IDK, a lot of people claim to need to be able to manage several hundred of open tabs.
Bookmarks are for long term storage. In some sense it is more like Stared History, something may be we need to return in the far future for reference. If browser have a function where it would record everything I read, bookmark would be stared piece of information where I think it is important.
Tabs Opened are reading list or To-do list. 30 Tabs on Toothbrush because I haven't decided which one to buy. Another 30 Tab on "each" different items which I planned to buy. 50 Tabs on HN because I haven't had time to read it yet. Sometimes I opened them when I visit HN front page and read it later. I must admit about 200 tabs wouldn't be needed if I am at 200K+ salary I just buy the top range without thinking. But I am frugal. Shopping on Amazon Prime, another 50 tabs.
SideBar Tabs doesn't work for me. Mostly because the Desktop web isn't designed for squashed layout. I would imagine it would work much better if I am on a 21:9 ultra wide monitor. But I haven't had the luxury to test it out.
> His tab bar is composed of only barely recognizable icons
I assume he is on Chrome? Because Firefox doesn't squeeze out the Tabs to Fav icons only.
... Are you still on an old 4:3 screen? Standard 1080p is wide enough, if a bit short. I tend to do half-width and full-height on a 4k screen, with a tab sidebar.
I mean, really? A tootbrush is a $2 item. They are all basically the same, some bristles on a handle. Why would you spend the time reading or even opening 30 different pages about this?
Personally I just use the free one I get from the dentist with each cleaning/checkup.
It's just annoying that firefox took away the original tree style tab's ability to hide the main tab bar...
Is his desk clean?
Is he strong enough to lift a feather duster and whip the vacuum cleaner around?
Having a mountain of tabs open is the equivalent of not putting your tools away, keeping your desk tidy or keeping your house clean.
People that get stuff done tend to be those that keep things tidy. Millions of tabs open might give the impression of 'genius at work', but do the deliverables get delivered?
This might not be a popular opinion, however, after having to tidy up my dad's estate (he never put tools away and his computer had billions of tabs open), I have formed my own conclusions on this.
The comparison doesn't really hold. This is not like an untidy workbench. Modern browsers don't incur a significant penalty for having hundreds or even thousands of tabs. There are workflows that benefit from Never Closing, and I'm glad to see browsers now don't turn into a nipple bar to expose me.
Indeed after years and dozens of times where someone looks over my shoulder to see many tabs and abandons our topic to engage in Shame Time, I am fully innoculated to their barbs and feel it says more about the person pointing than myself. I manage to engage in a world with noise. Some people can't. The worst of them reach for grand overarching conclusions, as you have done here.
I also sometimes leave the evening dishes for the morning cleaning session.
I have recently learned a lot about highly effective people and tidiness is a common trait, even with browser tabs.
For most of my life I have been working with far too many tabs open, however, I do have this habit of bookmarking all tabs monthly, to then go to about twenty tabs across (the forever tabs) to then 'close all tabs to the right'.
You would be amazed at how few of those 'vital' tabs get reopened.
Each of them is a promise to one's future self to do something or read something, and rarely does one's future self do that.
I just don't see open tabs as burdensome, any more than my Steam backlog. If I get to them I do, if I don't, I don't. I also don't defrag my SSD and when I reboot my RAM starts fresh.
Tidiness and entropy are always at tension, and it's often best to let the balance be.
Not my experience at all.
Depending of the computer and phone, it might be the same thing in Firefox or Chrome.
Even on Android, despite that chrome updates in the last years made it more sluggish and buggy to have lots of tabs than it used to be like 5 years ago.
I can't understand how Google/chrome team might be so incompetent, but often reopening the browser app in android, some times are overwritten or shifted in position. Very annoying.
The consistent failure of bookmark managers is notable, doesn't matter if they are pure web-based or implemented as browser extensions the story is always that they're a "roach motel", somebody put in 30,000 bookmarks and realizes a few years later they didn't look back at them once.
A counter-example is my Fraxinus bookmark manager/personal webcrawler/image sorter that I've been running for about 15 months and probably accumulated about 1 million images (was 700k last I looked) I look at images from it every day. The backlog of image galleries in the primary classification queue is about 1000 and I dunno, I could probably put "bigtags" [1] on another 1500 galleries but I don't feel like I have to, it's not like I don't have enough content already.
I wish I had some consistent and simple way to export both bookmarks and history into all my devices so I could feed them into my AI, make them portable, etc.
[1] tags engineered to work with automated classification, namely it is possible for tags to be positive/indeterminate/negative
How do you feel about the fact that the author (of the web page) gets to decide whether a link opens in a new tab?
Point is that I ignore tabs unless I'm alternating between 2 tabs or a need a placeholder for a few minutes. If arbitrary web sites could add to my the list of bookmarks kept by my browser, I'd ignore that list, too.
You've discovered the source of many-o-wars throughout human history.
Thankfully Firefox tabs likely won't bring that 'round.
Thunderbird filter function understand what I want when searching old emails. If you search on an email and selects the one you are interested, and then remove the search, it will automatic scroll the navigation to that date and keep the selected email on view.