[canadianwriter]

I never have more than like 10 tabs open at a time, so likely wont be helpful to me, but I find this super interesting!

Can someone explain what normal people use so many tabs for? It seems to be super common to have tons and tons open.

Are people using tabs as a soft bookmark of basically anything interesting? Afraid to close the page because they wont find it in their history or bookmarks? Is this more an issue with bookmarks and history not being as useful as they could be?

Not judging or anything, I just find how other people use tools differently than I do an interesting subject.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

I have almost 2000 tabs open. I use sideberry for tab management.

> Are people using tabs as a soft bookmark of basically anything interesting?

Yep, that's as good a description as any. I have a lot of tabs that I'm not "finished with" in any finite amount of time.

Case in point: currently shopping for a steam generator for a steam shower. I have about 30-40 tabs open to different models, stores, reviews, data pages etc. Once I'm done with the purchase, I'll close them all.

I sometimes use sideberry's ability to have tab groups, but not much.

To be honest, it's a not a great system in that stuff falls off my radar. Most of the tabs at the bottom of my sideberry tab list are ones I have not visited in many months. There's very little point having them there. However the cognitive cost and computational costs are close to zero.

[quesera]

> I have almost 2000 tabs open. I use sideberry for tab management.

I'm just here to report that Firefox + Sidebery continues to work perfectly well at 14571 "open" tabs.

All but a few hundred are unloaded, and I block JavaScript fairly aggressively. Currently measuring 1992 MB, explicitly allocated.

I won't argue with anyone who tells me that I have a problem, but I will say that Firefox and Sidebery make my problem not a problem!

[m4rtink]

Can report that my testing indicates 40k+ tabs is doable with unloading on a 64 GB machine, across multiple Firefox windows with tree style tab.

Since task manager has been introduced, making it easy to unload whole related tab groups its even easier to reach absurd total tab counts. ;-)

[nativeit]

I just wanted to say thank you to all you mad tab hungry folks for making me feel both seen and comparatively sane.

[seba_dos1]

It's doable with a single window on a 16 GB RAM machine as well.

[jowea]

As someone who has gotten to 2000 a few times, even I have to ask myself "how? why?"

[m4rtink]

Investigating some some are to decide what to buy properly could be a couple hundred tabs easily. Usually you can close those when you are done, especially if you use Tree Style Tab to have them in their own little trees - but not always you have the time or are waiting to try the thing after it arrives.

Its is more tricky with technical projects, as you might and up with a big reference tab hierarchy that ideally you should first all read before closing it (maybe, just maybe, someone in one of those forum posts you opened in a tab without looking yet solved your problem!) or get back to the interesting tabs when working on the project.

Worst of all are fiction or world building sites... Like, you end up on some page on Project RHO or Orion's Arm or a WH40K wiki somehow and that page has links to some other interesting topics. And those pages have more links - oh, interesting!

Those can get to hundreds or even thousands of tabs easily and you just can't close them - they are just so interesting and there is that one topic/megascale engineering project/story you did not read to the end yet and you can always get back to it - as long as you keep the tabs open!

And lastly, it is a sort of a diary/history log - sometimes you see a forgotten tab tree you did not touch in a while - oh, right I was researching that thing, how nostalgic! :)

[joe200]

How do you organise them across many windows ? I found it difficult to categorize them by topic (i.e. one window with topic X, another window by topic Y and so on)

[SSLy]

tbh, ADHD meds help for that. Cut down my average tab backlog by 90%.

[quesera]

I appreciate this advice, but FWIW my tab habit is more a product of curiosity and time constraints, than any kind of compulsion or control issue. More of a "read-it-later-maybe" queue.

I'll open tabs for any possibly-interesting HN story, for example, and then come back later and read maybe 25% of them, often when the comment threads are still short, and almost always when only one hemisphere has had time to weigh in. Then I'll come back the next day and reload the page for new comments. Or I'll close the tab if the topic wasn't as interesting as I hoped, or if the comments are dominated by a boring tangent.

Periodicaly I sweep through the older tabs that I've never read. Some have expired in their currency. Some are reassessed for interestingness and dispatched quickly. Others are left for future sweeps.

It may not be neurotypical, but I don't think it's ADHD. :)

I should note: this is on my personal/non-sensitive browser profile. My primary work profile is usually fewer than 1000 tabs and is more actively-pruned, but generally reflects things that are still in current ongoing work. And my personal/sensitive profiles only contain a handful of tabs each, things like pending order invoices, etc.

[pdntspa]

This sort of thing sounds like a fantastic use of Firefox's bookmarks system.

[quesera]

Bookmarks don't retain scroll position, and must be actively managed to preserve hierarchy.

Firefox tabs are a zero-cost, and far more usable, implementation of bookmarks.

Chrome tabs are terrible -- the UI and memory demands are absurd.

Firefox (vertical) tabs are great, convenient, fast, easy, and cause no resource drama.

I have bookmarks too though. They serve three purposes: a) remember this forever but get it out of my way for now, b) put this in a managed hierarchy easily accessed from my bookmarks toolbar, or c) save out this big hierarchy of tabs that I haven't looked at in a while but were each probably the culmination of some level of manual navigation that I don't want to repeat.

[mitthrowaway2]

I bookmark pages I want to keep on hand forever. I don't expect to ever delete them. I wouldn't bookmark product reviews that I'm just juggling while deciding on a purchase, even if I have to put off that purchase on the backburner for a week to deal with the rest of my life.

[bcraven]

I personaly create a 'temp' bookmark folder for things like this. An advantage is that it then syncs to all my Firefox instances.

[martin82]

A few days ago there was a post here about "the internet in a box"...

I guess what you are attempting is "the internet in a fox"...

...fascinating!

[jerf]

"To be honest, it's a not a great system in that stuff falls off my radar."

That's a feature, not a bug. A system that doesn't let things fall off your radar is a taskmaster, not a servant. You have to let things fall off your radar.

[karaterobot]

Maybe not, if there's no way to differentiate between something that has fallen off the radar, and something that is currently on the radar (I mean that all the tabs are in one big flat list, no matter if they're relevant or not). Also, if additional cruft increases the search time (i.e. how long does it take me to find the right tab from among these 2000 open ones) then each unused tab is a small additional burden. I'm not arguing for or against any position that works for anybody, I'm just pointing out some possible wrinkles I see from the outside.

[pawelduda]

And here I was, thinking 200-300 tabs is a lot. Turns out these are rookie numbers.

[seba_dos1]

2000 is still in the same category :)

[radicality]

Damn, 2k tabs, I’m not familiar with sideberry but with 2k of them are they even right to be called native ‘tabs’ or do they function more like bookmarks?

> computational costs are close to zero

Is that true for normal Firefox tabs (I usually use chrome/safari) ? Wouldn’t each one still use up some memory, keep any background tasks running etc. If some tab starts playing audio how do you even find it?

[hs86]

(Not OP) Sidebery is half tab manager, half session manager. It stays in the sidebar, and if I collapse parts of my tree, I have set it to unload those folded tabs after 60 minutes. There is also an option to hide those folded tabs from the native tab bar.

Sidebery, Tree Style Tabs, and Tabs Outliner (for Chrome) all go beyond just adding a linear/flat vertical tab bar to your browser. They preserve a nested hierarchy for child tabs and allow you to restore the entire tree (or just parts of it) on another device, which is super handy if you often switch between desktop, laptop, etc.

[ziddoap]

>Wouldn’t each one still use up some memory

Firefox unloads tabs that haven't recently been used, or as memory approaches system limits. You can also manually unload your least-recently-used loaded tab.

