A tab hoarder's journey to sanity
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Third party managers don't hit the spot either. They all spread out over too large of a surface area, trying to do read it later or moodboards or canvases and whatever else, without offering much in the way of material improvements over built in bookmarks (aside from being cross-browser).
It's also related to the fact that since ~2010, the quality/efficacy of "search" has gone downhill and you'll never find anything again.
I don't understand how it's useful to anyone, even the companies. I just leave without buying things so why would their searches not just search for the specific thing that I ask for?
I've been happy with Pinboard for many years now, which does just the bare essentials. There are integrations for most browsers, though I prefer using it externally via a small CLI client. This allows me to keep a local backup of my bookmarks in JSON, to filter them with fzf/rofi, and to use it with any browser. After all, I just need to quickly find a URL, and copy/paste it in the browser.
The service has had some issues over the years, leading to growing concerns over its stability and longevity. It hasn't affected me much personally, but I've wanted to replace it with a fully self-hosted solution for a long time now. With projects like ArchiveBox, linkding, etc., this is quite feasible, though I've been lazy with making the jump. My Pinboard renewal is coming up, and I think it might be time.
The only data I need—my bookmarks and tags—are already backed up in a JSON file. You can get this via the API. It would be good to have the crawled archives as well, but I don't really need it. A large number of my bookmarks are probably dead anyway, and could use pruning, so an archive of these is not that valuable.
The one thing they all have in common: they cannot stop me from being tab hoarder. That behavior (in my case, and I suspect I am not alone) is not impacted by tab/bookmark mgmt approaches, at least not by anything I've seen.
Bookmarks, locally archives the page, OCRs text off images, auto tags using and summarizes it using whatever AI model I want, in my case one off a local ollama instance. ios? just a share away to have any link processed.
Now I just stash and move on, when I need to find things again it's never been easier.
Onetab add-on in FF works fine. After every work you just “onetab” all tabs. It is flat structure, so I usually store similar tabs into one box.
There are 2 features: restore all tabs into browser. And fulltext search is easier.
I was a tab hoarder too. I am cured now as Onetab helped me a lot. (No affil. here.)
The problem is context. I think Tab Groups partly helped. But the implementation of tab group is still not good enough as it is. A lot of tabs aren't bookmark but unfinished work or research. I currently have Groups for Housing Market because of Rent increase, Jobs Search, Product Research, Marketing Courses, Surgery Research for Lasik, Youtube and a few others personal stuff. I wouldn't be surprised if it add up to 500 tabs.
Again, I will take this opportunity to say again, Multi / Lots of Tabs on Safari sucks.
I never really need more than one YouTube tab. I can’t watch more than one video at once, and if I want to watch something later, I use YouTube’s own “watch later”. But in my 300+ tabs there’s likely several copies of my subscription box. Because rather than scroll through the tabs I can just press ctrl+t and type YouTube in. This not only happens with YouTube, but with every bookmarked page I have, from the HN front page to the site I use to check the weather.
It didn't exist (or was undiscoverable) when I was last using Chrome / Chromium, though that was ~6+ years ago.
So the web is too broken for bookmarks to replace all uses of tabs.
Browser devs do not seem interested in improving the state of bookmarks.
I'm often a visual person, similar to what the twitter longpost also describes---I miss Apple's spatial file manager and made heavy use of the drag-and-drop grid on the Windows 10 Start menu to pin apps in logical groups---but I don't really have any problems with bookmarks as they exist now in Firefox. I have as many bookmarks as some tab hoarders have tabs (last count around 2,000), and I drag them into a well-ordered hierarchy with the Firefox Bookmarks Sidebar (Ctrl+B to toggle show/hide).
A hierarchy in a vertical sidebar has always seemed... Plenty visual, I guess? Do folks who have hundreds or thousands of tabs open also have as many files in their Desktop and Download folders and just search there too? What upgrades to bookmarks would make them significantly better than they are now?
Hierarchy-as-directory is a good conceptual abstraction, and it has useful, well-established visual representations. I get ornery when software tries to conceal a useful hierarchy from the end-user (most often... the file system itself, as in the iPhone).
