For those wondering how that is manageable I use Firefox with multirow tabs. And how it gets so high is that I always open links in new tabs in the background when doing any research.
At my job where we can only use MS Edge, the Vertical Tabs feature helps me immensely with ~1000 tab sessions. I'm not sure about Google Chrome, but Brave also adopted the feature this past year.
My browser windows are like literal trains of thought where each tab is a station. I only close them when the journey is finished, so to speak. If possible, I like to preserve the tab structure if I ever must save them for another time. The problems with doing so are 1) no browsers support this natively, and 2) the add-ons/extensions/plugins which do this are either clunky or closed-source software.
>What advantages do you see to keeping a large number of tabs open at a time? Do you find that you return to them?
I edited my comment to expand a little on that. Adding to it, tabs for me are a crude thinking tool. I usually open links as new tabs so I can see how my search for information has branched out. The practice is unwieldy and results in my browser being the highest consumer of system resources, but at least I can see how I came to research a particular thing. It's more insightful than browser history, which only tells a linear story. Browsers these days will also try to direct you to open tabs if you type something similar in a search bar, which can be interesting for connecting previous inquiries with new ones.
I should dive into the Next browser. Apparently it has a tree-based history, which might be an efficient solution for my needs: https://nyxt.atlas.engineer/
I’m similar, I have around 200 tabs open at any given time on my work machine. I use Firefox and a plugin called Panorama to manage them.
On an ongoing basis, I am typically working on 4-5 projects plus some utility functions. I use Panorama to group the tabs by project. Each project has 10-20 tabs open. Panorama only shows the tabs from a particular group at a given time. By grouping the tabs, the cognitive load is reduced.
Over the course of a day, I will visit most of these project groups and interact with the tabs in each. Some of long running tabs like the main project page. Others are tabs for current open issue. It is helpful to me to be able to treat each project as a browser workspace and be able to return to that workspace at will. Using bookmarks and closing tabs would add more overhead. Often I am switching quickly between projects and I may have open editing sessions on one or more tabs that are not ready to close.
The browser+OS (MacOS ) handles the RAM usage gracefully and swaps tabs to SSD when they are not recently used and more memory is needed. I’ve never seen an “out of memory” message even though I’m running Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and other apps like Affinity Photo at the same time.
2K ? I learned the hard way that Firefox has a limit of 8000 tabs per window when reloading a previous session. Wrote a small app to split the tabs to save my decade-old session. The day I close a tab without having read it hasn't come yet !
My browser windows are like literal trains of thought where each tab is a station. I only close them when the journey is finished, so to speak. If possible, I like to preserve the tab structure if I ever must save them for another time. The problems with doing so are 1) no browsers support this natively, and 2) the add-ons/extensions/plugins which do this are either clunky or closed-source software.