me better. But I haven't found an open source one that hits the spot, and I'm not interested in using any closed source or cloud-based clipping tool, having been bitten by locked away formats, and inability to extend the tool, too many times already.

[jml7c5]

There's a middle-ground between bookmarks ("permanent" storage where it feels like you're archiving the page), live tabs (obvious issues), and "to read" lists (which are better for a stream of content that you know you want to read but can't get to yet), that isn't served by current approaches. Firefox Preview (Android) had a really good idea with "collections", where you essentially save tabs into groups that were visible on the "new tab" page, but it doesn't seem to have percolated to any of Mozilla's other browsers.

My painful tab overuse is caused by skimming HN/reddit a few times a day, popping anything I'm interested in looking at into a background tab, then getting to those tabs as I go through the day. It doesn't feel the Pile Of Prospects should be in a "to read" list, as it seems that such a list should only contain long articles & videos & etc that I'm certain I want to read but don't have time for. That is, the "to read" list is meant to be something that could be integrated with a tool like Pocket, where the content could be backed up and read offline while in a continuous, focused state. Rather, the Pile Of Prospects should go in a sort of "haven't looked at yet" list that needs to be pruned and which is always visible so as not to go untended.

I'll probably write an extension to deal with my use case, but I think this slow creep is how most people end up with a thousand tabs open.

I do agree that thousands of open tabs is a terrible way of operating. It's not great for memory consumption (even with tab discarding), it makes hunting through the "real" active set of tabs difficult, and people do end up losing their Pile Of Prospects. I'd love to see Firefox et al gain better support for this without needing to resort to extensions, especially as most extensions designed for this are a touch too slow, have rough edges, or try to do too much.

[vs4vijay]

Ditto, I do the same everyday. I once had ~700 tabs opened and I usually skim through them in a 2 days to 1 week.

So I have enabled "Restore previous session" option in firefox and sometime I manually crash the firefox so the next time I open the browser it asks to me restore the 700+ tabs but they won't be consuming the memory because they are inactive and when you click on them, then only it loads the contents and consume memory.

This is how my tabs looks: https://snipboard.io/AUQ3kj.jpg

Also, I use multiple profiles of firefox and having them as separate applications like this: https://snipboard.io/mXUCqp.jpg

PS: I don't use chrome or electron based apps as they are memory hogger.

[kqr]

Some people use tabs as a sort of bookmarking/selective history thing. Firefox makes this especially easy with tree-style tabs. I'm still undecided whether it's good or bad.

[travisjungroth]

It’s terrible! Do you leave every single piece food and cooking utensil you own out on the kitchen counter at the same time? No, cause it’s a workspace and that obviously makes no sense. Tabs are an ephemeral system that you can clean with a single mouse click. If there’s anything in your life you should be able to keep tidy, that’s it.

[jlokier]

Perhaps you're proposing to put all the kitchen utensils in the garbage and go shopping for new ones each time you cook; that's surely even weirder!

If you're proposing that bookmarks are the equivalent of tidy drawers (and a tidy mind), then I wonder, why you think tabs are not.

In Firefox, Bookmarks and Tabs seem quite similar apart from the UI for handling them. However Bookmarks record only the page title and URL, and organising them is so much work that picking up a group of tasks with them is a pain. Whereas Tabs record where you were on the page as well (scroll position), and automatically product a track of grouped, time-ordered tasks that were spawned, which can then be pruned.

(Neither is ideal; I would like to be able to highlight text on a page or a region, to attach a note to remind me what task I've set the page aside to resume later, and to have a fast, sleek UI for reorganising later in a pruning phase. Neither Bookmarks or Tabs provide these things unfortunately, and neither does any extension I've tried so far.)

When a comment above asks what sort of workflow, my answer is that at least there is a workflow. Bookmark land is where tasks go to die because too much context is lost, and not enough is captured automatically.

[travisjungroth]

I don’t throw away my kitchen tools, but I do throw away any food scraps.

I think your comment touches on the essential thing here, which is that web pages have the characteristics of tools, but also of tasks. Browsers are good at the tools part but don’t do anything for the tasks part.

I think trying to get the browser to handle the task component for you is the wrong answer. You can only do things that are equivalent to leaving the hammer by the door to remember to buy nails, and this scales terribly.

For all the concerns the many-tabbers have about “losing their place” they seem to be just always sort of lost. I can’t imagine the commenter above with thousands of tabs has everything he needs at his fingertips, and nothing he doesn’t.

My life has been easier since separating the tool and the task. Tasks go in my task manager (Todoist), and I put links to the relevant site if there is one. My toolbar has frequently visited sites with just their icons. My bookmarks folder is just a list of things I might be happy to run into someday. It would be no big loss if it was deleted. And last week I wrote a script for those pages that I just have to revisit, like an article I know I should read ten more times. It automatically creates a task in Todoist at increasing intervals (week, month, 3 months, 6 months, year) to reread X, with a link.

[hazz99]

Different people use tabs in different ways. Tree style tabs lend themselves to having a larger number of more permanent ones.

[notyourwork]

You can decide how to live your life, others can decide for themselves. No judgement needed.

[c0restraint]

> As I have a few thousand tabs over several windows

I'd sugges you need to find an alternative workflow... even one thousand tabs has far passed the point of diminished returns