I'll note that Firefox's "keyword" option for bookmarks is a killer feature for me: assign a keyword to a bookmark (e.g. "hn" for news.ycombinator.com or "yt" for www.youtube.com) and you can type those letters into the URL bar and instantly load the bookmark. It's kept me on Firefox for years, even though I'd prefer some of the security features and better process isolation of Chromium/Blink. I have a row common bookmarks in the Bookmarks Toolbar with favicons and names matched to their keywords and I've never needed or wanted a landing page with favorite sites.
Bookmarks do seem worse to me in other browsers without keywords. Oddly, if I import my Firefox bookmarks into other browsers the keywords I made in Firefox still work, but I can't edit them or add new keywords in those other browsers. Maddening.
The other issue is cache. If my internet goes out, for a lot of things I can just still re-open Firefox and there's a cached version of whatever tabs I had open that weren't put to sleep that I can look through. It's great when there's spotty cell coverage when using a hotspot, or when using a laptop in something like a highway or train tunnel. Bookmarks don't store a cached version of the page, it's just a link. This means if I close Firefox to clear up some RAM or save some battery life and then open it back up, if I didn't have those tabs open I'd have to have an active internet connection to view the page contents again.
The first time I've written my own bookmark manager was like 25y ago, before del.icio.us - which I used, then I got on pinboard, lately I've been self-hosting linkding.
I totally use those solutions daily, and I still have a couple bookmarks in some browsers (but mostly on the bars for frequent access).
The thing is, that 90% of my open tabs are either "I kinda want to consume this soon" or more often it's a working copy of research etc.
ANY form of bookmarking (and thus closing the tab) would destroy part of it's usefulness of being just one click away (also visible and on my mind). Of course that's not true for all of them.
So maybe I kinda agree with one of your possible observations, just not with your conclusion. Maybe if I could instantly find what I wanted in my bookmarking service, then I wouldn't need to look for it (just minutes or hours later) in my tab bar. On the other hand I'd need several hard-separated categories there, or a different bookmarking tool for work.
The middle ground is missing (on several axis):
- daily & semi-important -> bookmarks bar
- long-term & maybe important & !daily -> bookmark manager
- "need to read this" -> tab"long-term & !daily" is the only thing that could be a bookmark. the problem then is categorization. tagging helps. but before i bookmark something i open it as a tab to look at it, which makes bookmarking a extra step over "i want to keep this, so i'll just not close the tab". somewhere the impulse from "i want to keep this" to "bookmark this" is missing.
At some point you adopt a workflow where every browser activity starts with opening a new tab. Plus, so many websites have broken browser history management that it’s easier to open all links in new tabs, too.
I do close tabs on occasion, usually when I see that the device starts to struggle. Closing all tabs helps make things fast again.
Browsers tend to take open tabs into account when I search for stuff, and it’s nice to be able to enter a few keywords and get redirected to an existing tab. Saves me time for page reloads.
Sometimes entering the same keywords into a search engine does not land you on that article, though, so closing tabs as rarely as possible pays out for me a few times a year. But it’s ultimately not that important and I don’t keep tabs around for the sake of it.
You seem serious, but it sounds a bit funny!
I also often open links in new tabs. It's also a bit faster than e.g. going back in history. But I do close tabs after I'm done browsing that site or otherwise don't need it. I'd start to feel lost with a lot of tabs open (say, hundreds), not knowing what is actually relevant, what kind of research is "in progress", how to keep track of them well etc.. I do use multiple browser windows and vertical tabs in Firefox.
> Browsers tend to take open tabs into account when I search for stuff, and it’s nice to be able to enter a few keywords and get redirected to an existing tab.
Similarly, I mostly receive suggestions from my browsing history and use that a lot. I've disabled any suggestions from search engines, since they are usually useless.
I agree with comments arguing bad bookmark UX is part of the problem. Zen's approach is a vertical tab sidebar with workspaces and folders. Crucially, it distinguishes pinned and ephemeral tabs.
The approach is much more natural to me than either bookmarks and tradition tabs.
I am not sure it fixed my tab problem, but it improved tab management and overall efficiency.
Omnivore helped a bunch before they shut down. I need to see if any good apps exist that are similar.
I've been using tabbed browsers for 20-something years and I never really have more than 1, 2 at a time. If I need to call something back, I either bookmark it or I open up the history and search for it.