[seltzered_]

Yes, but in practice I've experienced Firefox (at least under linux) getting killed by the OS when RAM runs low. I recently lost some low-priority reading projects after I couldn't recover the tab sets (they were opened months ago, so hard to dig back through history)

I've found myself using Sidebery and the manual 'unload' tab option quite a bit.

[ksec]

Interesting, because out of all the three browser Firefox should be the best at memory management, unloading tabs along with Sessions recovery.

But I have only ever used it on Windows and Mac. So no idea about Linux. You can do About:memory to check out which tabs are using more memory as well as manual memory compact.

Firefox also allows unlimited History, unlike Chrome which I believe you cant even have history for more than 90 days.

[Izkata]

There is a memory problem on Firefox I only found out about a few months ago when it started happening to me after an upgrade, "ghost windows" that use memory and never get deallocated. Restarting Firefox is the only way to clear them.

[chupasaurus]

FF memory management on Linux is usually outpaced by oom_killer.

[m4rtink]

I suggest using the session manager extension & having it do periodic snapshots.

[seltzered_]

Haven't heard of that one, thanks!

[dredmorbius]

Not sufficiently in my experience.

Is this a user setting / tunable for aggressiveness?

[pxc]

There are various extensions that use the native "discard" API that is enabled by default, but give you more knobs to tweak. If you search for "discard tab" in the add-ons store, you'll find a bunch.

I use this one: https://webextension.org/listing/tab-discard.html

[PurpleRamen]

> Damn, 2k tabs, I’m not familiar with sideberry but with 2k of them are they even right to be called native ‘tabs’ or do they function more like bookmarks?

Sidebery offers a hierarchy of tabs, supports group-tabs inside the hierarchy and also has panels, which are basically groups outside/parallel to the hierarchy. With this, you can have very diversified organization-tools.

I also oscillate between 1k to 3k tabs, and I see them more as a process-state. I use tabs for my working-memory, and bookmarks for permanent memory. So any projects, I organize into groups, for every area I have a panel where I collect the corresponding groups. And if the project is over, I close them.

With bookmarks on the other side, I collect links to websites I might visit at some random time, but not necessarily because of a specific project, or with multiple projects. For example, I have bookmarks for my bank, my provider, video-sites (Youtube, Netflix...), Social Media, but also resources like Wikipedia, or self-hosted apps, etc. Those are links I never want to delete, unless the service itself shuts down, or I switch to a different one. So in that sense, they are "stateless".

[PaulDavisThe1st]

The tabs don't get loaded until I revisit them after restarting firefox.

So 90%+ of the tabs are just bookmarks really.

[OneDeuxTriSeiGo]

Well not exactly. Tab suspenders (at least the ones I use) dump the current DOM state, etc to disk so when you reload the tab, it reloads it in mostly the same state it was in when you left it. Of course some pages don't like that and force a full refresh but generally I find when I get a tab reload on a documentation page when it loads back up I end up at roughly the same part of the page I was on when I left off.

[SAI_Peregrinus]

That's a big reason why I prefer tabs to bookmarks. Unloaded tabs have their state saved, bookmarks don't.

[mixmastamyk]

Don’t believe that continues through a restart by default.

[OneDeuxTriSeiGo]

It seems to work across restarts from what I can tell. I just tried to verify it.

I have a tab group in Simple Tab Groups for a perl project I've been working on. The group is basically just a bunch of perl docs (metacpan, etc). I haven't touched the project or the group in a few weeks and I've in that time restarted both FF and my PC several times as well as having updated my FF install several times.

I just switched to that tab group and opened up a random cpan docs tab and it loaded it back in half way down the page. The scroll moved a little bit (only a few lines of text worth of scroll) but that was it.

Of course this doesn't work consistently for all pages. I know for a fact that social apps like bluesky don't tolerate suspends all that well and force a reload but most "vanilla" web pages like docs sites tolerate suspends quite well.

[riquito]

They don't consume anything, at my peak I closed 2736 tabs (I have a photo to commemorate). Firefox somehow didn't care

[malfist]

If you don't mind to share it, I'd love to see it. I want to prove to my coworkers I've not got a problem!

[barbazoo]

Have you checked out Arc? I switched the other day and their approach to somewhat-permanent "tabs" is interesting. At first I missed bookmarks but then I realized that what they were doing is actually closer to how I want to use the browser.

[cassianoleal]

If you like Arc but would prefer if it was open source and/or non-Blink/Chromium, Zen is based on Firefox but with an Arc-like interface.

https://zen-browser.app/

[ibll]

It copies a lot of Arc, but the core tab organisation features from Arc are significantly lacking. Last I checked (a few weeks ago), Zen didn't even have a keybind for pinning a tab. It fully keeps the Firefox bookmarks and prioritises those all over the UI. The Arc tab system is meant to entirely replace all of that. It just makes Zen feel very shallow in comparison. It's just firefox with some goofy Arc features mashed into the front without care.

Arc (macOS) is ridiculously good though. It's become difficult/impossible for me to use another browser happily the past few years. I wish they were focused on it instead of their mediocre AI browser project. They decided to claim Arc windows was out of beta when it's still vastly worse than the mac version in just about every sense. But at least they got the core tab management features locked down (from what I've heard, I don't have a windows machine to try it on.)

[eddyg]

What are you going to do now that Arc development has stopped and The Browser Company is pivoting? (I'm also a big fan of Arc, especially the Air Traffic Control feature to keep certain sites organized into Spaces.)

[barbazoo]

Thanks for pointing this out, I didn't know that. However, at least

> Miller said that Arc "isn't going anywhere" and would continue to receive stability updates and bug fixes

https://www.androidauthority.com/the-browser-company-plannin...

[imcritic]

Poor UI, judging by the screenshots on that page. Another piece of software that treats users as imbeciles in dire need of being saved from "clutter".

[jofzar]

It's pretty much a 1:1 copy of arc, which IMO has the best browser UI/UX I have used.

[cassianoleal]

I think you missed the "If you like Arc" at the very beginning of my post. If you don't like Arc, then Zen is absolutely not for you. And that's fine.

[drtgh]

I use instead the bookmarks toolbar, where you create a folder by topic, select the open tabs with Ctrl, and do a drag&drop into the folder to store such urls. You can then press "Open all tabs" from within the folder when you need to, or individually.

When you have many folders in the bookmarks toolbar, an ">>" icon will appear at the end to the right of the bar, which will expand the rest of the folders vertically, that I scroll with the mouse wheel. So I have my at first sight folders of common use, and also the other ones by pressing ">>". I like much such dynamic (first sight horizontal, and ">>").

I do not like the folder-icon on such first sight bar with folders, I find it a bit distracting and takes up valuable space, so I have a css in userChrome.css to hide such icons (only there, not in the ones unfolded by ">>") leaving this way only the folder name, where I use short names.

This in combination with another css to show only icons for some bookmarks placed at such first sight (bookmarks with no name was the easier way for this). I also had to reduce the separation between such first sight bookmarks.

In addition, I also have the bookmarks button to the left of the url bar, which unfolds another group of different bookmarks vertically.

Sometimes I get the feeling that people are using tabs for what bookmarks were designed for, which is why the number of tabs open is so high.

About the OP, I often search several topics at once, and/or a topic with several sub-topics where the open tabs of different topics sometimes get visually mixed up or I lose the track/focus, for what this new tabs groups sounds ideal.

[dredmorbius]

What are you using to unload tabs?

I've got to confess that my FF memory management is a run-as-needed-or-think-it-should-be-needed shell script which arbitrarily kills the top 10 Firefox processes by memory utilisation. If I'm leaving my desktop for a while I'll run that several times.

Tree-style Tabs keeps the slots open, and can reload tabs as needed.

I'd really like to have the capacity to unload all tabs other than, say, a specifically-specified set. Though on balance, the tabs that are likely to be most usefully kept open also tend to be the worst memory offenders.

