I've been staying with Firefox not for the performance (today Chrome loads Google sites like YouTube faster), but mainly for Tree Style Tab extension. I couldn't imagine opening more than a dozen of tabs without it.
I can't imagine having more than a dozen tabs open, period. You tab hoarders will never make sense to me...
For games, I often have a bunch of wiki tabs open at the same time.
I hardly use it, though, because I usually have < 100 open tabs, not thousands like others have. I identify tabs by their tree structures (parents, children, siblings tabs) and the prefixes of the titles, whose lengths don't depend on how many tabs opened, because the tabs are arranged vertically.
Fortunately, I also habituated the simple behavior of "If I realize I have a lot of HN tabs open, right-click and close the entire pane". That's how I know I'm clocking about 100 tabs per two days on HN alone.
Also, Sideberry changed my tab hoarding habit in a way that still results in keeping hundreds of tabs, but using them in much more sensible way. I keep them arranged in trees stemming from topical groups on high-level panels, and trim or kill as they're no longer useful. Most of those tabs are unloaded anyway, but the interface works as excellent short-term (days to weeks, sometimes a few months) bookmarking system - and I don't lose tabs anymore (as in knowing the tab is there somewhere, but not being able to find it in the vast sea of other tabs).
You can save all of the tabs of your current session as a bookmark folder in one fell swoop! Your research tabs can be all saved together and opened as a group! Your gift ideas that you won't close because you don't want to forget about them can be saved in a folder named gift ideas so the next time you need them you have them, without the cost of using up your extra RAM and CPU cycles!
Except for the annoying interaction (I think) with "open new tabs next to current tab", which causes Sideberry to somehow leave behind lots of stupid empty tabs named after the page the real new tab had. I deal with it, but it's annoying.
So, I have groups for casual browsing, work, volunteer work, etc. So I don't have to close tabs when switching from one to the other. I just switch and those tabs are still there when I want to next look at them.
Can't really point to any concrete issue, other than I have a distinct feeling Sideberry is much faster/lighter, and feels more like part of Firefox vs. some bunch of JS faking an UI on top of it. Sorry I can't give you a more objective comparison. I did find this though:
https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/118ddge/tab_manage...
which is a recent(ish) discussion, and the points made there seem accurate.
Firefox/Sideberry is useful for mitigating that. I also have workflows set up for mass-exporting my tabs from Firefox to a text file and reorganizing them in plain-text and re-opening just the tabs I care about[0].
Bookmarking on any browser is cumbersome and leads to disorganization over time. Tree-style tabs helps make that organization at least a little bit easier.
I remember both Chrome and FF making a big deal over that point years ago.
The big change for me has been realizing that all my "tabs" are still there, in the form of my browser history, or if not, via Google search. If I can't find my way back to a website via my history or via searching the web, then I probably also wouldn't be able to find it among 1000 tabs. So why not close the tabs and be free of them?
Dashboards can easily take two or three tabs.
The bug tracker is opened on a tab as well as the ticket page. You have a pull request opened to review it, and you check something in the repository. Pop open a couple of diffs to check where someone messed up in the past.
And in the meantime you have Spotify/YouTube.
A dozen tabs easily.
Factor in task switching, checking CICD pipelines, and of course HackerNews opened somewhere, and you can get multiples of that.
I've got 30 tabs open today, and the oldest of them is only a few hours old.
I look down a page, see interesting links, and middle click them all. They open tabs but don't actually load until I click that tab. I close each tab after I'm done reading it, or after a few hours if I never got around to reading it and lost interest.
Is that hoarding? I don't think so. But it's the sort of workflow that TST makes pleasant but is extremely frustrating with a horizontal tab bar.
So I do have bad news about this that may or may not be news: Firefox cycles history even if you never clear it. Unbelievably it's not permanent.
This has bitten me a couple of times in the past because I always assumed that naturally history wouldn't just get randomly deleted in the background, so I'd search for a tweet or article from an obscure blog and couldn't figure out why nothing was coming up in my history searches. Took me a long time to actually check "is this article I looked up 6 months ago even there anymore?"
There is a way to set up recurring database backups manually if you're willing to do some gruntwork, but it's kind of a pain and means you need to break out an SQLite browser across multiple backups in order to search.
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Where searching is concerned, :shrug: that doesn't generally work for me, but I'm happy for anyone that it does work for :) My tabs aren't just so that I remember where a document is (although they serve that purpose as well), they're also a reminder that the thing exists at all. When it gets to 1000 tabs, is that useful? Arguably no, but the process getting there is pretty organic, it's not really a conscious choice.