In Vivaldi, vertical tabs mean each tab takes about 40 vertical pixels of height, and about 250 pixels width, so I can skim through the titles of each tab...
Now my bookmark list is crazy. I have started using 'open all' and then reviewing items in each folder to see if they are worth keeping. 99% of the time. no. Many times they are from years ago and the site doesnt even exist anymore. I have some items in my folders that go back to 1992. I have a bad habit of 'oh that is mildly interesting ctrl-d time'. Usually a few weeks later 'what was I thinking'.
My tabs however are wildly focused on what I am doing right now. Once that task is done. I close them out. Think my max is 20 tabs. But usually I really only need about 5. The rest I close out. I probably can find it again with search. That is how I found it the first time...
That also reminds me, time to delete more folders.
I have 546 tabs in Firefox (on macOS) at the moment. I've never noticed any degraded performance. On my phone (iPhone) it's 490+ but that's because 500 is the max. I don't think it keeps them truly loaded until you go back to them.
Now sometimes a different system is better. So there is nothing wrong with understanding - you might learn something that helps you. However it is optional if you are not aware of defects in what you are doing (but if you are aware of them...). Also technology marches on and so something better might come out in the future: keep an option mind.
The important part is to be slow to criticizing people who are different.
Always vertical tabs since forever. I feel like if I bookmark something I probably just missclicked at some point, it's just never been in my flow, even before tabs restoring on launch and automatic tab unloading.
The problem for folks like me/us is fear of "losing" something, and like the OP. knowing that something can be saved and found again (or stumbled across) later solves the problem, whether it's ever searched for again. The act of "hoarding" actually scratches the itch for me. I'm fine to close a tab if it doesn't feel like I'm "throwing it away forever." And bookmarking a site is just a slower way to lose something forever. It's not easily findable, and I won't take the time to organize my bookmarks into a nice hierarchy. That reminds me of those old "internet yellow pages" that were sold at Microcenter back in the early days. That's a silly, slow way to organize information for retrieval.
I wish that 99% of my browser history was automatically indexed/recorded for later searching. I could imagine "boosting" particular links' importance with a bookmark concept, but I think you could also choose to elevate any site I spent a little bit longer on to actually read, or that I came back to later. If you added semantic search into that, and offline plain-text greppability, we'd really be in business. A lot of my searches boil down to "Didn't I see a tool or HN post that solved this problem 6 to 12 months ago?" Sometimes I find it again. Often I don't.
I keep hoping that someone like Kagi (which I already happily pay for) will let me build my own personalized internet index consisting "only" of the tens of thousands of URLs I've seen...They've built some stuff that is kinda close, and they already have a good crawler/indexer.
I have been using OneTab to quickly consolidate a lot of tabs to a single list of URLs, which actually does help me "feel" a bit better, but doesn't solve the semantic search issue. It sounds like Karakeep (mentioned by @miladyincontrol) does some of what I want already, and that they're working on semantic search too, but it doesn't offer it yet.
If anyone (including the OP) has something to help me auto-hoard, I'd love to hear it.
Occasionally I type a keyword for something I previously bookmarked and the browser finds it in the bookmarks. Other times I don’t have the right word so I have to google it instead. But that’s ok. I know that the bookmarks aren’t hugely useful, but at least they helped me stop hoarding tabs :)
Consider a phishing site which opens up in a new tab, tricking the browser into color-coding and sliding it over into the middle of the user's existing tabs for the real site: "Huh, my bank says I got logged out and need to re-enter my credentials, well, no problem, I mean this is obviously the same interface I was working with earlier, right?"
Protecting against that attack would require some deterministic security rules, such as refusing to add to any group if the domain isn't already represented there... But at that point, isn't the AI-fuzziness really only useful for deciding when not to group things by domain?
[0] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-use-ai-enhanced-tab...
iOS Safari lets you have 500 tabs max in a "tab group", including the default tab group which is the one that shows "N Tabs" when you open the browser.
I tend to hit this limit every few months and end up saving everything that's currently open into a new tab group with a name like "Old Tabs January 2026".
"Firefox power user kept 7,500 tabs open for two years" (04.08.2024)
I used to sweep them more regularly, but Firefox + Sidebery don't even break a sweat with 20K tabs, apparently, so why bother?
The only downside is that it takes about 15 seconds for the browser to launch. I restart the browser whenever Firefox or macOS is updated, so every week or two.