If I fail to prune, MacOS falls over early and often, which is somewhat unpleasant.

[louky]

I personally have been using "Auto Tab Discard" for years. It works perfectly for me, and you can set a group of tabs to not unload. It has a ton of options. I have ~320 tabs open right now, for multiple projects and only ~5 are loaded.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc...

[dredmorbius]

Thanks!

[glenstein]

This approach has made me wonder about the utility of a pin board style bookmark managing service where browser history and bookmarking amount to the same thing. As a way of kind of serving that process that's served by having all kinds of tabs. And maybe it could even overlap with tab management. Like if you name a tab group something, it gets named that as part of a persistent history. Like a tag for your bookmark or something.

[imcritic]

Browser history gets rotated. I've lost a beautiful song that way, forgetting to like/bookmark it properly, thinking I'd just find it in history...

[jiehong]

Safari tends to do a good job at that too.

I currently have 867 tabs on Firefox desktop, and 495 in Safari mobile on my phone (I need to start cleaning safari, because weird things happen at 500 when a new tabs is opened).

Safari on desktop also keeps tabs unloaded when re-opening a window.

I just wish safari would allow me to hide the top tab bar when I open the vertical sidebar (if someone knows how to do that, let me know!).

[crossroadsguy]

Wow! My total bookmarks in raindrops are much less than that. The moment I reach 30ish tabs I start experiencing micro panic attacks.

[redeeman]

can you describe that in more detail???

[snapplebobapple]

If relaxamist still exists and is in your region check them out. I have been using my 2.5kw steam generator daily with zero maintenance for 11 years now. Been very happy.

[agumonkey]

Hello fellow 1k+ tab hoarder.

[alabastervlog]

I'm not consistent about going back and closing tabs. By the time I've browsed on a couple topics, I have enough tabs open I can't see the titles any more, and it's downhill from there. Some of them, I think "this is good, I'll come back to this when I get a chance" so I don't want to mass-close them. Eventually I'm opening new tabs of tabs I already have open, because it's faster than finding the original.

Every now and then, I declare tab bankruptcy, mass bookmark them (to get over the feeling that I'll be closing something important), and close them all.

I've never, ever, once, in 15ish years of operating this way, looked at any of the bookmarks.

[EDIT] I guess the main issue is that deciding to close tabs I'm not currently looking at takes time, because I have to evaluate each one, and when I'm down to just favicons on the tab itself, that means actually looking at each page. Just periodically mass-bookmarking and closing is less work. It's a UI issue. Plus, if I'm looking at my browser, it's because I'm doing something, and that something is basically never "playing tab-gardener". My very first action is gonna be "new tab" and go from there.

[philsnow]

> By the time I've browsed on a couple topics, I have enough tabs open I can't see the titles any more

Sidebery or TreeStyleTabs lets you see the titles no matter how many you have. ... Well, you have to scroll, but it's so much better than having to go through tab-by-tab with a typical horizontal tab bar.

> Every now and then, I declare tab bankruptcy, mass bookmark them (to get over the feeling that I'll be closing something important), and close them all.

> I've never, ever, once, in 15ish years of operating this way, looked at any of the bookmarks.

Even though I can see the tab titles, this is exactly what I do(n't). I threw together a couple scripts to extract all the tabs (including which window they're in), and export that all to an org-mode file.

[LTL_FTC]

Any one else favorite hackernews articles knowing they will never actually take the time to go back and read them and their comments? I feel like this is not too dissimilar to hoarding your tabs there. Tsundoku for the digital world.

[DigitalBison]

I'm essentially the same way, with the caveat that I do occasionally go back and find something from one of those archived bookmarks. Maybe a couple times a year at most, which is all the validation my lizard brain needs to consider this a critical practice that I will continue doing without questioning for the rest of my life.

[codethief]

I used to be the same and it drove me nuts. Eventually I looked for a solution and ended up installing Limit Tabs[0] to limit the number of my tabs[1] to 10-15. I couldn't be happier!

[0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/rudolf-fernan...

[1]: On my desktop. Unfortunately, the extension is not available for Firefox for Android, so on mobile I tell Firefox to discard tabs that I haven't used for a day.

[c6p]

I liked the term tab bankruptcy. I'm using tab stash[1] to stash them aside with a timestamp (or a descriptive name if you want to). So, it does not clutter my bookmarks.

Then, I can search or clear the list, or bring back from the stash whenever I want.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-stash/

[pandemic_region]

Cue David Attenborough voice:

And here we find the Tab Hoarder ...

[dredmorbius]

Tree-style tabs lets you close an entire (sub)tree of tabs at once, should you choose to do so.

It's also useful to start new projects in a new window, and let the tree structure build up in that as you progress. You can close parts or all of that window as you've concluded with them.

[Aerroon]

I operate this way, but I didn't used to bookmark them. Until one day I needed to find a website that I had not bookmarked and had closed. I even remembered where the tab was supposed to be but I had mass closed my tabs. It took a long time until I found the page again.

[iworshipfaangs2]

Good lord! If you mass bookmark, aren't you just turning your bookmarks into your history? In that case why not just use browser history instead?

[alabastervlog]

- History gets cleared sometimes. Bookmarks are (basically) forever.

- History includes tons of ephemeral shit, like search result pages (useless, will be different the next time you load it) and redirect pages, or things I've actively decided not to care about. If I looked at 20 shirts on a store-site but only had 3 still open, odds are good I already firmly rejected the other 17. Straight history loses the information of which ones I cared about the most.

[Arelius]

I don't do this, but it appeals to me, as History seems to be pretty spotty, I've a couple of times recently tried to find something in my history, and it ended up as if it was never there.

[BenjiWiebe]

Ya history isn't forever, at least in default Firefox.

I was quite annoyed when I realized that since I was hoping to find something from many years ago.

[dredmorbius]

History is comprehensive, bookmarking is curated.

It's possible to edit history, but it's easier and more useful to edit bookmarks: removing (as with history), but also tagging, annotating, and/or organising.

Heap'o'clothes on the floor vs. a well-organised bureau or closet.

[ziddoap]

Not the person you're replying to, but I clear history on close. I don't clear bookmarks on close.

[bityard]

How about I try a metaphor: Imagine you work in a building. Inside the building, there are multiple rooms. Each room has a different project going on inside it. In one room, you are building a canoe. In another, you are restoring a motorcycle. Another is a music production studio. And so on. Every day, you enter this hypothetical building to get some work done in one or more of the rooms.

Now imagine every night while you're asleep, a cleaning crew comes into your building and tidies up. But they don't just sweep the floor and take out the garbage, they also put away all the tools, pick up any open books and put them back on the bookshelf, re-assemble the motorcycle, and put the music equipment back in its retail boxes.

When you come back in the morning, you have to dedicate minutes to hours just getting things back to where they were when you left. And because you're ADHD as fuck, you probably don't remember exactly where you left off and frequently end up skipping some major step or accidentally redoing work that you did before.

That is what my life feels like without tab groups.

[em-bee]

i feel exactly like you, but i managed to solve that problem with windows, each room/project is a window with tabs. since the UI makes switching windows easy, that makes switching projects easy. eventually i discovered the winger extension which allows me to give windows a name, its important feature, because it makes finding the right window easier. it also makes it easy to move tabs from one window to another.

[gertlex]

Windows are a good solution, except, MS Windows (my home desktop) makes it not a good solution.

I'm pretty sure the ordering of my 4 firefox windows used to stay fixed (i.e when clicking the tray icon, and seeing the 4), but this stopped being the case a few years ago for me.

So I live with 3-4 windows; I don't think having 10 windows would help me because their arrangement is not consistent.

