I think I've got Firefox up to 3500, indeed I mentioned this when I went to a meetup hosted by Mozilla, and they said that few people use more than 14.
I think some of the tab tools start to make it unstable, but the root issue is that it'd be good to clear down browser tabs often.
Even when I declare browser bankruptcy and close whole windows dedicated to some topic, I don’t think I can get my total count below 14.
I mean, I get that my workflow is unique, but I’m apparently truly out of touch with typical browser usage.
Occasionally when cross-referencing stuff I will go up to perhaps 5 or even 10 in extreme circumstances, but then - as before - I close the tab when I am done.
For stuff I want to come back to "later" I just use a bookmark instead of just leaving it open.
At work I tend to leave email chat and calendar open all day, but that is only an extra 3 tabs.
In my experience - both at work and at home - it is better to concentrate on only a small number of things at once and try to work them through to completion (or as far as you can get) so you can just drop it from your head when you are done and not need to dedicate and brain energy on juggling all these differen "in-flight" tasks. I find it easier to concentrate and way more productive to finish a task and then move on, rather than context-switching every 2 minutes and wasting endless time hunting for "that tab with that thing I need" on it.
Some tips for people who are struggling with their tab count:
* Always close all tabs at the end of the day.
* Use different browser profiles for different types of task (eg work admin/emails/calendars/trello vs work-related documentation/search vs monitoring vs nonwork.)
* If you notice you have enough tabs open that the browser needs to shrink or hide them, cycle through and cull a bunch. If needed, you can always find them again later, either just by searching for them or using your browser history.
I used to have hundreds of tabs like some people. At some point I started to get very bothered by having too many tabs. I don't remember what happened, but I always keep a low count now. I make heavy use of bookmarks and qutebrowser's quickmarks, and have pretty good luck pulling stuff from my history as well. Some tabs just get bookmarked and immediately closed, like if I find an interesting project on github but have no plans to do anything related to it.
Everyone else is saying bookmarks are their solution to exploding tabs, but I've never used bookmarks. I have six on the bar that are just shortcuts to frequently visited sites. I dunno, I guess I just never find pages that are so unique that I can't google them if I need them later. I'm certainly never going to go back to anything that I didn't have an immediate need for the first time. I might intend to, but I know better.
Anything not being used is closed and kept in bookmarks.
I can definitely say there is a selection bias at play here. Tab management as it is in major browsers by default sucks. At more than half dozen tabs, you start losing tab titles, basically playing "Where is waldo". When you go beyond a dozen tabs you can barely see the favicon. Any more and it becomes a game of "Concentration"[0]. When the experience is so horrible, no wonder people don't use more than 14 tabs at once. Give people vertical tabs with nested hierarchy and watch how quickly people go about operating 100+ tabs without losing sweat.
It turned have to have huge performance impact, so I don't do it anymore. I got out of the habit a few years ago. I think since then, browser went to lazy loading of tabs on restart.
If you think your system is running slow, cut the number of tabs to under 100, and try again. You may see a huge jump in performance.
The one thing that helped me break the habit of not closing tabs was just installing a tab counter extension. Now, if I see it creeping up towards 100, I know it's time to clean house.
Hacker News facilitates me opening scores of tabs a day, that and not being able to find the tab I need means duplicating it; although the browser now serves me up with the original one.
I tend to open a new window for a new line of work, so the tabs are over 40 or so windows.
The limit used to be the bowser crashing, or me forgetting to reopen history and so relinquishing the interesting things.
My point is that I’d greatly appreciate keeping this down. I’m currently down to 800 or so, I think the tab history tool crashes Firefox, without it it could go a lot higher.
ADHD can creep up on you