I also have many tabs (that's why I could quickly recall and find the post). Restoring session takes a while (much more than 15 seconds). I measure this time by looking on the CPU consumption. Only once it drops to near zero I consider session completely restored.
Usually, when I launch this 20+Kt profile, I also launch 2-3 other profiles simultaneously (work 2Kt, personal/misc 3Kt, sometimes commerce 400t). I've noticed that they each peg a core while launching, but this is the only one that isn't ready quickly.
I don't open heavy websites in FF, though. For youtube links, I always use Brave.
Still, it always baffles me how poorly browsers handle high tab counts. Browser tabs should be able to proliferate as freely as spreadsheet rows. There's no reason you shouldn't be able to have 100,000 tabs open, or even a million, and switch between them smoothly. Only the tabs that are active should impose a meaningful performance cost. The tab itself is just a tiny UI element with some text and an icon.
The beauty here is that if you are at risk of losing anything, in a form that is not yet submitted, then the browser will pop up a prompt saying are you sure you want to close, you will lose data. So there is no risk of losing something you can't get back.
Then, after they are all closed, as needed, I just type in the browser bar the names of the tabs and it searches history and suggests previously closed tabs, then up/down arrow, then enter.
I do this frequently and it really helps my brain.
I have been using tree style tabs on Firefox for so long, I can't function without it. I can nest tabs together and collapse them, but most importantly, I can read all the tab titles due to the vertical layout.
"% string" in the awesome bar completes against tabs only. Helps a ton, along with some about:config settings that open new tabs from pinned tabs at the right (end) of the tab list. Also windows for separate contexts (though tab groups may also work here now, and avoid the overhead of opening a window/loading a tab at startup).
And "About Tabs" extension from glandium (who works for mozilla)
I also noticed there is a new split feature now in Chrome, more stuff to hide in tabs hehe
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/tabsio/kfgpkekbcoae... (I have done zero marketing on this hence why basically no users)
For example, my HN-dedicated firefox window has ~900 tabs right now, from June. All save the recent 5 are unloaded. I probably won't look at them again but just going through the list is a chronological reminder of what I was doing. Honestly, I could close them all but there's a "what if I need that sub-list of tabs dedicated to XYZ again?" in my head that wins out.
I have a separate note/data management system so this is mostly just... something.
Bookmark titles are editable. If you create a bookmark and the title doesn't mean anything, change it.
I often put bookmarks on the toolbar, so I shorten them to one character, or empty string (if the icon is clear) to have space for as many as possible.
> I don't like the browser bookmarking system because it's too hard to organize the folders and it's not visual
But then goes on to write a whole section of the article "Here's a few interesting links I discovered buried in those 664 tabs" which gives nothing but topic headings, under which are lists of raw links with no description.
:)
The real unlocks were:
- using the bookmarklet that pops open a small browser window with the page title, suggested tags
- doing the same on my iphone
- have a couple in browser bookmarks that point to the tags for important things
It's so good I even used it to track all of my LinkedIn connections tagged by location, job function etc (inspired by Derek Sivers post on having a database [1])
I can fully understand “hoarding” for people who don’t understand how tabs work, or that they can slow things down/get in the way, so don’t realise (on iOS Safari for instance), they have dozens of old tabs in the background.
What I don’t understand is:
(a) as I see it, surely the default behaviour is… you’re working on some project or other, gradually accumulating more and more tabs, the space for each starts to get a bit small, you can’t tell what they are, you know you don’t need most of them, your computer starts to feel a bit sluggish (and frankly something will be hogging memory, I can’t imagine how bad it would get with hundreds of them, never mind figures like 7,800 in the comments) so… therefore “oh I have too many tabs open, let’s close a few / them all”
(b) why don’t more people make use of History? That’s got me out of a hole many times, especially as I can often remember roughly when looked at something and Firefox offers a filtered search by page title.
c) Tab Groups make my head hurt every time I’ve tried to use them, it feels like more effort organising the groups, and knowing that sooner or later i will place a tab in The Wrong Group, and then I have to move it to the correct one, and mentally debate if I should even still have that group at all, get distracted by the stuff in those tabs instead of what I should be working on etc.