(I hover between about 600-1100 tabs open; I do cleanup when I notice I'm near or above 1000; I don't reliably do cleanup after e.g. opening 5 ebay tabs and deciding what to buy; nor do I reliably finish using those ebay tabs in one sitting; multiply that by the dozens of things I might be researching/comparing, going back many months :) )

(I keep my work Linux laptop Chrome browser to under 50 tabs, and often don't bother restoring tabs after my laptop is rebooted)

[asqueella]

A perfect metaphor for Windows auto-update!

[Macha]

This many tabs are a temporary todo list, basically. Bookmarks are permanent and the interface is worse for cleaning them up when you're done with them.

Also, some sites, and especially app-like sites, are terrible at preserving your state if you close and navigate back. This could be something as simple as highlighted text in a document, or as advanced as the settings for the piano practice app session I'm in.

[deredede]

> Afraid to close the page because they wont find it in their history or bookmarks? Is this more an issue with bookmarks and history not being as useful as they could be?

I think tabs are just the better user interface.

It's not that I'm afraid I won't find the page in my history and bookmarks, it's that I don't want to have to do that because it's painful. History is full of irrelevant pages. Bookmarks make me lose my flow constantly wondering if I should bookmark a page or it's not needed (and in which directory!).

Tabs have a very simple workflow with low cognitive overhead. Everything is preserved by default (middle click/ctrl click is my default click in a browser), unless I'm clearly in a linear workflow where I don't want to keep the page (left click). Self-organizing due to the way they open, but very easy to manually reorder (or close) if needed. Kept in memory so going back to a (recent) tab is instantaneous.

They just... get out of the way and let me work. Tabs make browsing feel like one continuous task, where history/bookmarks feel like constant interruptions.

[Aerroon]

I think an interesting feature might be tabs that turn into bookmarks automatically after a week/month of being open but not interacted with.

[happytoexplain]

Any task that can't be accomplished in one sitting is left to return to later (Note: If this isn't a given - for example, "I simply don't do things I don't have time for" - then you may not have enough in common with the people you're asking about to be able to relate).

Step two: You just need a little discipline to audit your tasks and admit when something has fallen off the top layer of your priority list and take the couple minutes to archive it into a folder of bookmarks or text file or other format of your choice.

And then you need the discipline to occasionally take the time to audit your archives for things that have fallen even lower and delete them (or archive them more deeply...).

For many, it's difficult to justify spending time you already clearly don't have enough of doing such audits. Same psychology behind procrastination. Hence a self-perpetuating problem.

Logically if your task income is greater than your available time, this pattern occurs.

Task income increases both with curiosity/goals and obligation, and most people have an abundance of those. Time is necessarily scarce. So, logically, many people have a lot of tabs.

Note that learning or researching is one of the most common tasks, is an active task, and usually requires multiple concurrent tabs. I.e. it's not simply one article you want to read later.

[perihelions]

- "Can someone explain what normal people use so many tabs for?"

Why are you qualifying "normal" there? I have thousands of tabs open because I have infinite curiosity and a psychological deficit of attention span.

An open tab is earnest expression of a curiosity one is unlikely to actualize in this short life.

> "A man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for?"

[wickedsight]

I realised that ChatGPT with o3 has been a great solution to much of this problem for me. When I previously read or heard something that piqued my interest, I would often easily spend over an hour researching through sites, reddit, HN, to find the info I wanted.

Now, I open o3, write a clearly specified question and let o3 do the research for me. More often than not, it comes back with a perfect answer that satisfies my curiosity. Sometimes, it makes me dig a little deeper, but te time spent is a lot less and I can spend that on more 'physical' interests.

[coldpie]

So, suppose you have 2200 tabs open right now. Under what circumstances would you open, say, the 330th tab from the left? How would you access it?

[perihelions]

It's a different question to ask "how will you access it?" and "have you abandoned the hope of accessing it again?"

Sometimes they come up in my search results in the Omnibar. Open tabs are in the top rank of results.

[coldpie]

The omnibar feature also searches your bookmarks and history, so they are recoverable using the same method if you closed the tab.

But that depends on you thinking to bookmark the page; or accepting that some things will age out of the browser history. So I guess it's kind of like a fragile bookmark: probably reliable, but not the end of the world if tab restoration failed for some reason.

Also, (I assume) tabs retain their Previous Page list, which also has some value.

Interesting. Thanks for the discussion!

[homebrewer]

The tab will also have the context around it (in form of other tabs). When you often switch between various tech stacks/frameworks and open 30 pages of documentation for each one, it's useful to be able to restore all of it easily without messing with bookmarks (that haven't improved in the slightest over the past two decades).

[gertlex]

I haven't regularly bookmarked sites in a decade or more. The bookmarks are in my head, and I can live with the Omnibar mostly reliably surfacing the things I didn't finish, and later recall and want to pick up.

That said, I'm pretty sure the Omnibar is buggy at finding tabs. I inevitably have several tabs to gmail "open". It ought to be a lot easier than it is to find /return to the last-used gmail tab, and not one of the several from previous browsing sessions. :)

[ChoGGi]

The only stuff I tend to bookmark are things I want to use as a keyword search, everything else is a tab in a certain window. There's not enough of them that I have to search to find, maybe a fifty in total?

There is the rare bookmark in my toolbar tabs for undetermined future stuff.

[reginald78]

I use tree style tabs and typically have anywhere from 20 to hundreds of tabs open. My workflow is basically opening anything I find interesting for further review which naturally opens in a tree so the main task grouped together. I use them as soft bookmarks to come back to where I am, generally closing the sub tabs when I'm done with them or closing the whole tree if I'm done with the main topic.

I use bookmarks for infrequently used items that I know I will come back to at some point, the tab groups are more transient.

[netdevphoenix]

As I type this, I have about 20 HN tabs open. Why do I have so many tabs open? Many of them are 200 plus comment posts about stuff I really care about. HN has lots of quality content and I actively consume it. I don't use bookmarks because I plan to consume the content, derive insights and discard the tab. While I use bookmarks for stuff I plan to check regularly.

[em-bee]

the problem is that bookmarks are to static.

remember where the term "bookmark" came from. a strip of paper or string that you lay in the pages of a book to remember where you are reading. when you read further you move the bookmark to the new position.

browser bookmarks don't do that. instead every time you remember a location you get a new bookmark. and then you have to go around and search for the old one to remove it.

a tab always remembers the latest state and gets updated automatically as i move forward or backward. the state is also cached as long as the tab is open. that matters for hackernews for example which tells me which messages are new since i last loaded the page. when i go to a tab the page doesn't get automatically reloaded so i get back to the old state, whereas with bookmarks that state is lost.

if bookmarks could keep the state (that means permanently cache the old version until i force a reload) and allow me to update them when that state changes while using the page, then i could use them instead of tabs.

[MisterTea]

> Can someone explain what normal people use so many tabs for?

Because book marking sucks as there's no associated metadata on the site behind the link. You have to insert that data yourself by changing the page description. How do I search my links for battery charging if the link that leads to battery charging is joe6pack.com/foo?bla=foiuewyrocv9yetn75y9087wn7y9ewsygbatmobile? History is similar and something I dont want to bother with.

It's easier to just leave the tabs open and come back to them later. I do this all the time with sites like bandcamp, shopping sites, and so on - open a bunch of tabs and slowly work through them. I might have upwards of 50+ tabs open at times but they are mostly short lived, lasting a few days until I get frustrated and go on a tab nuking spree.

These days I manually maintain my own bookmarks in flat text files arranged by subject with my own metadata and just use grep. The link goes on one line, the next lines are "meta data" followed by a blank line. The list is mainly filled with stuff I really want to find again in the future so I put in the effort.

