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Comment by testtestabcdef | Hacker News Reader

Most likely i just have different habits, but I never really understood how people can cope with such a massive amount of tabs. I genuinely enjoy closing my browser after each day (or maybe just before a break) and starting with a fresh session, no saved sessions for me. For me this has three main benefits

- Less RAM, obviously, while this is not very important it's just nice to have.

- My Attention is directed to the things that I actually need right in that moment

- Even though my booksmarks are more or less messy, I know where to place what, I know where I can find things I need and for the temporary stuff I just have one folder which I work through or sometimes just plainly delete.

I'd say my absolute maximum would be 50 tabs. I doubt, that I ever went above that.

The extension from the OP still sounds nice, even for my use case. Will look into that.

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> Less RAM, obviously, while this is not very important it's just nice to have.

Unlike PC RAM which I can expand every time I get a new PC, my mental RAM is limited.

Making sure to put everything I don't need right now into external systems to free up my mental RAM was one of my main takeaways from reading Getting Things Done some 15 years ago, and for me, nested browser tabs is one level of my storage hierarchy.

Also note the word nested.

I can bookmark things, yes, and I do it a lot.

But for me, ctrl-clicking as I read through some documentation first time and then have everything open in a nested level of tabs and then being able to walk backward and forward between a table of contents or a search, concepts, related concepts and related information like blogs or bug reports effortlessly and without losing track of where I am or how I came there (it is just one step up in the hierarchy) is very valuable.

Before I learned to use Tree Style Tabs I'd navigate linearly and be afraid to lose out something important.

Today with TST I am only afraid that someone at Mozilla will finally find a way to totally destroy the extension API, forcing me to go to Mac/Orion (nothing bad about Orion, but I still struggle with Mac shortcuts).

I just don’t want the hassle of managing bookmarks for all except those I want to keep long-term, mainly. Every browser’s bookmark management is higher friction than its tab management.

Bookmarks also don’t preserve scroll state or window positions which makes getting things set back up more annoying. It’s easier to just let it all sit open and be exactly as I expect to the next day.

> My Attention is directed

Sidebery has tab groups, which you can then fold. Also has panels, which are basically full-size permanent tab groups (that can be linked to containers).

> Less RAM

It also lets one enable tab unloading for folded tabs. And you can middle-click on a panel to unload all the tabs in it.

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