[Izkata]

I use them instead of bookmarks. Basically had two requirements to be reasonable:

* Tree Style Tabs for automatic organization and collapsing into "folders" (links opened in a new tab become child tabs, the parent can be collapsed like a folder, to arbitrary depth)

* Some sort of tab unloader/discarder, so memory usage stays reasonable.

I only have like 10 or so root level tabs, the rest of the several hundred grew from there.

[Dalewyn]

>I use them instead of bookmarks.

This.

The hundreds of tabs I have open are bookmarks, I don't actually use them as tabs.

[JohnFen]

Oh, that's really interesting. That use case wouldn't work for me because I want to be able to access my bookmarks from any browser on any machine -- so I use a bookmark server.

[fassssst]

But why?

[evanjrowley]

I'll try to articulate this as someone who usually has 500-1000 open tabs.

Bookmarks are things that meet or surpass a certain threshold of usefulness. My open tabs probably include things that should be bookmarked, but all of that information needs to be screened for what's really worth saving. Clusters of tabs for various trains of thought take time to condense into purified bookmarks.

In order for me to have less tabs open, I guess reality would need to become much more boring.

Ironically, as I'm browsing the web, Google, Bing, Facebook, etc. are all maintaining various growing data structures about me that encapsulate key information, like what content is the most engaging for me, my social graph, or tracking the sites I visit most. People act like having 1000 tabs is a problem, but no one cares when Google's database gets it's 100,000th record for the data they're keeping on you. I wish that raw data could be shared with the respective users. It would be nice to know more about my digital self than the algorithms do. It's another facet of what makes these tech companies god-like.

[bbor]

So you don’t use bookmarks because bookmarks seem like they have to be perfectly named/organized? Why not just… not? I.e. a bookmark folder called “chaos”. Seems like it would instantly unlock a more natural UI for the same data, but maybe I’m missing something.

Thanks for explaining what you already have, I’ve always been SO confused by people with hundreds of tabs. I hope I wasn’t the only one who read “people either use 3 tabs or 300” and thought that was insanely out of touch

[Izkata]

> Why not just… not? I.e. a bookmark folder called “chaos”. Seems like it would instantly unlock a more natural UI for the same data, but maybe I’m missing something.

Back to my comment that started this: That would be a flat list with no grouping and little to no context. Tree Style Tabs automatically organizes them by context.

For example, one of my root tabs is Youtube. Immediate children include a few channels that upload a lot of videos so I don't subscribe to them (they'd drown out the ones that upload rarely) but want to keep up with them. Those then have child tabs for their videos I want to watch/listen to at some point, but haven't gotten to yet.

I do the same on here, one of my root tabs is the Hacker News homepage. This one has a bunch of additional long-running tabs, interesting projects I want to try out myself, or reminders to try something out and maybe switch to it instead of whatever I'm currently using. Most of these have further subtabs as I've started exploring whatever it was but not yet finished with it.

And yeah, you could do such groupings with bookmarks... but that's manual work. This is automatic.

[cole-k]

I was reading some other replies that suggested using something to close all tabs and bookmark them automatically and I had the same reluctance as you do because I also group up my tabs.

However, this makes me think: what if there was a tree-style-tab extension that let you convert a tree into a bookmark folder? Then I wouldn't feel bad at all about closing half or more of my tabs.

This could be optionally combined with some sort of bookmark/page archiving service so you can be extra-sure that content will be waiting for you if you ever decide to look at it later.

[evanjrowley]

>Why not just… not? I.e. a bookmark folder called “chaos”

Both open browser tabs and bookmarks get auto-completed by the omnibar in contemporary browsers. One important difference is, after a new browser session is created, those pervious tabs go away, but the bookmarks stay. The "chaos" bookmark method results in more chaotic omnibar auto-complete suggestions over time. Unfortunately, that seems like a worse outcome.

[fassssst]

Doesn’t that waste a lot of electricity though given all those tabs are loaded? Do you have to buy higher end laptops to accommodate that workflow?

[evanjrowley]

The answer used to be Yes. 32GB RAM was a spec I'd commonly try to get. As the other commenter has indicated, contemporary browsers have decent logic for unloading open tabs from RAM. Likely it's one of the many improvements made after Google Chrome received strong criticism for it's RAM consumption.

[Izkata]

I think tab unloading in Firefox might predate Chrome. I was using an addon for it called Bar Tabs Heavy in the late 2000s / early 2010s, and I know it was a successor to another addon (which I think was just Bar Tabs).

[Izkata]

No, because they're not loaded.

Firefox doesn't load tabs after a restart until you click on them, and I use a tab unloader so tabs also get unloaded after a few hours (mentioned in my original comment that started this chain).

It's currently only using about 3% CPU.

[cobertos]

Tabs also store an implicit chronology and don't require organization other than the order/vague time they were "saved" and the related tree they were in (tree-style tabs).

I also find the tab scrolling UI of a long list easier than manually waypointing stuff into folders and then trying to remember what, where, and other context of the saved items