[alanbernstein]

Mainly because the interfaces for tabs, bookmarks, and history are all quite disparate instead of being unified like they should be. None of them are good, but the interface for tabs is more manageable.

[kristopolous]

Also search in the history should also involve the content of the cache and not just the page title.

This is such an obvious one.

It might have been an unreasonable request in 1995 when these concepts were coming into form but maybe we can move on...

[jeltz]

The UX for bokmarks is terrible in Firefox, almost useless fir ny needs.

[elcomet]

Arc browser unifies the tabs and bookmarks in a very clever way.

[bearcobra]

Being able to navigate back within the page history of a tab is the major reason I keep them open

[felbane]

This is the primary reason I keep so many tabs open instead of just bookmarking things or copying URLs into my project notes.

[hysan]

Primary use cases for me:

1. Organizing threads of research into context groups. Usually doing heavy deep dives where it’s uncertain if I need to revisit a previous branch, so rather than closing, it’s much more beneficial to group and collapse. It’s also easier to reopen and glance at the topics you looked at.

2. Similarly, grouping tabs by purpose while developing. It lets me organize tabs in a way that makes it so they I don’t need multiple browser windows open. It makes for a much more zen-like development environment.

3. Testing across dev, staging, and prod. Want the same tabs open but grouped so that I don’t accidentally do something destructive on prod that I meant to do locally. Now that this is in Firefox, I can also combine it with multi-account containers for more workflows.

[_Algernon_]

I don't use an excessive tab count I don't think, but still find it useful to simply organize tabs by "topic". Eg. research question, what github issue I'm working on and so on. Since they can be temporarily hidden it allows a less cluttered tab bar and improves focus when context switching.

[bityard]

I use Vivaldi which has had excellent support for tab groups (as "Workspaces") for quite a while now.

At work and at home, I always have multiple projects ongoing at the same time. I use one tab group per project. I typically have my notes for that project in the first tab and then other tabs contain documentation, reference material, forum threads, search engine queries, and whatever else that I want OPEN and AVAILABLE while I'm working so that I'm not always wasting time closing and opening tabs that I keep coming back to.

This way, when I switch between projects, I just select the tab group for that project and everything is exactly the way I left it last time. Didn't have to remember to manually save anything beforehand last time, or manually restore a folder of bookmarks or whatever.

Why not use bookmarks? For me, bookmarks are only ever used for links that I go to semi-regularly to regularly. I will NEVER add a bookmark to a site that I visit once, or might want to go back to again, because eventually you have to dedicate time to sorting, cleaning up, reorganizing, deleting them. And I HATE curating things.

Why not use browser history? Because it's full of all kinds of garbage which can hard to sort through and because my browser history only goes back about 6 months. I don't need (or want) to keep my history forever because it just needlessly fills up the disk and becomes a liability if my computer ever gets compromised. And sometimes my projects go longer than that.

[breput]

I am not a tab hoarder, but I have been using Tab Groups as a way to collect (and hide) YouTube videos for future viewing.

I had previously used the Pin Tab feature to collapse them, but Tab Groups allows you to have essentially unlimited videos that only take up a single favicon-sized space when collapsed.

[OneDeuxTriSeiGo]

As someone who somewhat does the same thing, I'd recommend just adding the youtube videos to playlists so that you can just close out the youtube tab and only keep the one with your playlist up. Like I slap all my interesting podcasts, tech videos, hobby related videos, conference talks etc in a "currently watching" playlist and it greatly cuts down on decision fatigue to just have it all thrown into a queue that you can just sit down and consume (with occasional reordering).

[chupasaurus]

Pinning tabs is very bad for YouTube because they are always rendered and thus always leaking.

[firefax]

Can you elaborate on this? What does "always rendered" mean?

[chupasaurus]

Basically they have a higher priority than regular tabs, mentioned here [0] in context of unloading and the same applies to execution scheduling.

[0] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2021/10/tab-unloading-in-firefox-9...

[firefax]

Interesting. Does this mean I should tell users to avoid pinning tabs when browsing in the Tor Browser Bundle? (Assuming they have set the slider to "safest" to disallow JS)

[chupasaurus]

With JS disabled only media files could cause a memory leak, so the "safest" option covers that.

[CamperBob2]

Can someone explain what normal people use so many tabs for? It seems to be super common to have tons and tons open

Doing some EE work last week, I hit my personal worst-case scenario for tab usage. A certain chip manufacturer whose name will not be cited here except by the initials T and I has a particularly nice part that outperforms its peers from other manufacturers. Its data sheet is unfortunately among the worst I've ever seen. Lots of missing and wrong information that is absolutely required to write and debug firmware for the chip.

The only way to succeed with this particular chip if you don't have an FAE on speed-dial is to comb through their customer forum and read every post related to the chip, where one or two hapless employees are actually doing a great job filling in where the data sheet falls short. And the quickest way to do that is to go through the list of search results and middle-click the link to every message thread that looks like it might be important.

I didn't count the number of tabs I had open, but it was easily over 50 and probably close to 100. Rookie numbers compared to some, as has been pointed out, but it's certainly necessary to be able to juggle more than a dozen tabs or so.

[thibran]

It's not uncommon to work on multiple things over a certain period of time. So I have a bunch of tabs with all the information needed open for every topic. From time to time I close a 'group' of tabs when I'm done. This workflow seems very natural to me.

Using bookmarks would not fit here, because I have no intention to access the tabs in future (e.g. a year from now) again.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

>Can someone explain what normal people use so many tabs for?

Basically, bookmarking webpages has been broken since the 1990s. It was (still is?) too difficult to bookmark something with a meaningful name so that you can find it again. Bookmarking is (without extensions... there's one that saves them to Nextcloud) local, so you have them stranded on a work computer or a home computer or your phone. And, they go stale (likely, a proper bookmarking system could check that Wayback saved it at least once, and also save a link to that just in case).

Many of the tabs I open could be closed soon after, certainly a few days on. Perhaps even most. But they're mixed in with tabs that I would like to keep that content longer-term (weeks or months), and it's tedious to go back through closing them. Giving me tools to have ever-more-complicated schemes to arrange them would only make the problem worse, not better.

>Is this more an issue with bookmarks and history not being as useful as they could be?

History is even more fucked up than bookmarking, which is saying something. If I do start closing tabs carelessly, they'll end up in the closed tabs list, which is so full of junk (all with similar page titles, more often than not) that finding them again will be impossible. If we use full history, then it's so spammed up with hundreds of pages per day that I'll never find anything in that. I don't have a team of forensic data technicians on staff to help me find that one doodad I saw while searching for something else on Amazon last week. Bookmarking is salvageable as a concept, if someone were to truly nail the implementation, but history hasn't been useful since 1995 when Grandma would browse the web for 10 minutes per week.

>Not judging or anything,

It's ok. Judge me. I know I have a problem.

PS It occurs to me that at least some of this problem has been that I've never found a good note-taking app that could be used long-term. If I had that, then I could jot down notes that would be superior to bookmarking pages... often times there's just a trick to writing a one-liner on the command line that I can't keep clear in my head. I don't need the link to the stack overflow page for that, I need an example with a comment. But note-taking software's probably more difficult to get right than bookmarking. I need to be able to access it from anywhere, but not be held hostage by some corporate cloud. I need rich text, but something around the level of markdown, not Evernote's "paste a pdf into it" crud. I am subscription-averse. And so on.

[fn-mote]

> But note-taking software's probably more difficult to get right than bookmarking.

Joplin? I’m a happy user. There are several (mostly-free) competitors.

