Ask HN: How do you manage the tab explosion in the browser? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you manage the tab explosion in the browser?

4 pointssuyash6 comments

I've been feeling overwhelmed when the sea of tabs open in multiple browser windows and often those are about articles I need to read or action items I need to do at some point in time. Not to mention the fact that links automatically open new tabs and it can increasingly get unwieldy and worst case your browser crashes unable to restore. Just looking for your thoughts, ideas, best practices in managing tabs online.

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I use the Stack Tab plugin. Since I mostly surf on a Raspberry Pi, chromium simply can't handle the number of tabs I tend to have open on my desktop.

As soon as I pass 4 tabs, the links get stacked and don't consume nearly the amount of RAM a tab would. And it keeps me mindful of how cluttered it could be getting since the longer they remain in the stack, the less likely I'm ever going to get around to them.

Anything that I would normally want to keep in an open tab, I add to another plugin: Markdown New Tab. That way I have everything sync'd, but not killing my rpis.

I use Switch-Off addon both for Firefox* and Chrome. It has an option to limit how many tabs you can open.

* https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/switch-off

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/switch-off/ehjhebf...

I have a virtual desktop per customer/project, one for me. Hotkeys to jump to those desktops. One Firefox window per desktop plus one for WhatsApp web. This naturally limits the number of tabs per window. Recent Firefox versions have a menu listing the tabs of a window. It's easier to jump to one even if it's off screen and doesn't require an addon.

Just close tabs. Whatever you actually need is in history. Omnibox in modern browsers searches through history as well by default, so often you don't even need to open the history screen. There are also handy "close other tabs" and "close tabs to the right" options when right clicking on a tab. Easy.

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

Tree Style Tab, you'll never go back.

Focus when you are browsing and close tabs when you have nothing to do with this tab.

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