How many tabs do you have open?
Home is another story. I've got two instances of chrome open, split screened on my 24" monitor. I constantly bounce back and forth between the two while pages are loading or watching youtube in one while surfing in the other. I haven't seen favicons in weeks and frequently resort to Ctrl+Tab and Shift+Ctrl+Tab for navigating because the tabs are so small.
It's bad, some of them are for things I read two months ago and wanted to reference to code something but then lost interest. Can't stand to close them though cause I might just find the interest and time again and then wonder where that page was.
Bookmarks are never looked at, i have a very strong out of sight out of mind mentality.
I cry on the occasions that Chrome crashes and for whatever reasons the session can't be restored. But I purposely don't have any extension to save tabs. It's my forest fire, a destructive but necessary part of the process.
I have tabs out of 100% the same reasons as you, however I try to save my sessions with Session Buddy, but I kind of like your forest fire attitude. Sounds cleansing.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-flow/pfhnncnie...
I started using Readability to add things that I wanted to read later.
Chrome is currently using 6.3GB of RAM
EDIT: I use CMD + OPT + Left/Right Arrow to navigate through the tabs
EDIT 2: Chrome handles this. I have never been able to accomplish this in Safari and/or Firefox. Even Chrome has issues with this type of abuse.
Edit 3: Doing a quick look over misc tabs it is mostly articles I wanted to read, Cocos2d-X and other programming documentation, e-mail, calendar, Readability a few Tumblr's I follow, SO, etc.
I heard this a few times. I don't know what I'm doing "wrong" but for me FF easily handles a couple of hundred tabs, no questions asked.
Is it because I often use flashblock and mostly consume boring (work-related) pages? As far as I remember that used to be the case on Mac as well.
I even started to write a browser that puts focus on your daily patterns, frequent sites, frequent search terms, in order to somehow try and make tabs manageable and allow us to get back to the data we care about without hundreds of open tabs.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-count/cfokcacd...
In my case, 82. When the favicons start to disappear I open another window.
Since it's Friday, I'm going to try and close everything by the end of day. I'll do this by grabbing the URLs of the important things, save them to a text file and write a sentence on why I need to open that link again. For example, if I'm researching something on say, OAuth, I'll have about 15 tabs open, stuff scattered everywhere. I'll eventually close them all and have some cohesive notes on the topic that I can either act upon, or ignore. Regardless, the tabs will be closed and my mind/task freed.
Edit: in addition to my own notes, some of the tabs I'll add to a read it later service, and some I'll add to Springpad (things like libraries that I have categories for, etc.)
/1/ Tab groups -- I have a tab group for my work,
another for general comms, and yet another
which serves as a "to read" buffer.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tab-groups-organize-tabs
The default shortcut is command+shift+E
/2/ Tab unloading. Firefox is smart about unloading
from RAM tabs which have not been used recently.
Upon focusing on the tab it comes back to life
as it was before.
I still use Chrome for web dev though. The developer console, and tools are superior.
update: I HIGHLY recommend y'all try out this tab group thing. Here is a screenshot of what it looks like: http://gigaom2.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/firefox-tab-group...
The issue with tabs is that once you are past 10, you are significantly degrading the readability of your content. In order to reference 'x' material, you have to parse through all your tabs until you find the right one. This is a valuable waste of time and energy.
Over the last year I've slowly moved towards finding a solution to the tabbing dilemma, and how to actually have a huge number of different windows open, and I found it's already been solved. Workspaces.
If you've used a Macbook, you probably found out about 4 finger swiping, which switches between different 'workspaces', different, full-sized screens.
Similarly, on Linux distros, workspaces are usually enabled by default, and accessed via CTRL+ALT+ARROW_KEY.
On Windows, I found the free program Dexpot to be similarly as useful, except that the swapping is definitely not as smooth as on Linux/Mac.
The main benefit of workspaces is literally to section off your activities according to workspaces. For example, I will have a text editor open in one workspace, and a terminal open in another. I swap to one to compile, I swap to another to write.
I will then have several workspaces of pure reference material. C++ documentation, other specific documentation, random .pdf files, stackoverflow on Chrome and similar things.
And finally I'll have another workspace that's more of a play/irrelevant to activity theme. This way, tabs don't really build up (30+) unless I explicitly ignore the way my workflow is designed. This has been part of my evolution from Bookmarks to Hotkeys to now, efficient workspaces. I'm working on Macros.
However, for casual business, I'll usually have 20+ tabs open. :p
Every so often I go through the tabs and bookmark anything still relevant, not that it ever helps me find it again.
I'd find a page and click `add bookmark' and then I would go back to it later. Somehow bookmarks regressed even though they were fine as they were. If I bookmark a page now, it just goes somewhere.
If I click the `Bookmarks' menu, I don't see any bookmarks. I don't understand what happened, all I see are a bunch of folders of stuff I never added and don't care about.
Anyway, since bookmarks are worthless now, I just have like 50 tabs open at all times now. I periodically go through them and get any code snippets I want or just close them if I read what I wanted.
Nowadays I use Chrome, Firefox and Safari on two different machines, and they all have multiple open windows each with dozens of open tabs. I'm pretty good at bringing any machine to its knees.
My biggest problem was when Safari gave up and decided not to remember what was actually in those tabs. That sucked. Or at least, it felt sucky at the time. I have no idea what was in them either, so I don't really miss them. I suspect it means there's something on the Internet that I haven't read.
*edit: I also have probably close to 1000 open on Chrome on my iPhone (they're hard to go through)
I discovered that 30-50 tabs wasn't conducive to working environment.
If there can be a solution - it's this: if a tab has been open for more than say 3 hours and it's been untouched (focus has not gone to it), it needs to be closed. I currently do this manually
My wife, on the other hand, regularly consumes 2-3 gigs of memory with her Chrome usage. Sometimes, when I'm doing some heavy lifting in R, I have to log into her account and close her browser windows, just so I don't hit swap.
Pinboard extension lets me stash away sets of tabs and treetabs adds structure. Firefox lets me find back to tabs by typing in the (awesome) address bar.
Hardware ranging from 6y.o. hp laptop to 6 core desktop w/ssd.
Drives me crazy having loads open, I kind of treat them like a to-do list...