You’re going to have to pay for your OwnCloud instance to host the info one way or the other, unless you’re hoping to leech as a free user for an essential part of your workflow.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

> ou’re going to have to pay for your OwnCloud instance to host the info one way or the other,

I have fiber internet at home, and an Intel nuc with docker. I wasn't happy with Joplin. Over the years, I've checked out half a dozen or so note apps that did webdav (and could be hooked up to Nextcloud), but never found one that quite worked. Joplin's notes aren't really markdown, he spams them up with metadata... I think I know how I'd fix that if I were writing it, but I'm too lazy I guess. Keep hoping someone else will do it. Oh well.

>unless you’re hoping to leech as a free user

If I'm not going to trust iCloud for stuff like this, I'm not going to trust some smaller fly-by-night company or someone hosting for free. Nah, I have that part covered.

[eviks]

Tabs can be better than bookmarks for "project"/"workspace" type groups because they preserve (and maintain) actual working order of pages in the same primary browser interface. Bookmarks require a separate one and are not synced to the actual working order

[pmontra]

I have 53 tabs open on Firefox Android. They are a dump of what I'm reading or wish to read or what I want to come back to. Sometimes I send a tab to my desktop using the KDE Connect app. I have Gnome with GS Connect on my Linux laptop.

I've got 113 tabs on that machine (about:telemetry#scalars-tab_search=tab). I'm using 5 virtual desktop, 2 for me and one for each of my customers. One Firefox window per desktop (maybe my workaround for tab groups), one editor window per desktop, one terminal per desktop. The Slack app on the desktop I'm currently using. My password manager on all desktops. I switch using an hotkey, Windows + the first letter of the customer. No animations, no Activities, nothing. I was OK with Gnome 2.

It's nice to have 32 GB of RAM. 113

[GuB-42]

Does it need really that much RAM? RAM you don't use tend to get swapped out, and browsers themselves are pretty good working with a large amount of tabs opened, sometimes by unloading those that are currently unused. Note: swap is good!

I think what kill memory more than having dozens of windows on many desktops is self contained apps and VMs. For example, if you have a browser with 1000 tabs open, you will only have one instance of the engine, and the browser can manage the memory associated with tabs effectively. Now if you have 10 distinct browsers opened with all their dependencies, which can happen if you are running electron apps and you are actually using them, you are going to need a lot of RAM. Also if they all come with their dependencies instead of using what's on the system, you also multiply RAM usage.

Running many instances of the same apps running the same libraries tend to not cost that much, as they only need to be loaded once and are shared. There are a reason we call .so and .dll files shared libraries.

VMs are even worse, as they need a whole fixed chunk of memory that is mostly opaque to the host OS, meaning there isn't much it can do.

[pmontra]

I checked. htop reports 22.7 GB. I do have one VM with 4 GB RAM. Having 32 GB I disabled swap. It's been maybe 8 years since the last time I had swap on. No problems at all.

[PaulHoule]

My impression is that the history for web browsers is excellent and it's usually pretty easy to find things, even in cases where I looked at maybe 100 images and have to actually look at the pages and not just the titles. I think though there are a lot of people who don't know the history is there, or don't use it, or don't psychologically want to accept that it exists or something.

I wish browsers had better APIs to get history and bookmarks out, so if I did decide I had to find one of out 100 images I looked at on a particular site yesterday I could write some script to download those images and show all of them on one page.

[lurk2]

The problem with Firefox is that the history feature doesn’t store duplicate entries. If you go to google.com on 2025-04-28, it creates an entry reflecting that:

ycombinator.com - 2025-04-28 10:35 google.com - 2025-04-28 10:30 youtube.com - 2025-04-28 10:25

If you go to google.com again the next day, it just reorders the list:

google.com - 2025-04-29 11:30 ycombinator.com - 2025-04-28 10:35 youtube.com - 2025-04-28 10:25

This can make it hard to reconstruct groupings of tabs from the history alone if two or more groups shared a given link. It’s not an issue for most users, but it is the reason some users prefer to hoard tabs.

[PeterStuer]

From what I gather from someone close to me that does this they just open things and are afraid that if they ever close it they will not find it again. Ironically if I ask her about something she kitterally has to hunt for 10 minutes or more to find the one tab out of the hundreds open.

In a similar vein these people also postpone system updates and restarts as long as possible, never shut down their machine (always hibernate) always click keep all in office apps for recovered files from the machine over months of this abuse getting some resource exhausted leading to an inevitable forced reboot.

[schmorptron]

Yeah, I'm using them as soft bookmarks. Turn them into hard bookmarks every month or so, not to actively look at them, but the firefox address bar searches in bookmarks as well and offers them up first when typing, so I have a repository of things I've declared interesting / cool / good before that I can refer back to when typing keywords into the address bar. Messy, but it works! I must have a couple tens of thousands of bookmarks by now...

[Tagbert]

I use tab groups for work projects. I am a project manager. I usually have somewhere around 200 long term tabs open at a time with several other transient tabs.

I typically am working on 4-5 projects at a time with some other non-project work categories like status reporting. A lot of my work involves reading and editing multiple web pages or writing updates on web pages based on communications in other channels. I reuse the same web pages multiple times a day and it is not feasible to close and reopen them constantly. Tab groups let me switch between the web pages for projects, read or update the pages, and then switch to another project. If nothing else, it means that I can actually see the titles of most tabs within a project rather than having them all collapse into identical icons. Tab groups helps keep this sane.

I am currently using Firefox-based Zen because its Tab Workspaces gives me the project separation I need. Chrome's tab groups don't offer enough separate between groups for me. I'll have to checkout this Firefox implementation but from what I saw earlier they may be adopting Chrome's minimal separation method of grouping so that may not work. I was using Arc for a while as they have a similar grouping to what Zen does.

[johnnyanmac]

I tend to cull tabs a lot myself, but I still find groups useful. Sometimes it's nice for focus to group together a few tabs from research but "minimize" it for later while I look at some other topics.

>Is this more an issue with bookmarks and history not being as useful as they could be?

If you want to put it in hardware terminology.

- Tabs I am immediately interested in: registers

- Tab groups minimized: RAM

- Bookmarks: Hard Drive

- Pocket: cloud storage

- History: My attempt to restore something I put in the recycle bin

Tab groups are a good intermediate to store knowledge I don't need immediately but still need quick access to, likely within the day. It's often some tangential research that I won't need to save or lok at long term, but not my immediate attention.

In my head, bookmarks are more for items I know I want to reference for weeks, months, years. Stuff I know I would want to pluck out and share as popular/general knowledge if others fall down a similar line of research as me. I only tend to refer to the history tab when desperate and my judgement failed to realize something was bookmarkable.

as a current example, I have this tab and a few open researching work stuff. I have a tab group collapsed regarding career advice and job app stuff.

[dkarl]

I mostly use tab groups to keep and hide the context for a task I'm going to return to later. For a given task I might have design docs, Jira tickets, meeting notes, technical documentation, and a dashboard open. I can group all of those into a tab group, collapse it, and then they're out of sight, out of mind until I return to that task.

I could use windows the same way, but my personal preference is to use tab groups so I can keep fewer windows open.

Right now I also have several tab groups that are each a collection of current documentation and historical context for a particular internal system at my company. I always intend to turn a tab group like that into a list of links in a note, and sometimes I do, but a lot of them are still sitting around. Chrome is reliable enough at restoring them that I have tab groups I've kept for over a year.

I also have groups of documents I intend to read and digest better. They are 90% aspirational, but they serve a psychological purpose. I frequently scan through them, so anything that gets ignored for very long probably isn't important.

[m463]

> It seems to be super common

I've always wondered if this kind of thing is just embarassing to talk about.

Sort of like admitting "the trunk of my car is full of unresolved stuff" or "my refrigerator is where things go to die"

it's just recently that lots of tabs has become normalized and people talk about it.

