Comment by tored | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tored | Hacker News Reader

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Yes, it is the 200+ tabs (probably closer to 500) over multiple windows.

My latest move was to merge every tab in all windows to one window only (with an extension) and start using vertical tabs (better scrolling and overview of tabs) Then sort tabs by title with another extension (Edge built in AI tab sort sucked on sorting so many tabs). With sorted tabs I could start create tab groups, Edge AI tab sort worked better when the tabs was already sorted alphabetically and managed to create most of the tab groups for me. With all this reorganization it was easier to manage all of them and to start closing tabs.

I’m not done yet but it is much better and number of opened tabs has been significantly reduced. Now I have one main window with all the tabs and some temporary windows that is only used for temporary stuff that get closed within a day.

What makes things a bit more complicated is that I also use two profiles, private and work. Firefox always sucked on multi-profile setup. Firefox’s new container stuff is somewhat improvement but not fully (at least when I tried last)

I usually have at most 10 or so tabs open. Anything more than that and that tab gets buried visually and cognitivly. I like to be able to read the first bit of the title page. Anything else I make folders of 'tosort' and bookmark them. Then every few months I do an 'open all' in that folder. Usually I find that only one are two were really worth keeping. The rest I was just hoarding and are just clutter.

My problem with bookmarks is that I tend to forget about them.

What would be nice is a browser where tabs, history and bookmarks blended together seamlessly.

Check out the Auto Tab Discard extension for Firefox. It removes the contents of tabs from memory after a period of time, but keeps the tab icon/title around. Next time you click the tab, it acts like a bookmark and reloads the page it was on. As a tab hoarder, I've found it very helpful to keep CPU/memory usage down.

The bookmark UI is a bit weird. I have most luck using the bookmark toolbar which is open by default for new tabs (this might be an option).

How on earth do you find what you're looking for in 200+ tabs?! When I'm deep into something I'll have maybe 10-15 open. It's such a good feeling when I'm done and realise I can close them all. I could almost let out an audible sigh.

If you forget about a bookmark, is that a bad thing? Maybe what you really need is a todo list that supports more than just browser tabs.

Tab hoarding is not an effective strategy of organization, it is more the fear of losing something important. And tab hoarding builds up, just like any other type of hoarding.

Finding tabs was a bit of hit or miss, you can search for them if remember the title, otherwise you have to manually find it, time consuming.

With my new strategy that I described above, it has become much easier to find what I’m looking for.

Bookmarking has always been clunky, putting them into hierarchical folder structure is both time consuming and has the same problem as files and folders, it lacks a dimension, a bookmark can be in multiple folders.

Bookmark toolbar could work, how paradoxical it may sound with all the tabs opened, it just don’t like that UI element cluttering my browser.

Forgetting about bookmarks can be a good thing, it is similar when browser loses all opened tabs, the feeling is a strange mix of anxiety and relief, anxiety of missing out but a relief that I don’t need to process them anymore.

Sometimes a find ten year old bookmarks on some backup, most bookmarks dead or just out of date. I feel we need better ways to organize things in this temporary cloud world.

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