Don't know the details of how they handle this but going above 100 tabs in Chrome proved to be too laggy and slow to be usable.
Meanwhile I've had 800+ tabs open in Firefox with no noticeable issues.
Meanwhile I've had 800+ tabs open in Firefox with no noticeable issues.
Once you switch to vertical it becomes easy to leave old tabs hanging around. They impose no extra cognitive load until you have enough to require scrolling.
I navigate them using the tab hotkeys, container tab menu, and fast scrolling while watching for favicon clusters.
Every few weeks I do a quick pass through all my open windows and tabs and I close any documents that have grown stale or that I've already finished studying up on or read through.
In other words - this behavior is proof that there's room for improvement of browser history UI.
Definitely. Firefox's built-in history browsing UI is frankly horrible. Norwell History Tools was better but is no longer supported.
I recommend aggressively archiving into Zotero or another tool, perhaps into an "unread" folder, so that at least it's possible to read any one of them.
... I'm not joking.
But overall I'd say In my case my high tab count is mostly due to laziness. I have tons of tabs open that I may never look at again, but just haven't cleaned up. You might say "well, that's dumb, you're wasting memory and should clean up those unneeded tabs", but I'd retort, "why should I do manual work when the computer can clearly just deal with it for me so I don't have to care?"
I tend to do think and do things very on a very asynchronous / concurrency level. I'll load dozens of webpages CTRL+Left click new tabs open, cross reference other documents open.
When I do this, there's two reasons usually
- 1. I'm surfing the web for interesting content as quickly as possible
- 2. I'm researching a specific topic and answer
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So in case 1, I'm on hackernews. Its far faster for CTRL+Left click and upvote dozens of articles that I find relevant. First, I open the comments page to see what the general concensus on the article is, then I load the article after.
Because my browser needs a few seconds to load all this in one go, it makes sense for me to open new tabs at a time. I save what is essentially seconds of time, but it adds up in the long run making me way more productive.
When I get tab overflow, I just move the most important tab (the hackernews page) to its own window, leaving behind everything else, but not closing it off. I have the "Great suspender" chrome extension set to 30 minutes or so, in that 30 minutes, I will pop open roughly 20-100 tabs and skimp through dozens of articles and hundreds of comments.
I do the same process as well, for (2) researching a specific topic in a field. Say my computer breaksdown. I need to deduce what issues I can look up, and go through dozens of sites such as tomshardware, reddit, microsoft tech support, superuser stackexchange, youtube, among many others. I need to cross reference sometimes dozens of sites to identify and narrow the issue.
Not everyone does things this way, it requires a specific mindset to be okay with having a chrome tab wasteland, but it gets the job done way faster than any other solution or method I've tested.
I realize that (1) reading and keeping up to date on news is valuable, but it also is a huge time drain as well. So I try and get it as quickly over with as possible.
During this entire process I will also bookmark certain things as well, based on how useful the information is. In each of these 20-100 sites, I assign a mental metric in my head, depending on the metric, I will do certain things
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- 1. If the site is relevant to me down the road and on a site, or has something interesting to talk about, I will CTRL+D pinboard shift add 3 or so tags and press enter. This takes me about 5-10 seconds to do on a page
- 2. If the site came from hackernews and is going to be useful in my life in the next 1-2 years, I will "favorite it"
- 3. If the site is interesting on hackernews and I read the comments / article, I will "upvote it"
- 4. If the article on the site is something I will use in the following week, it will be added as a chrome toolbar bookmark which I sorted on a A-Z basis
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At the end of the day I will have funneled down all the interesting tidbits into (1) what is useful and (2) what is interesting, and (3) what is not.
These will all be aggregated in a singular list on hackernews or pinboard or into its own dedicated spot on chromes toolbar.
This means I can access all the information I've ever read in roughly a few keyboard clicks and strokes and can reference and cite dozens of pieces of factual pieces of information to backup any arguments I have, whether in writing or in person.
In this sense I am essentially making my own version of zotero or some citation machine with whatever tools are available in the best possible workflow I can possibly imagine to get shit done really quickly