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In support of your comment though, being able to just stick all of my tabs in an open text file does genuinely help a lot[0] because it's permanent history and it serves the same purpose of being a reminder. It could be better, sometimes I leave tabs open on images that I forget to get around to saving or on open sessions and then the link rot hits whatever I'm looking at -- but it helps a lot. Being able to have an intermediary step between "leave everything open" and "categorize and organize everything you're looking at and save what you need" does allow me to do things like grab 500 tabs that I haven't checked in weeks and just stick them in a text file and write some notes at the top about what I was working on.
Split browser sessions, better windowing would help a lot with this, although I worry I'd end up with similar situations as my Emacs window, where everything looks clean but behind the scenes I have 1000 open files and 20 of them are unsaved scratch buffers ;) But the text file does kind of work the way you're describing; you can be free of the clutter, but if you really need to find everything, you know it's in a static text file that you can grep through at any time and that you know the browser won't do anything shifty with in the background.
[0]: I say that it's common to have 1000 tabs open, and it is, but currently I only have about 200, largely because of that method. I went through a bunch of stuff a few weeks ago and stashed most of the stuff I had open.
The only reliable way that I've come across for finding stuff after a long time has passed is saving every sightly interesting webpage to Zotero and using fulltext search afterwards (including webpage body).
I'm curious, do you find the builtin browser history facilities sufficient for your needs, or are you using some third party tool for that?
But I completely trust Firefox on the password issue, to the point that I let it generate them for me.
Not that I don't trust them but I always recommend using a dedicated PW manager like KeePassXC which is FOSS and has been security audited, plus it gives you full control over where you get to store your PWs and how they're secured and generated.
Mostly though I realize I have focused heavily on not having clutter vs. being able to recall quickly everything I've ever found necessary or useful. It's a trade off I like, but it may not be for everyone.
Wen I use a password, I look it up and type it in by hand. No autofill is possible, intentionally.
Not to say that KeePassXC isn’t useful if you want even more fine-grained controls, but it seems like in the
> Use password in browser
Use case, KeePass would actually weaken the security guarantee by adding a second component you need to trust.
Nonetheless, it's clear that people do. I don't have to understand.
I find that browser windows are much easier to manage than tabs and make it possible to see more than one site at a time as well as have different sites/pages sized differently. If I'm doing heavy web research, I'll typically have many browser instances, each with three or four tabs.
This is what Firefox says when I go to export my logins: "[!] Your paswords will be saved as readable text (e.g., BadP@ssw0rd) so anyone who can open the exported file can view them."
KeePassXC on the other hand gives me a simple encrypted database file that I can copy around to different places for some peace of mind.
We all have to gear our security mechanisms toward our particular threat assessments.
That's effectively what almost all of them say when you export your logins (usually as CSV, JSON, or XML), because they export in plain text, because you don't know what the user needs it for, up to and including manual imputation (better than expect a random user to have to learn how to print out a database, or worse submit that database file to some online service to print out).
Users aren't necessarily highly computer literate, we don't want to prevent people from having security, but even if they were they may still have use cases that do not accept such a database (migrating password manager that don't know your previous one, perhaps), so most of them use (unencrypted) plain text and just accept they'll have to leave it in the user's hands, and warn them it's exposed.
We'd absolutely love there to be safe, portable ways to move our data around such that it remains encrypted while migrating, yes, but that's just not something our current crop of software really enables fully these days, unfortunately.
Much more convenient and quick and still reasonably secure.
Same, I like to pretend I use Firefox for other reasons but 99% of it is tree tab.
That's certainly possible, but if malware were able to get installed despite my other protections, then I probably have much larger issues. And the keylogger would have to phone home with the data, which is unlikely (but not impossible) to happen without raising some alarms.
So I'm more worried about sharing data with the password management company systems themselves. If there's no real reason to send data over the net, then I don't want to send data over the net. The smaller the attack surface, the better.
It's just my personal policy. In reality, I don't consider either keyloggers or password management company computers to be huge enough risks that I lose sleep over them. Plus, I don't want to become reliant on a particular piece of software to do important things -- typing my password by hand means that I'll have the most common passwords memorized, so if something goes wrong that prevents the use of the password manager, I'm not locked out of anything.