Maybe telemetry normalized it ("lots of people use 100's of tabs")

[iaaan]

I only have 10-20 tabs open at a time, generally, but I still use tab groups to reduce the cognitive load of remembering which tabs relate to which projects/tasks. Previously, I would separate groups of tabs using a blank "New Tab" tab, so this update effectively just gave me a good way to name the groups and organize them more compactly.

[INTPenis]

The internet as a knowledge base is a large part of my daily tasks. Both professionally and privately. Maybe because I'm a millennial, I grew up reading books but early realized that it's much easier to read websites and docs. So I'm kinda on the border between two generations, where I remember having tech books in my shelves, but last time I moved I got rid of most of my old tech books because I never opened them. I exclusively use the web these days.

Looking at my FF right now I have 7 tabs open from something I've been working on all week, and 3 more tabs open for something I'm doing just this morning. Soon I'll close those 3 tabs and return to the 7 to continue working.

And that's how it goes for me, every day, every week. 7 is a mild example. During more hectic periods I might be pulled away and end up having several groups of tabs, related to different tasks that I had to pause.

[xnx]

> Are people using tabs as a soft bookmark of basically anything interesting?

Reading queue. Unfortunately, every app becomes its own sort of todo list: email, browser tabs, social feeds, RSS feed.

Maybe someone will be smart enough to make an AI agent that collects, cleans (ad removal, de-sensationalizing, summarization), and prioritizes information from disparate sources.

[fikama]

More or less what you written + sometimes toxic multitasking I would leave one work half done and start something different. Also sometimes I open new tab is tead of working in the already opened one (that could be solved by some kind of tab dedup). Fun Fact IOS Safari has a limit of 500 pages per group then you have to open a new one.

[alabastervlog]

I hit the 500 limit a couple times a year. Bookmark all, close all.

I use groups when I'm really deep in a topic, but the rest of the time I forget which groups I have and that I ought to use them, just end up putting it all on the default group until it hits 500.

[lurk2]

> Fun Fact IOS Safari has a limit of 500 pages per group then you have to open a new one.

I just use the “Bookmark All” feature and save it to a folder with the date that I made the bookmarks, then I copy the folder to Joplin and export it as plain text to my computer. I never review these bookmarks, it’s just a compulsion that allows me to feel like the information is still there if I need it.

[prinny_]

I don't have more than 5-6 tabs in my personal life, but in my professional life I regularly have 15-20 open. By all means a low number compared to some maniacs rocking hundreds or even thousands of open tabs. My case is like: 3-5 tabs for secretary duties: email, calendar, Jira, maybe a google doc, then 2-3 random tabs then multiple tabs for grouped tasks.

E.g if I want to review a PR I need to have the jira ticket, the figma designs, the API dashboard, the PR link and the actual app open. That's 5 tabs for a single PR review + more if I need to go over some documentation.

And since a review takes its time and I often have to context switch a lot, being able to quickly collapse 5-7 tabs under a "Foo PR review" group is super helpful.

[npteljes]

I also rarely have many things open, but now I have a bunch, and it's very useful to have them in group (in Edge). I am working on three services at once, because we need a change that impacts all three, and they depend on each other as well. I have my ticket open, and its parent ticket as well for context. I have the pull request, the build pipeline, and the deployment settings open for each service. I have an AI open, an API reference open, and I have 1-2 random internet searches open. All in all, this is 14-15 tabs.

I can imagine that other people who have different contexts, and some web apps like mail, im and socials, that can easily make use of tab groups. Grouping and coloring them makes it really easy to not get lost in the bunch that is open at the same time.

[surajrmal]

Sometimes I go through email, open a bunch of links as things to follow up on. I keep the tabs open until I've finished with them. I also keep tabs open per doc I need to review, code review still pending completion, etc. For a given project I keep a host of tabs open for things like documentation and research. Organizing these ephemeral tabs into groups (docs, code reviews, project abc, etc) keeps me organized. It's far more lightweight than bookmarks and works great with tab search. It keeps me from losing track of things while also being able to focus better.

Think of it like organizing papers on your desk vs putting them in the filing cabinet.

[guerrilla]

I use it as a queue of things to read or watch. Also a few are soft bookmarks, yeah. These days I try to keep a lot fewer tabs though because I noticed that it actually stressed me out to have so many open. Right now, just 17.

[zackmorris]

Like garbage collection, closing tabs isn't a job that should have to be performed by humans.

Browsers are basically designed wrong. Sort of like how after you learn about the write ahead log (WAL), you wonder how databases could have ever worked before. Or reducers, or Firebase, or anything like that.

Browsers should record everything, including a cache of all data received or sent, so that the user can rewind to any time in history, a bit like Apple's Time Machine. Then pruning history should be a task for heuristics.

I've given up hope that browsers will ever improve now. Although I've dreamed of taking something like WebKit and building a real browser where every tab is truly an isolated process, then attacking it like a video game and getting rendering performance up to multiple thousands of frames per second. With something like Russian doll caching or a hash tree to cache renderings for gigabyte per second throughput. So that page loads are measured in milliseconds and restoring 1000 tabs could happen in 1 second or be skipped entirely since they aren't visible.

I grew up in the 80s with 1 MHz computers, so consider computers today as running thousands of times slower than they should. The web runs millions of times slower. That collective waste puts the onus on the user to be self-sufficient. A bit like how capitalism can only reach low single digits of efficiency because it forces every consumer to own a copy of everything. Alternatives like socialism are little better, because the real problem is that artificial scarcity isn't being addressed through automation, so we can't see beyond economic systems and think they're fundamental.

"Can someone explain what normal people use so many tabs for?" is asking the wrong question. The question should be: what's wrong with browsers that causes people to have so many tabs open?

[jeltz]

I am not sure if your proposed solution is the right one or not but you are certainly asking the right questions. What is wrong with browsers?

[iworshipfaangs2]

I don't think I ever need even ten, but I inevitably end up with 30+ spread across two browsers because I just don't close. Then I close all in CTRL+W rage* and rely on history + memory to find anything I'd like to return to.

*Thanks for your post. It reminded me to go into firefox and unset "Open previous windows and tabs," which I accidentally turned on and has ruined my ability to rage X out of firefox everytime I have too many tabs.

[2mlWQbCK]

I used to have 200+ tabs open all the time, but it's just noise. Now I close tabs asap. If the page contents are of any interest I save the contents first using the Single File extension. If the page address is for some reason interesting (that is far less common) I save a bookmark. I started having the bookmarks bar enabled again and it pretty much serves the purpose that the tabs used to serve for me, but in a more organized way.

[kmacdough]

Bookmarks are more permanent. Open tabs for me are a physical representation of a task in process. Tabs for a purchase show what needs consideration. Could be options, reviews, learning materials. For a project, tabs might include specific documentation pages, spreadsheets, etc.

Generally, it's tracking the in progress process.

Keeping tabs open for me is a physical token of a path not complete.

[new_user_final]

I had a meeting, so I opened 5/6 relevant pages to quickly show something. I thought the meeting was postponed, so I created a chrome tab group and close the group and continue working with 1 or 2 tab in my browser.

Suddenly, meeting was scheduled again, I simply clicked on the group, and got all the tabs open again.

[Someone]

I don’t have many tabs open, but use tab groups in Safari. For example, I have a tab group with a group of weather forecast pages that I visit frequently but not that frequently.

That moves them out of sight, yet within easy reach. Psychologically it feels different from a group of bookmarks.

[catapart]

I do project work, which generally requires dozens of tabs, sometimes across multiple browsers, depending up on the project (usually a browser-based software project).

In some cases, I'll have 6 or so tabs open about different steps of a woodworking project, for example. Not bookmarked, because it's unlikely I'll need those tabs again; either for never working on a similar project, or for being outdated by the time I need to circle back. So I just leave the tabs open, and when I finish the project, I go through and close all the tabs.

