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Comment by wintermutestwin | Hacker News Reader

A couple initial thoughts as a Sidebery user that keeps ~100 tabs open:

1. The whole point of vertical tabs is that horizontal browser space is "cheap." Why not keep the tab list visible? Having it be a dropdown adds an unnecessary step.

2. Horizontal (Sidebery style) pinned tabs that just show the site icon are much cleaner. I have a row (8-12 tabs depending on how wide I drag the tab bar)of frequently used sites pinned at the top of my tab list.

3. It doesn't look like you have right-click move to window functionality, which is critical for my workflow. If you add it, be sure to make it work with the Titler extension so you can work with window names.

I'm glad you didn't put energy into tab trees - I think they are a waste of space. I have a window for each general category of tabs.

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I have >1000 tabs open and probably many that I haven't looked at in >6 months now (most are discarded using Auto Tab Discard). I This many tabs causes every tab management extension I've tried to be unusably slow. Even the Firefox multi account containers popup usually takes around 2 full seconds to load, presumably because it's counting the number of tabs for each container (a feature I would happily disable if possible) via a horrendously slow API.

Try multiple windows. I use Tree Style Tabs extension, and have around 1,700 tabs open across three windows. Yes, it can be slow.. sometimes.. but for the most part.. everything is pretty smooth still!

Yes, it's crazy.. but this is essentially my bookmark system. I take backups of the "session" so if something did happen, I can recover all of them. And every few years, I quickly go through them and start afresh. Bookmark what might still be relevant, and discard the rest. It works for me

How do you take backups of your session? Is there a built in UI, or another add-on? I’m a heavy user of tree style tabs and would love to be able to “save” a window with 100 tabs in a complicated tree, close the window, and be confident I could open it up again later with the tree structure intact.

Not GP, but I do it like this: https://imgur.com/a/HTtSELl (right click one or multiple trees -> bookmark this tree)

Would love to know if anyone has a more elegant solution

I wonder if my extension would work faster for you. I built it to be quick and simple so i can find a tab visually across many windows. basic features: click on a link to go to the tab, groups the tabs by windows, shows the favicon next to it, shows the tabs that are making noise, and allows you to close the tab via middle mouse button. cmd(or ctrl on pc)-shift-e opens it up in a tab. I'd be curious if you do try it to see how fast it is.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabist/hdjegjggiog...

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

https://www.github.com/fiveNinePlusR/tabist

I use Panorama Tab Groups. It lets me group tabs into domains like each project or specific research topics. When I select a tab group the only tabs showing in the window are those in that group. If I select a different tab group it switches to display those. Tabs are kept in memory and not reloaded when switching. I don’t know if I would try to manage 1000 tabs in any system, but it does bring some clarity to my tabs.

You might want to look into a plugin that will snapshot you tabs to a bookmark folder or html list so you can save the list and then close a lot of them.

I can only recommend TabStash for fellow tab hoarders. You still get all your tabs, but only a few are loaded, making your browser much more snappy. (It can basically save the open ones, or the ones you find worthy either simply by date, or by some named groups)

Tab suspender is your friend

I migrated from Sidebery to Tab Stash [0]. I found the user experience to be a bit more streamlined; I don't find myself missing the tree-style structure, but the stashes it provides are a good replacement.

[0]: https://github.com/josh-berry/tab-stash

> horizontal browser space is "cheap."

I keep my browser window ~ 1/2 my screen width. If it grew, it would overlap other windows I am using.

That sounds like you're saying that for people who don't do that, horizontal browser space is very cheap and can be reduced by half.

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