On top of that, what was their solution when it became apparent it was slowly killing your SSD by blowing up write amplification through the roof [1]? Zipping the JSON. Yeah. Seriously.
I mean sure, this storage format might've been a nice first implementation as a PoC, but you'd think they'd redo this at some point and store the session in an Sqlite DB file or something, I mean it's not like they haven't been using it already for history and bookmarks.
1. https://www.servethehome.com/firefox-is-eating-your-ssd-here...
If its important, I just remember it.
The article does actually explicitly address this as well.
>I do this because I have ADHD and I'm a visual thinker. if I don't see something, I forget it exists. So I keep tabs open, group them by project, save things to read later. Before I know it, I have another browser window with multiple tabs sprawling across my screen.
Which mirrors my experience. My brain can obsess over things all it wants but if I don't see that set of tabs open roughly in the same order as I had them then I am promptly forgetting about that. I've gone through setting things up before only to realize a week before I had done the same thing in a different spot that I didn't name very well.
This approach has never once caused me any issues...and it sure feels good.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabwrangler/
The basic idea: It closes any tab that has not been visited in the last N hours.
You can lock tabs to prevent them from closing (you can match on domain names, etc).
You can also see the last so many tabs it closed (1000? I forgot if this is configurable).
It's been fantastic. I don't need to manually manage tabs any more. I happily keep opening new tabs, knowing full well it will clean up after me.
I never close tabs or re-use old open tabs on mobile, since the UI just buries them and I just open a new tab if i want to check something, so I will just accumulate useless tabs.
On my Laptop i try to only hoard a handful of tabs. I just noticed I have some open since months, but never gotten to reading them.
The thing is i want to read the content, but never find time, so they just stay there.
smells like ADHD
"I do this because I have ADHD and I'm a visual thinker. if I don't see something, I forget it exists."
yup
To some extent this seems like a feature, not a bug. I have many tabs open that I find myself resistant to closing but I'm pretty sure if they just got closed and I forgot they existed my life would be no worse.
I consider tabs to be inherently volatile and disposable. I rarely have more than 10 open at once. There is no hope of finding anything with more than that many. If you need to save something, doesn't it make more sense to actually save it?
Apart from that, I usually have the browser history open.
and then there's sometimes a graveyard of them but I tend to keep them "just in case" even though I may not ever need those tabs, but I don't remember so I tend to play it safe
I don't use the browser history much, maybe that's your equivalent?
Why do I do it? To see all my tabs visually and quickly go back to a particular page. And also as a hard limit to start cleaning up tabs.
"Tab hoarding" has been dead and buried for years. It's just "using tabs" now. Many people realized that what they used bookmarks for could be done with the same semantics using only tabs, and they started doing that to reduce the number of browser systems they needed to keep in their head. There was a brief gap between that, and browser vendors optimizing their tab systems to efficiently support those use cases. The tab hoarding dilemma arose during this period, and should have died with it. I currently have more tabs open than the author did, on a 15 year old laptop running an out-of-date version of Chromium, and it's using less than a gig of ram. >99% of the tabs are evicted, which is done automatically by the browser based on the presence of ephemeral data in the tab (partially filled out forms) and my typical frequency of accessing that tab. It works great. Every major browser has some form of this, as well as tab searching and tab grouping. If you want to use tabs as if they're bookmarks, like I do, you've been able to do so without problems for many years. It's time to retire the rhetoric of the scandalous tab hoarder.
Did we read the same article? It's a very obvious complaint from the author. It's not actually a problem anymore, but that's entirely my point.
> you can’t see/scroll/wrangle 2000 tabs with the current tab display UI paradigm— you can’t even see their titles
Pretty much all Chromium-based browsers have a button to display a vertical scrollable list of all open tabs (with their favicon, title, domain, and time since last access) with a filter/search bar. Firefox has a slightly less detailed version (but the same general UI pattern) of the same thing, and can be augmented with more functionality through extensions if the user desires. I swear everyone complaining about this stuff hasn't looked at a browser in years.
> Chrome state management is crap and you’ll end up losing them
I've been using and restoring the exact same session for years with no issues. If I close the browser and re-open it normally, my tabs remain. If the browser crashes and restarts, I click the button that says "restore" and it all immediately comes back just fine. Again, the problem you're describing hasn't actually been a problem in many years.