Ask HN: How do you manage too many open tabs?

I think everyone is different, but for me bookmarks don't work (I just don't do it) and history rarely works (too much noise there).

Really, most of the time I can just close the tabs, and I will "re-discover" them when needed. But I don't do that: there is a fair amount of tabs that I don't dare closing because I feel like they contain something useful or I may need them.

I found an extension that I use as a "tab cemetery": a place where I can just store all the open tabs once in a while and start from fresh. And the two times a year I actually need to find one of them, I can open the cemetery and search there (it's organised by "dump date").

This extension is called "OneTab" (I have no interest in promoting it, that's just what I use). Works well for me.

I close my browsers with prejudice. If it mattered I would have put it into an issue or committed it to SCM before I wandered away from the tab. Also, history exists. If the reason we are keeping our tabs open is because we've disabled browsing history, then I have a simple suggestion to make.

Walking up to my workstation in the morning and seeing all the trash from yesterday's efforts causes me meaningful loss in motivation. I get down to a blank desktop at the end of each day now.

Most of the tools mentioned so far in this thread (OneTab, Tab Wrangler, tree-style) either flatten your live-tabs-only into a list or auto-close them, and the common gap is that a tab you're keeping "for later" stops being visible the moment it's saved, so you never actually go back to it. What's worked better for me is a persistent tree where you can keep selected closed tabs in their original place: it leaves the strip to free RAM and space but stays visible in the same spot in your tree, nested or rearranged however you prefer. I build one called Pinako (so, biased), a tab manager that holds tabs and windows in an extremely flexible nested tree with everything saved independently of the browser session so a crash can't wipe it. Also has shareable archive-trees with rich-text, browser bookmarks in tree-form you can edit, nest or annotate, and trees for synced browsers and mobile devices so you can drag and drop links between them all.

For the HN crowd specifically: it's the only tab manager (to my knowledge) that fully speaks read/write MCP, so you can point Claude/Codex/Cursor etc. at your live tree and archives and have it reorganize, edit, or port all your data (research, notes, etc.) to other connected tools, instead of just answering questions about it. Runs on any Chromium browser.

Visual demo video can be seen here: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/pinako-ai-tab-sessi...

3 monitors: 2K laptop on a stand, 4K rotated, 2K rotated & sometimes scaled to 4K. Lots of screen space.

Windows in strategic positions, sized small to fit the content. I removed maximize. I never maximize. I full screen a single game or video to one of the monitors when desirable. I rarely minimize. A dock on the bottom of the laptop with windows grouped by program -- very manageable. Placement and size of windows. Being able to see everything at a glance. I wish XFCE could save window positions and sizes.

No tabs. My default is new window. When desirable, I only create new tabs in a web browser window. Programs get separate windows, no tabs. I have custom CSS to hide the tab bar when there is only one tab. No tab bar is my default. I manually save URLs if important and close web browser tabs if I've gone down a rabbit hole. Destroy all tabs. My browser clears all history. Starting the browser opens a single custom web page window, no tabs, with recent URLs that I saved.

No tabs.

In my web browser I have an extension that close them: https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/dustman/

My IDE, previously VsCode and now Zen, has a max tabs option to close the oldest ones too.

Pruning. When I feel that I have too many, I go through them (or maybe just a subgroup of them) and close the ones that no longer are relevant or interesting.

This requires a threshold of feeling that they're "too many" while they're still a manageable number...

RAM/OOM does this for me very effectively. For example, I have opened several dozens of books right now, because when it happens to be a reading time I hate to look for any books in Downloads I am interested to read. I feel better to have opened all the books I am interested in right now. Maybe my reading session will be 5 minutes only, or maybe I want to see what I have read before leaving the reading with as little of digging in interfaces as possible.

I remember the times when 3GB computer could have 300 tabs hanging per months of everyday heavy using of the machine, but now a regular 1000$ computer can not open 300 tabs of modern webpages, so there is none of that problem any more.

My usual response once I'm doing looking things up to write/build something, and look up to see more than 5 tabs, is to go "ARRRGGGHHHH" and declare tab bankruptcy, just closing the browser completely.

There's always history, and bookmarks if you need to really keep something.

Currently I have 3 tabs open, Braid Solitare, HN Active threads, this edit window. I'll probably put on an HFY story from youtube for background noise in a minute, after I post this edit.

3 is a good number of tabs. Sproutlet, the kid, usually has many dozens, and if there's going to likely be a power interruption, I warn them to save their work, just in case.

I don't. Never understood how people need more than 10. Usually you have a few websites always open like gmail etc. and whatever stack of 1-6 tabs for whatever you're doing or researching right now.

If you're holding tabs more than a few hours those should be bookmarks (I don't use those either, I just send myself links via Telegram or keep in notes app).

I use the Tab Wrangler extension and have it nuke everything after like 8 hours or so. If I need it again, I can search for it in that extension. I've probably gone back to search for a tab two or three times in the last five years. That 8 hour window is almost always plenty for anything I actually care about.

I save them to https://histre.com/ [1] using the browser extension. This can save all tabs in a browser window into a collection, or even multiple windows each into their own collection. This also makes everything searchable.

[1] I created it fwiw

Tree Style Tab https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

I don't have more than 15 at once. Only when selecting hn posts to read at once. If they linger much (or anything at all) I will put the "important" ones at my raindrop with the false intent to read some day

I usually make tab groups to sort the frequently visited tabs properly but still most of the times, I am opening a lot of tabs outside the groups then I keep closing all the tabs outside the groups.

When my tabs get out of control, I keep only the ones I can still remember why I opened. The rest is just noise at that point.

I'm using Notion Web Clipper (as a replacement for Evernote Web Clipper) to save promising links for future reference. Then I close these tabs.

I treat tabs as temporary, not storage: if I won’t use one within the next hour, it gets bookmarked, turned into a task, or closed.

If I start to feel it’s too much, I take some time to go through it all and reset back to just what I’m actively looking to working on.

I don't really control them, it just when I feel the system response becomes slow, I close every tab I don't need anymore.

I use the Arc browser -- it has a different way of organizing tabs into spaces in a quite intuitive and easy way.

I try to keep my tab count to a reasonable number, and close tabs I'm not using on a regular basis.

Limit the number of tabs to 10. Or if you want to ignore it completely add more ram and memory.

once a month sort them into groups and then journal about them is how I do it. for instance if I have 5 tabs on braid groups or learning chaldean for my wife mary then it goes into my journal where I paste the 5 links together and share what I learned.

Tab stacks to keep them in collapsible groups, and closing the tabs I'm not using anymore

I close them when they get to be too many, like 15 or so

21k from around one year

I use the extension 'Tree Style Tab', with some settings changed, and 'Auto Tab Reaper' to unload old tabs. Or Sidebery

Eventually I will probably just bookmark them Ctrl-Shift-D, which was what I was doing before, at the end of the day for all tabs open

So later I can tell the llm to go mine something forgotten

You close them.

By closing them.

I just wait till I feel I have too many and just nuke them all at one lol.