I'd even say "adding a second vendor you need to trust". Yes, these days there seems to be a strong drive to just get a big package out of a single hand. Like having the browser closely tied to the OS. I don't like it. I prefer to choose the individual parts as i see fit. Keepass and some bit of custom sync, in this case. Now, in the same vein I expect MS & Google making it easy to support different browsers, I'd want Mozilla making it easy to integrate other password managers. I'd love to be corrected, but afaik the "password manager with extraordinarily well-integrated browser compatibility" doesn't offer any way or API to connect my keepass with it. Its only for Mozilla's own stuff. Not the open, user controlled system i'd love Firefox to be.
The Firefox Android Addon system is even worse... only a very short list of pre-approved extensions are available. With the escape hatch for devs requiring some stupid online-account. Sorry, but how is that different from an App store without side-loading?
Still recommend using Firefox, since it is the best we have. But yeah, i don't like the less and less open direction apparently chosen by Mozilla. And wonder if not being a good role model will hurt them down the line...
I was surprised at how decent it converted TST tabs, but I can't remember how low my bar was; maybe try a new profile?
One thing I'm finding really nice in Sidebery though that TST can't do, is that I can create a parent node that is not attached to a specific page (via grouping).
Panels I'm undecided on. They seem useful, but they also seem like a bandaid over window management tools. One problem I'm having is that they don't restore, and all the tabs go back to the main panel. That may be some setting I toggled though.
You need to install Firefox Nightly.
I mentioned this below, but check to see what your history limits are in Firefox (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1039372). It's possible if you do enough browsing that you might have trouble finding older pages because they're not there anymore.
I'm not sure what the best mitigation is for that, I've kind of accepted that history for Firefox is short-term, not long-term. It might be possible to rig up a webextension to save history more permanently, but I suspect it would need to do native messaging I think to do that, and at that point maybe it's better to just do regular copies of the SQLite database.
Relying on Firefox history less also has the kind of minor advantage of allowing you to be more aggressive about cleaning it yourself, which can have a noticeable performance impact in some cases.
If you use the word "just" then it's a you issue. Close the tabs and you'll be happier.
As for history, imagine you're researching a topic and have gone through fifteen search results, decided three of them were relevant, and closed the others. Your history is polluted with all fifteen, whereas this tab search will directly return you these most relevant pages only.
You choose to open tabs. Don't open tabs if you know you cannot handle that.
This is an interestingly narrow take on what is a pretty common broadly used phrase with multiple meanings. If you're familiar with people with ADHD, you should realize that ADHD isn't something you can "just" choose to ignore or decide not to be affected by. Executive dysfunction isn't something you get to opt out of.
That knowledge should clue you in that when I use the word "just" in this context that I'm not dismissing anything or treating ADHD like a joke or using it as an excuse to be lazy. Particularly given that I immediately follow up that usage by talking about practical strategies and techniques I've developed to try and mitigate the outcome.
My point with the word "just" is that there isn't some complicated reasoning going on in my head for why it's good for me to have 1000 tabs open, in the same way that it's not some kind of life strategy that I forget to eat when I'm hyperfixated. It's not a workflow or a decision that I've made about my life, it's just a consequence of ADHD.
> you're trying to justify it
Having a lot of tabs open doesn't need to be justified. It's not a moral failing. I don't need an excuse for having a lot of tabs open because it's not behavior that needs to be excused.
The only reason to mitigate it is because mitigating it makes my individual life better. It's not really relevant whether you or anyone else approves beyond that. I'm not trying to justify anything because there is nothing about the number of browser tabs a person has open that needs to be justified or condemned. Opening a browser tab is a morally neutral act.
I replied to a comment that was curious about why someone might have that many tabs open: was it easier to work that way? Is there some browser config that makes 1000s of tabs more efficient than bookmarks? No, the cause is just ADHD.
> You choose to open tabs. Don't open tabs if you know you cannot handle that.
??? I genuinely have no idea what you're suggesting or getting at here. People who open too many (?) tabs shouldn't be using browsers? What does this mean?
Given that you are saying you're familiar with ADHD, I know you're definitely not suggesting that the solution is to just choose not to open a lot of tabs in the first place. Because you know what executive dysfunction and impulsivity is and you're familiar with how people with ADHD operate, and so I know that you wouldn't make such a pointless or useless suggestion. But I'm at a loss for what you're actually trying to convey then.
The question is... is there an easier way these days or do you still have to use CSS?