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Comment by beAbU | Hacker News Reader

I keep about ~10 tabs open on a single browser instance. I might run 2 or 3 instances, depending on what I'm doing. I have 2 tabs always open, mail and calendar. The rest are all ephemeral and task specific.

At least once a week or so, the browser loses my tabs (this usually happens after a forced update at night). No biggy, the browser will recover them for me. Oonce every couple of months the browser fails to recover my tabs after losing them. Annoying but no biggie, it was only 10 or so tabs.

How on earth do people keep thousands of tabs alive for years, and never lose them? I do not understand how this is possible. Or do they lose their tabs regularly, but reinstate them manually from browser history?

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I don't recall the last time I lost all my tabs. The only big annoyance I've had in recent years is when something caused my tab tree to flatten so all my arranged nesting was gone. I'm more curious how you end up with a system that destroys your session semi frequently?

What do you mean by "lose them"? They are in the browser, stored for next session. Why would they be lost?

Firefox is very capable of managing this many tabs. You can also use things like % in the address bar to quickly jump to any ob those tabs, even, if they are not loaded, which most of them will not be.

I ran around with 4k tabs for quite a while. It does slow down startup of the browser a little though, and that is what made me close most of them.

> What do you mean by "lose them"? They are in the browser, stored for next session. Why would they be lost?

From time to time, usually when Chrome crashes, it restarts without the tabs history saved so you cannot restore them. I also can't remember the last time this happened tho, it's been at least a few years.

Actually, it probably simply closed the wrong window. Just like you can reopen the last tab, you can also reopen the last closed window. I run into this issue all the time when I open a second window and close the main window first.

What are you doing that causes it to forget your tabs? I can't remember the last time that happened. You can use sidebery and let it do snapshots and recover from that. I'm sure there are other ways, but sidebery is a Swiss-army knife for tabs.

The thing I learned is to quit the browser without closing any windows (ctrl-q or equivalent). Closed windows are restorable from the history section.

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