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Comment by mingus88 | Hacker News Reader

I don’t know you, but most people I work with for some reason keep so many tabs open, the tab bar is squeezed so you can barely see a favicon

Probably due to my age, I religiously close every tab after I read it. If that gets more than a dozen, I literally quit the browser and declare bankruptcy because it’s not worth it to sort through the mess of tabs I clearly am not using.

Firefox is old too. I’m sure it could manage memory better, but couldn’t we all? If you have tabs in GC and using CPU when you aren’t using them, kill them maybe? What else is that tab doing all day when you aren’t looking?

I’ve never understood why people keep so many tabs open and why they’ll literally switch to an entirely different browser platform rather than change a bad habit

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I'm around middle age and keep tons of tabs open simply because I have a number of projects/tasks or soon-to-be projects/tasks going at any given point and managing associated websites is easier with tabs than it is with bookmarks. In other words, bookmark management UI/UX is inadequate and tab hoarding is the band-aid.

There's also a higher chance that things will slip through the cracks and be forgotten if I bookmark them, whereas with tabs they're staring me in the face any time I'm using my computer.

tab groups, a very recent feature, help a lot at keeping tabs organized. you can even archive whole groups if you no longer need them but don't want to throw them away

Exactly this. I used to be a tab minimalist, but vertical tabs + tab groups made having lots of tabs open viable for me.

My hot take: there are two kinds of bookmarks. 1. shortcuts to get to common sites and 2. stuff i need to get back to. And it's a UX mistake to keep #2 separate from open tabs; they are the same thing.

Broadly I agree. Unfortunately the major browser devs haven't moved bookmark UX forward since the late 90s.

I wish I had that level of executive functioning. I open tabs at a high branching rate, and faster than I have the impulse control to (for lack of a better word) run a garbage-collection pass over what I'd just done.

When it balloons into the low thousands and starts hurting performance, I dump Firefox's open-tabs store (file called recovery.jsonlz4) into a different file and start over. At some point I'll point an LLM at that junk pile and see if I missed anything important. (Probably not).

You could probably just use an extension that unloads inactive tabs from RAM, and maybe another that closes tabs that haven't been touched in over a week. Between those and an extension that closes duplicate tabs, it's pretty easy to get down to a sane number, no LLM required.

If a tab is important, you'll be using it more often than once a week. I have a similar rule with impulse purchases: anything I want needs to sit in the cart for 24-48 hours before purchasing. If I still need it, I buy it. Probably cut the crap I buy down by 75%. Steam? It goes on the wishlist (personally capped at ~50) until I can commit to playing and finishing it right then and there.

>You could probably just use an extension that unloads inactive tabs from RAM

Doesn't Firefox already do this? (Or at least have an option for it?)

Some of it, yes, but you get finer control with extensions.

I have maintained Tab Wrangler for both Chrome and for Firefox for years: it auto-closes tabs based on a configurable timeout and when they were last active. I'm not sure how people keep dozens or hundreds of tabs open either. It's FOSS, no ads, no tracking, no monetization:

https://github.com/tabwrangler/tabwrangler

Nothing makes me happier than holding down ^W at the end of the day.

I also discovered the joy of shift-selecting a big range of tabs and pressing ^W only once. It also feels pretty good, but in a slightly different way...

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