In my head, it's understood as: this is my garage/workbench/workspace; it'll be messy DURING project work, and it'll get cleaned up as much as I can as I go, but it'll be a bit unruly until the project is done. Then it'll get wound down.

Multiply that by the 3-6 projects I'm working on at any given time, and then add in the utility tabs (task manager, email, note app, git repos, npm, cloudflare, etc), the social tabs (only bluesky, discord, and soundcloud), the news tabs (a tab for "news" like CNN/Fox/NBC/etc that I cycle through, and then others like HackerNews and hobbyist news sites like video gaming or hunting or whatever), and the experiment tabs (searches and likely dead-ends that I'm using to try and figure stuff out), and you've already got dozens of tabs. But on top of that, I also tend to curate "entertainment" tabs, like YouTube videos that I'll probably find interesting, or whatever. Things that I will consume and then close the tab.

I've been told it's a lot of tabs to have open, but it's always between around 10 and 100. I've definitely seen worse. /shrug

ETA: regarding the thread topic, I would find groups useful because I can dump all of the project tabs into a single group and that would help me navigate faster. But, I'm not really happy with Mozilla and I don't find Firefox to be particularly good (pages with custom elements are too slow for my taste; too slow on web standards, too - it's well past time for WebGPU to be working), so I doubt I'll use the feature much because I'm jumping ship to the next best thing as soon as anyone puts something out (looking forward to Servo for this; still not sold on the mac-focused Ladybird and everything else - Chrome, Brave, Arc, etc - are either badly built or badly managed). If I'm going to have to go back to non-grouping, anyway, I'm not sure I'll be keen to start doing it in the first place.

[sammyteee]

Personally, I find myself working on multiple tasks/projects across a day and the easiest way to decompartmentalize it all in my head is to move tabs related to a project into it's own group, that way I can click around Project A, Project B et cetera

[brooke2k]

I just don't close them, that's all. If I search something, I open a new tab. After hours or days, there's a lot of them, at which point I go "whoops," close all the windows, and start fresh.

Maybe that's not typical tab use though, idk

[OneDeuxTriSeiGo]

I use the simple tab groups plugin and I normally have quite a few tabs open (but only a few visible at a time).

I group my tabs by project/topic so I can just send them to the background when I'm not working on that project and bring them back up when I context switch back to that project. So I'll have like 20 different groups, each dedicated to a specific personal project, some upstream project I'm contributing to, to an academic topic I'm studying (ex: PL theory, abstract algebra, topology, cryptography, etc), a group dedicated to looking into job opportunities, and then also some entertainment groups that have the youtube playlists I'm currently working through (some just fun, some niche topics, some tech) as well as other "third monitor content".

Each group acts less like bookmarks and more like a workspace you can quickly send to the background, pull back up to the foreground, or rotate between windows/monitors (without also moving pinned tabs which stay fixed to the window they are in).

It makes multitasking easier and you don't really get much memory overhead since the tabs generally all suspend automatically after a certain amount of inactivity anyways (might be due to the tab group plugin or another autosuspend plugin I have).

To give a TLDR: I use it to context switch quickly between projects without having to manually reopen stuff in the order it was in and at the spots on the pages where I was when I left off. So when I tab over on tmux to the workspace for a project that I haven't touched in a while, I can pull up the firefox tab group on my documentation window/monitor and immediately see where I left off and I can pick right back up again.

[j0rd72]

At work, I use Vivaldi's tab stacks to group tabs by the GH issue I'm working on. So the issue, PR(s), and app tab(s) go in the same stack. It's very handy.

[colordrops]

I use them for work. Usually I have multiple efforts going on at once, so I put jira tickets, documents, deployment tools, etc for each effort in a group.

[brailsafe]

Yes, soft bookmark for ongoing threads. Bookmark folders are fine for other things, but generally bookmarks end up out of sight, and out of mind.

[croo]

Related easter egg in Android Chrome: after 100 (or 1000?) tabs it just prints ":D" instead of a number.

[dguest]

I discovered the feature accidentally a few days ago while I was trying to simultaneously write a presentation, book accommodations, submit travel paperwork, and brief my colleagues on what they should do while I'm away. And for the last day or so it was very useful.

Basically, though, it's a sign of toxic multitasking, as some others have said. I'm not happy that this feature was useful but it was useful.

[DrammBA]

> I never have more than like 10 tabs open at a time

Me neither, and I find groups very helpful to me!

[hollerith]

I don't get it.

To me a browser tab is like an Emacs buffer: although I need the ability to have more than one Emacs buffer open at a time and to switch between them, if some process ran at random times and deleted all the buffers I haven't looked at in the last 2 minutes, I probably wouldn't be significantly annoyed or hindered.

[ksec]

Most common scenario. RSS Reading.

I often wonder how other people read their RSS feeds. I open them as new tab for all my interested links. My Subscribed list mostly generate about 400 - 500 links per day. Most of them are news. And scanning through all of them I mostly open about 30 - 40 tabs. Sometimes it could be up to 100s depending on topics. Then I just run through them one by one. The same goes with HN. Normally I get about 10 - 20 tabs opened on HN per day. All Together this could be 50 - 60 Tabs opened. And if you dont have time to read through them all they stayed there. Another day another reading cycle.

Another category which happens to have lots of tabs is Shopping and comparing. Trying to look for the best tools for the best price and where I could buy them. This normally includes opening 5 - 10 Tabs form the like of Reddit or some other specific forums.

Or Researching about a Topic where it leads to 5 other sub topic and every sub topic has 5 - 8 tabs.

I currently have different "Groups" of tabs, MBA, Jobs Searching, People I follow, Surgery operation comparison, Insurance, Youtube [1], AI, Electric Toothbrush and Water and Water Floss ( Any Recommendation from HN ? ), HN, Twitter.

I used to do 1000s of tabs but Nowadays I tend to limit to within a few hundred at most. Although that is also partly because Safari is the worst browser for multiple tabs and Firefox on iOS dont work as well.

[1] I increasingly think Youtube should have a Desktop App because the web simply does not provide good enough experience.

[Arelius]

I'm actually really curious what the experience is like having not more than 10 tabs at a time, like what thing causes you to close a tab? 10 seems sort of wild to me, it's enough that you are clearly not just monotasking, somehow bounded. Probably in contrast, if you could imagine just forgetting to do that whole closing tabs thing, eventually you have hundreds or thousands of tabs.

Some context, for starters, I have about 10 tabs pinned, discord, 3 slack instances, my fastmail, my gmail, my work mail, spotify, my task list.

Then, there is the things I left open because I am going to read it, a stack of documentation I'm working on. A few random products I'm researching as procrastination. Any search I'm on, and a tree of tabs from different results that I'm working through.

There are the various layers of those things for the things I was working on 30 minutes or a day ago, that I haven't worked back to yet.

And most importantly, there are all the tabs that used to fall in the prior categories, that I just forgot to close, or haven't gotten around to closing yet.

[nicman23]

i used to use groups heavily as i have the work flow of research -> pause -> maybe work on something else to clear my mind -> implementation.

[mattlondon]

Likewise - very very rare for me to have more than 10 or so open.

I assume people who have many tabs open are the same sort of people who have 100s or 1000s of unread emails in their inbox too.

I was trying to help someone debug and issue at their desk the other day and they were a tab hoarder too. Literally 75% of the time spent debugging was them trying to find the right tab. I prefer to work with organized people (...who also read their emails!) - to me, someone with hundreds and hundreds of tabs open is a sign of someone who is easily distracted and disorganised and doesn't complete tasks before moving on to the next shiny thing.