zlacker

On my main Firefox profile I'm rarely below 1000 tabs. I also use them as bookmarks and backlog, and every couple of months I scroll through the entire tab bar and close everything unimportant. The address bar also searches all open tabs and lets me jump to matches.

>>alpaca+(OP)
FWIW the Firefox address bar also searches your history and bookmarks, so you can still retrieve those sites by searching for them without keeping a tab open for each one. Feel free to do what you like, obviously, but if having a zillion tabs open is causing you problems, know that there are other solutions :)

>>alpaca+(OP)
Same here. It's simply a convenient way to work with a browser.

>>coldpi+H2
Firefox already allows for proper tab UIs, so no need to search for other solutions there :)

>>seba_d+23
Just curious, what does that UI look like with 1,000 tabs open? Isn't it just like, one pixel per tab, or a scrollbar 50 times wider than your monitor? Is that actually useful?

>>coldpi+E3
That may be a reference to this classic Firefox extension:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

>>coldpi+E3
My browser looks very similar to this: https://framagit.org/ariasuni/tabcenter-reborn/-/wikis/theme...

Tab list usability remains pretty much the same regardless of how many tabs are open.

>>alpaca+(OP)
This is blowing my mind right now, how do you operate with so many tabs? For me, as soon as I can’t tell which site is in which tab it means I need to close some. And I don’t see the utility of having so many tabs open, since you can obviously only use one at a time. So if you have 100 or 1000 open, most are not being used most of the time, so why not close them?

What do you lose from closing tabs versus what do you gain from keeping them open? For me, if I use a site open it’s bookmarked or already in history so it’s fast to reopen. Closing tabs keeps my machine fast and memory usage low and also makes me faster at switching between the open tabs as I don’t need to search or parse through many UI bits.

>>twic+l4
If it weren't for TreeStyleTab, the browser would be barely usable for me. This is the biggest reason that I won't use Chrome at all, and stay away from Edge.

>>saberi+Db
I never have 1000+ open but I do have many open in a couple different windows for long periods. Firefox does unload tabs when you restart (at least, it can be set that way. And there are extensions that let you unload them manually or after a time period). Unloaded tabs take no resources (or an unnoticeable amount if any) and allow this trick to work. That and vertical tab addons (I use sideberry).

>>saberi+Db
I don't keep hundereds of tabs open, but tabs do serve two purposes that are not covered by either the browser history or by bookmarks.

One is as a sort of ad-hoc to-do list. When I leave a tab open it's because something is unfinished and I mean to come back to it soon. (I just wish there was a chronological view so that I could easily delete the oldest tabs).

The second purpose is to store the scroll position of longer articles that I haven't finished reading.

>>alpaca+(OP)
How messy is your bedroom?

>>alpaca+(OP)
No wonder, the tab bar is open only. Managing multiple tabs is a no-go with it, or lets say, a wonderful journey into Firefox UI.

>>coldpi+H2
Don't rely on you browsing history - Firefox will start deleting old entries without warning you if it gets big enough.

>>fauige+If
Tabs are the RAM of my TODO list, my README bookmark folder is the disk. Every so many months I purge the README folder, while regretting never really learning Blender, GIMP, SVG, d3, Godot, Rust, Julia, React, Svelte, CSS, shaders, machine learning, wavelets, Ableton, ....

>>alpaca+(OP)
I have Safari, Anybox, and Alfred, and the three works together in a nice way to save anything interesting quickly. And once in a while, I comb through the inbox and sort them out. If I ever need to explore a subject, I then have a collection of links ready. I feel uncomfortable whenever I have 10+ tabs open. It felt that I’m not focusing enough on my research (taking the proper time to read and reflect in order to find a solution).

The only things I hoard are books. They are more like my antilibrary (things I’d like to have read already) than collecting everything I encounter.

>>coldpi+E3
The handy part about Firefox, unlike Chrome, will shrink tabs to a minimum width and then make them a horizontally scrolling list. I am somewhat of a tab hoarder (I also keep browser windows on vertical monitors), so using Chrome, where it would shrink tabs more and more until there's nothing but a sliver, wouldn't work. Below are screenshots of examples. Firefox keeps things usable; Chrome not so much. (I also know it isn't 1000 tabs, nor is it close to the amount I keep open on my work laptop).

Firefox: https://yld.moe/raw/nVE.png

Chrome: https://yld.moe/raw/vu8.png

Also, if you're wondering why my tabs look like they're from 2017, that's just another benefit of using Firefox [1]. Although as nice as it being able to actually customize our browsers, it would be nice for Mozilla to stop breaking things for sake of breaking things.

[1]: https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix

>>saberi+Db
If you can't tell which site is open, that's likely due to Chrome's poor tab UX. Constantly shrinking the click target makes tabs harder to work with. Not being able to read the tab title doesn't help either. Thus, Chrome incentivizes people to close tabs.

With vertical tabs, you don't have this problem. Every tab is the same width, making them easier to interact with. You'll need to vertically scroll the list if it gets too large, but that's a natural enough action. In this situation, you now close tabs because you want to, not because the browser is strong-arming you into it.

Where things really get fun is with vertical tabs that track ancestry, like Tree Style Tabs or Firefox or what's built into Orion. These tabs will nest as you follow links from one page to another, capturing context.

HN is a perfect example of where this works well. I can go to the home page, see a few stories that look interesting, open each comment page as a child tab. Then on each child I can open the associated article. And, as I read the comments, I can open new links that look interesting and that page is now associated with the root story.

I could bookmark all of these pages, but short of creating folders for each story there's no good way to capture that context. Naturally, that makes it harder to restore the same state when opening bookmarks. Instead, I leave the tabs open and when I'm ready to take an action on them (read an article, make notes in Obsidian, bookmark into a topic of interest) I do so and then I close them out. It makes context switching much easier when I know I'm not going to lose the context I just left. As an added benefit, I find if I leave tabs open I get better use of the browser cache than I do if I close an open later from a bookmark.

>>nirvdr+eB1
Btw, you can bookmark the entire tree, to re-open the entire tree later. I mostly have the same workflow as you, though, except for a few regularly scheduled things (book clubs, DnD sessions, etc), where I have a bookmarked tree ready to open for necessary context.

>>Androi+x31
If this is the only thing stopping you from using Chrome (ie you'd prefer to use Chrome), this might help. https://www.ghacks.net/2022/08/29/how-to-set-a-minimum-tab-w...

>>saberi+Db
A tab bar is similar to a bookshelf for me: I see the icon and title of open websites in a neat list. Closing tabs and banishing them to some hidden history/bookmark menu is like putting your books into boxes in the basement instead of a shelf. Sure they're still there, but you might forget you have a book because you never see it and you have to dig through boxes to find it.

If a closed tab only remains in the bookmarks or history it might as well not exist for my brain.

> Closing tabs keeps my machine fast and memory usage low

I just restart the browser now and then, which will unload all tabs again. They're still in the tab bar but require almost no memory until I use them.

>>efreak+zS1
I was not aware of this, I will probably check this out on my Windows machine, since I've had a nasty bug where Firefox will decide to just use ALL of my GPU resources, crashing whatever game I am playing. Very annoying bug and I should probably take the time to report it, but every time I encounter it I'm usually focused on my game.

Thanks.

>>nirvdr+eB1
Yeah I use Grasshopper for that.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/grasshopper-u...