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.
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! :)
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)
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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?
(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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not my experience at all with 16 GB RAM. Perhaps a configuration issue? zswap and mglru do their job well here and the only issue with reaching tens of thousands open tabs in Firefox is that it tends to become noticeably slower at that point.
Firefox with any number of open tabs is stable on memory usage because it has a target budget for it, most of the oom situations come either from external processes or a spike from FF's own.
Its supper useful if you really want to make sure not to loose your session, as its serializes everything into files, which you can then even backup somewhere if you want. :)
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.
> 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".
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!).
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.
> 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.