[ksec]

On HN, I have once been to told to see a doctor or psychiatrist for having a few hundred tabs ( I am not making this shit up ). And it was from a pre 2013 Account.

So may be you are the normal one. I mean a few years ago Firefox has telemetry to show vast 95% of people has less than 10 tabs opened. And then you have a long tail that goes from twenty to a few thousands.

As a reply below i think most of us use it as research, come back later, short to medium term reading list. Like I am looking for a super thin wallet, currently Bellroy, but I dont like its flimsy structure. And then I have about 10 tabs next to those that are alternative. I haven't decided yet but that set of tabs are what my current unfinished wallet research status on. A bunch on HN Tabs that I waited for all the comments to settle before reading. etc. And if you have many unfinished task your tab number tends to increase a lot. And unlike old days where a single site would give in depth information on a topic, and you only need a few to make some informed decision, current web is basically very thin and light on everything.

[Given_47]

> I have once been to told to see a doctor or psychiatrist for having a few hundred tabs

Yea that's nothing, haha. I currently have 3592 open. Like you mention, research and tab hoarding go hand in hand. Even recreational research: everyone is familiar with the wikipedia spree with its innumerable hyperlinked articles and references, and now you suddenly have 20 additional open tabs. I'll read maybe two of them, but the others piqued my interest enough to warrant opening, so definitely not closing them. If you never purge, you eventually end up in the hundreds/thousands.

My tabs get auto suspended when they've been idle for thirty mins, which prevents the memory usage from becoming ridiculous enough to incentivize me to change! Though I do need a better system, such as a tagging/categorization system for links. At least half my open tabs are things not of immediate relevance (duh), but HN posts/random blog posts on $NICHE_TOPIC that I'll (hopefully) get to eventually; eg building a DIY keyboard. Especially the blog posts, I can't be sure that I'll stumble upon them again. Sites like MakeUseOf can fuck off, they always float to the top of the SERP.

[DiggyJohnson]

Fascinating. I have a very internet-research heavy project (writing a nonfiction book), but how do you find a specific tab that you want to go back to. It seems like that would be harder than using bookmarks or simply re-navigating to the resource.

Do you end up with a “feel” for where the tab is, similar to how we get used to the contours of our camera role on a smartphone?

[Given_47]

You know, that highlights the idiocy of my workflow. I typically search through my bookmarks or history with Vimium, and not through my open tabs because I want to open the link in my current context; not the context where that tab resides.

But overall I actually think the visual aspect is the reason, its mostly an unavoidable nag saying "DONT FORGET!" Closing tabs sends them into the abyss, unless you precisely remember what you're looking for (for someone wont to ctrl/cmd click hyperlinks, good luck finding those). And I do use session buddy to save and organize contexts (and keeps the tab situation somewhat "sane") but—and similarly with OneTab—those just get sent off to the extension's local db and you forget.

> Do you end up with a “feel” for where the tab is, similar to how we get used to the contours of our camera role on a smartphone?

When I used to only have a few hundred, spread out into different windows, and designated virtual desktops for each meta topic, definitely. It's what I want to get back to.

[djbusby]

Your browser likely has a tab search feature (chrome and FF have it). So, you can see/find easy. Also some plugins can help there too.

[ako]

Might as well just search your browser history?

[CodesInChaos]

I had the problem at some point, that Firefox wouldn't start anymore after an upgrade (at ~7,5k). That's was when I gave up, and fed all tabs to the one-tab extension, which saves them as links and closes the tabs. Nowadays I regularly press its save-and-close-all button, so the number of tabs stays reasonable (less than 200 or so).

[Given_47]

Haha, I use session buddy for that but I reopen all tabs every time I restart my computer because the fallacious thinking of "THIS time I'll go through some of them!" My above comment did prompt me to seriously start looking into a better system, though predictably now I have a ton of tabs open for linkding, archivy, et al. The awesome-$THING project(s) are great resources but you quickly spawn fifty additional tabs for each project's repo