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Comment by Morphling | Hacker News Reader

I hear quite a few people talking how they have 30-50 tabs open, how do people manage something like that? And why would anyone need so many simultaneous tabs open?

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Agreed. Sibling comment is talking about devoting "hours" to closing tabs, I'm not even sure if it's a joke.

I've presently got 2 tabs open: HN and this comment form.

Even when neck deep into documentation or github issues I don't think I've ever gone above 20 tabs, it definitely doesn't seem like it could be productive.

I have 5-6 windows open, each with 5-20 tabs. Often it's worse.

Things like: Gmail, calendar, Xero, time tracker, things I've been meaning to read but haven't yet put in a TO READ folder (sometimes hits 30+ tabs), Trello, business plan lists, BitBucket for an iOS project, Shopify partner admin, Font Awesome cheatsheet, 15-20 client projects I might work on in any given week including their admin backends, App Annie, Analytics, trip research (20-40 tabs easily on maps, spreadsheets, itinerary suggestions, Airbnb, Booking.com, hotels, national park sites), 5 tabs currently devoted to trying to work out how to get a National Geographic subscription to work on device and web, and so it goes on.

The problem is that you're doing something that uses lots of tabs, and with luck you remember to close them down. Still, at the end of the day, you may have an extra five tabs open, and that's 100 a month. After a few months you have 500 tabs.

So then you devote a couple of hours to going through and closing tabs, and find you still have 300...

The solution, if anyone ever gets this far down the page, is to use Session Manager to save the tabs, close Firefox, and then just uncheck the boxes for the tabs you don't ever want to reload.

See that "you don't remember to close them down" part gets me, or rather doesn't. I mean I have a lot of tabs open when I'm working, but at the end of the day I close my browser and I don't have any fixed set of pages that it opens or last session, it just opens on the new tab page and asks for commands.

I just can't stand if my browser has so many tabs open I can't read the what the hell it is from the header and since I always use browser only on half of my screen with editor on the other side (actually since I have 21:9 screen I've split it in 3 so I can have project | editor | docs) that gives me at most like 15+-5 tabs to work with.

But maybe I'm just the weirdo out of everyone.

If your work involves living in web apps (github, trello, gDocs, etc) he tabs pile up quickly. If you live in Photoshop or MS suite, not so much.

I do work with web projects, but I hardly live in github, sure it's an important tool and I tend to visit the site quite often especially if I'm working, but I see no need to keep it open all the time, but maybe I'm not solving hard enough problems for that to matter.

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