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Comment by stouset | Hacker News Reader

Why on earth would you do this? Genuine question.

I don't go quite that excessive, but you can keep various projects and activities tracked pretty well. Instead of regretting closing a few stackoverflow pages (which will be a nightmare to search for even with local history) you can leave up the useful ones, so you don't lose them, and close it all once the current task / project is no longer needing them.

I used to make fun of people who hoarded them, but honestly sometimes just keeping that one tab open until you've exhausted its use is worth it.

I can't even imagine trying to locate that "useful tab" amongst 1500 open tabs. My bookmarks by contrast are nicely organized into folders. I can also open an entire folder of links at once, for example, my favorite blogs.

So typically what happens is I'll split out browser windows with tab groups, Firefox used to have a way of doing this from one window, but they scrapped it or its just not default anymore, it was like "Virtual Desktops" but for tabs. It was insanely useful, I think the tabs that were hidden were not even loaded in the background, so they were on standby until you can back to them.

I do something similar, because I can. Why waste time organizing & pruning them when I don't need to? I can just search for open tabs that I need, jump to windows to resume sessions I was working on earlier, etc. At some point it gets too much and I use OneTab to save all my open tabs and start over.

Each project has its own window. Ctrl+tab moves down the call stack and ctrl+shift+tab moves up the call stack. Exploring a topic often requires depth first search and a lot of ctrl+w and clicking "close tabs to the right" after researching subtopics. I've used this approach for over a decade and I've always been able to upgrade my machine fast enough to keep up.

Of course I also use ctrl+e (QuickTabs) to jump faster with intellij-like fuzzy search. It's kinda like Chrome's built-in ctrl+shift+a, except better.

Bragging rights.

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