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Comment by bad_user | Hacker News Reader

I use Tree Style Tabs in Firefox, but I have mixed feelings about it.

It should help me visually find tabs, but truth of the matter is that it doesn't. Horizontal tabs become useless after 10 tabs opened, indeed, but vertical tabs become useless after 30 tabs opened.

Opened tabs also consume a lot of memory. It's why I now use Auto Tab Discard, which works, but then gets in the way because by Ctrl-Tab-ing you end up hitting inactive tabs that you did not want, which are then reloading and it's annoying.

What does help me in finding tabs is tab search via the address bar. In Firefox it works great, you can also prefix your query with a `%` to limit your search only to opened tabs.

Chrome also provides a way to search open tabs. It's not as good as Firefox's and you have to enable it yourself, but it's fine [2].

[1] https://add0n.com/tab-discard.html

[2] chrome://flags/#omnibox-tab-switch-suggestions

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Your situation sounds similar to my own. The following two extensions have helped me solve the '30 tabs' problem:

TabSearch does the same thing you're doing with the search bar, but with fuzzy searching and more customisability which makes finding tabs a bit easier.

Close Discarded Tabs is a very simple extension I wrote for myself that acts as a sort of garbage collector for Auto Tab Discard. You can customize Auto Tab Discard to discard tabs in a way that purges irrelevant tabs to your liking, and then if you notice the list of tabs looks a bit overwhelming, just click the trashcan and all the discarded tabs are closed. If you want to make sure you don't close a tab you wanted, just quickly scan through the list and click any that you want to keep.

TabSearch: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab_search/

Close Discarded Tabs: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/close-discard...

Hey, thanks for "Close Discarded Tabs", it's precisely what was missing :-)

> but vertical tabs become useless after 30 tabs opened.

> but then gets in the way because by Ctrl-Tab-ing you end up hitting inactive tabs that you did not want, which are then reloading and it's annoying.

I use Vim Vixen [0], which has a "b" command (for "buffer") to search all tabs in the current window by URL and title. Also tags "last tab" with #, so you can easily jump back and forth using the command. Pretty sure other such vim-style addons have similar features.

[0] https://github.com/ueokande/vim-vixen

I've tried TST a handful of times and for whatever reason it never quite clicked for me.

Instead, I found the Panorama/Tab Groups feature (before FF removed it, now preserved via addons like https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/panorama-tab-...) to be a better immediate fit for my workflow.

The focus on groups and visible thumbnails makes it easy to pick out the tabs I want visually. I'm not sure how well it holds up once you get to 100s of tabs, but for my average of around 20-40 or so (spread over several windows) it works well, and does a good job of helping to maintain context separation.

I built a simple Chrome extension for my own before. Not sure if that helps though. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-searching/mghf...

I can't use % since Firefox still hasn't figured out a way to make it search across containers

On an average how many categories and tabs do you have open during heavy web usage?

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