cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/12299180
who does that?!
How can it be in any way useful to keep 7000 open tabs?
Has she not heard of bookmarks?
I am thoroughly confused
The article explains that she likes to look at tabs in the past as a reminder of something she was interested in.
It’s sort of a snapshot in time. I get it. But hell no I’m closing tabs.
You can bookmark a whole window full of tabs all into a single bookmark folder. It’s called “bookmark all tabs” or something like that. Then later you can open all of them again into a new window using a single button again.
I know the average person isn’t tech savvy, but this loss is almost entirely on themself. If you have 7000 tabs open and it’s important to you that they stay saved, then it’s on you to simply ASK someone if keeping them open is an ok way to do it
This is hoarder behaviour, so I wouldn’t expect it to make sense as a general statement
Why do you need to “save” a tab? If you’re never going to look at it again what is the point?
I can understand someone who has 20-30 tabs. They’ll probably go back to at least one of them. But 7000??? There is nothing to save it’s an impossible rats nest with zero organization so the likelihood of reopening even one of those tabs is virtually zero. So in this case what’s the purposing of “saving” these tabs?
I have 4 virtual desktops, usually each with their own Firefox instance. I still have less than 10 tabs open.
YOU DON’T NEED THAT MANY TABS
Man if only firefox had some kinda feature that you could see your previous activity. Something akin to a history of what you did in the browser.
Self-hosted Archive.org? Neat
I have a practical but niche answer to this. This is actually a bit of a wall of text but tldr: Not quite a power-user. Got 1.5k tabs, Bookmarks and Browser history lack proper system and contextual integration, are a poor experience to review, navigate, categorize for me, and many integrations make tabs effortless to work with, group up, and accumulate. Looking a bit into other systems and I can definitely see benefits but what I have works pretty well for me.
I’m not as much of a poweruser but I generally will have between 800 and 1,500 tabs open on my desktop with Floorp which is a Firefox fork with native web app support and a bunch of neat customization features. This is mainly because I find history and bookmarking features to be rather inconvenient to maintain especially for deep internet rabbitholes and complex projects that can have multiple topics or differing levels of priority to reference. Firefox and Floorp allow users to instantly search through their tabs using the search bar and this tends to be very helpful although I also will like to have older versions of websites cached or loaded locally so I can make comparisons, review through collections of tasks and their related segments which I have previously worked on, or see how homepages and different segments of the web have adapted as a whole or personalized for me over time. I can basically have my own pocket of the Internet curated for me which I don’t need to go out of my way to find or maintain.
Now something to note is that it’s a surprisingly efficient process, Most of the tabs themselves don’t need to actually be active in memory with the browser in total generally using less than 8 gigabytes of ram and under 10% of my cpu when active. I have plenty of tab management extensions, Floorp provides a scroll bar at the top for multi-row tabs, Flow Launcher (ridiculously powerful search tool which can be run as a system-wide programmable hotkey.) within Windows has integration both for checking existing tabs and instantly opening new ones. It’s pretty slick except when my browser is first rebuilding after a full reboot as that can take around two minutes to complete from disk.
I think the main thing at least for me is just that other resources and tools (Been looking into the raindrop bookmark manager.) might be more efficient for me to learn in the long run but I tend to be working on dozens of projects at once anyways and actively going out of my way to adapt to a new system like that would be counterproductive in the moment where it counts.
Hope this has been a helpful and insightful look into my process. I could probably attach screenshots or video later although I feel like this is sufficient as-is.
Yeah I don’t really get it but it seems like it’s not that uncommon to have heaps of tabs open. More than 7,000 is obviously exceptional but it checks out - there’s a few users like this in mozilla’s telemetry.
I think it’s basically just concern that you might not be able to find your way back to something you were looking at before. To me that seems irrational but everyone needs to sail their own ship I guess.
I’ll say it again - anyone who needs (or let’s be honest, thinks they need) hundreds of thousands of open tabs has something wrong with their brain and should probably see a professional about it.
I don’t understand people who use a million tabs. Most I’ll have is like ten. And that’s if I’m deep in a problem in a project. I hate clutter
some people visit many different sites, continuously throughout the day, and it doesn’t make sense to keep reopening tabs, plus then you forget about it
Then you’re really not doing that much research. I can easily open 20 to 50 tabs for just one project. I’m not defending leaving them open. I’ve finally started to address the problem by learning how to take notes. I chose Joplin for this.
Autism/ADHD is a bitch for some things and note taking and writing up research has never just “come to me”.
I’m autistic as well and having that many tabs open gives me anxiety. I mainly code, and when I find a solution I either bookmark it until I can use it, it I use it and then close it. Maybe not immediately, but I try not to have so many open the broader can’t show them in the tab bar. Because it gets really disorganized after that
ADHD and easier to type a url than open a new tab. People that can maintain a curated tab list… I wish my brain would allow it.
Once a day I close browsers to make sure there’s not some work item I forgot to hit post on.
In AuDHD and I hate tabs. I’m worse at work but I don’t go over 5 or 6 tabs
I set my important links in the bookmarks tab, and if I need anything else, I hit Ctrl+t, type the first letter, and I’m there 90% of the time faster than sifting for the right tab
Screw all those replies amounting to ‘stop having that problem.’
Mozilla has previously bragged about testing how Firefox handles hundreds of tabs. If you feel cramped opening a dozen - my condolences. But get out of our way. We’re using all this RAM we paid for.
No.
I’m not done with them yet.
I am using this many tabs, after pruning. It’s not just opening everything and closing nothing. 99% get closed in a timely fashion. This is the rest. This is what’s left despite routine passes to weed out what’s no longer relevant enough to get back to.
All of y’all scoffing ‘use bookmarks’ act like a Bookmarks folder thousands of items long would be any more manageable or convenient. Bookmarks don’t even use less RAM since tabs started lazy-loading. Bookmarks also don’t go away when you open them and decide you’re done. You have to find it in the big dumb list to open it, do whatever, and then find it in the big dumb list to remove it. God help you if we’re talking about a group of tabs instead of exactly one page.
There used to be this perfect plugin called Read It Later. You’d click the icon and the tab would go onto a list, and opening it from that list would remove it. This did exactly what I wanted until it became Pocket and enshittified into a cloud service. And then Mozilla forced that cloud service on everyone by bundling its “recommendation” spam into the goddamn browser, forcibly uninstalling the old version I was still using.
I have been using Firefox since before it was called Firefox. I don’t care if you use it differently from me. Extend the same courtesy.
The issue is not about having a lot of tabs open, the issue is when people expect their tabs to be open between sessions.
Open 427362728 tabs if you want, but don’t expect them to open on restarting the session
Is this a new mental illness I haven’t heard of?
In an interview with PCMag, Hazel said she keeps all those tabs open because she likes “to scroll back and see clusters of tabs from months ago — it’s like a trip down memory lane on whatever I was doing/learning about/thinking about.” So, when she recovered her 7,000+ tab browsing session, she said, “I feel like a part of me is restored.”
Actually that’s kinda cool. I shouldn’t be a hater.
No it’s probably s mental illness or something. If she like the tabs as a memoir thing, she should do what people have done on vacations for decades - take pictures (aka here as screenshots or saved pages).
Do people not know about browsing history?
