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One of my all-time favorite quotes on browsers, from http://blog.tojicode.com/2013/08/holistic-webgl.html

"Have you actually seen how people use web browsers? Honestly it's kind of horrifying. It's not unusual for people to have 100+ tabs open across several different browser windows in a session that's been running continuously since sometime in the late 90s."

I was one of those 1k+ tabs people until recently, when I just admitted I'm not going back to read any of this stuff. Considering Chrome team has finite resources I'm glad they spend it on use cases resolving around actually browsing things over just keeping them unread forever.

I've been trying to shock the monkey for 4 hours now and still haven't won the $20.

Having that many tabs open is nuts. It makes the tab bar completely unusable. However, I too suffer from the same tabophilia. So I have a couple solutions, (a) a bookmark bar folder titled "to-do" where I just save anything that I haven't even skimmed over yet but want to and (b) Pocket for when I've read/skimmed and want to store the info for later use.

With these two methods I frequently hover around ~20 tabs open and I usaully dump to either method when I cross the close-button threshold (tabophiliacs will know what I mean).

Recently I've been trying to force myself to use Firefox to use their tab groups feature and I think I really like it especially for organizing tabs needed for projects. Makes it easy to just click the tab group button and select which project I'm working on and immediately have all the tabs I need.

> Having that many tabs open is nuts

That's a completely emotional response. "It makes the tab bar completely unusable" -- maybe the problem is with the tab bar, not the user. What if browsers were designed for the lots-of-tabs use case? Perhaps if effort was put into it, we could come up with some good solutions. I would bet that there's a not-insignificant number of users who have heaps of tabs open.

Yup, widescreen monitor, I moved my tabs over to the left side on Firefox and use a tree view extension. Tabs on top is definitely not for power (tab) users.

I have the feeling this multiple-tab-thing is similar to the desktop cluttering, back in the days. Temporary downloads, you don't need for long, but somehow you delete them only if the desktop is full.

> What if browsers were designed for the lots-of-tabs use case?

My browser bookmarks just fine. Why do I need all these pages currently loaded into memory?

"problem exists between chair and keyboard"

> I should change my behavior to conform to the limitations of my software, instead of changing the software to fit my behavior.

If people want thousands of tabs then let's help them do that instead of shaming them.

If it was designed for that use case it wouldn't keep them all loaded in memory

Use Tree tab style with firefox, way better tab management.

I'm genuinely curious as to the thought process of having that many tabs open. I often feel like I'm missing something when I see people doing it. Is is the muscle memory of knowing where each tab is? If so, how does that work when you move to a device that has a different resolution?

Personally I use tabs as sort of temporary bookmarks and I don't use bookmarks at all. Right now I have 7 windows open and every one of them has tens of tabs open. Windows help me organize them by topic (e.g. I have window where I lookup stuff related to biking, another window is for learning rust, and another is work related stuff etc). I use FF with https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

Well for me i generally have about 10 tabs "pinned" that are always there, always in the same place, and always open. That is in my "general" window which i also browse reddit/hn and other sites on.

http://i.imgur.com/FBXmBqh.png

Then i have a second window which i use for work. That generally has a few work-specific tabs (work email, time tracking, trello, etc...) which are always pinned, plus a few "general work" tabs which i'm using.

Then i like to open a new window for each project i'm working on. So i've got one right now working on integrating node.js with our 80's language. That window has about 15 tabs from the node manual as well as the 80's language manual and some stuff about dlls in windows.

Then i have a window for my personal project i'm currently working on. It has the github repo, travis.ci, coveralls, and sauce-labs pinned, as well as the handful of tabs that i'm currently using in that project (research, test tabs, various other crap).

It totals to about 4 windows, and about 100-200 tabs total depending on how busy i am any given day.

I don't bookmark or close them because i don't have to, and while some of the pinned tabs are important, many of them are just where i left off and aren't really bookmark-worthy.

Having multiple tabs per window seems reasonable - I have ten open in my "work" window, and seven (three pinned) in my "personal" one - but when I see someone with a single browser with a hundred tabs open, I always wonder what their workflow and brain are like.

I think that's probably what mscrivo was curious about.

Data point:

I often end up with many (read, ~100? Varies widely.) tabs open.

I work like a priority queue. When I'm reading something, and see something interesting as a link, I open it in a new background tab and keep reading the current thing. Then go to the most interesting/relevant/time-sensitive tab I have open and read that. Repeat. ( while not que.isEmpty(): que.pushAll(que.popBest().getChildren()) ) This adds up quickly.

For example, with HN I tend to browse the entire front pages (active / standard) / my user threads before I actually start reading links / comment pages. And when I'm reading a comment page I tend to open comments to reply to in a new tab to get back to them later.

Ditto, if I'm coding something unfamiliar I often find myself looking up things recursively. Oh, here's two options to do thing A I need to do. Oh look, option A requires things B and C. Oh look, B requires D. This is sounding too complex, close tabs for things A/B/C and try option 2 instead. Etc.

Realistically, I only need at max two or three tabs actually loaded at once most of the time - but at the same time I want things to be loaded before I get to them, and I do not want to lose data from unloading pages. Lazarus helps, but there are pages that still lose data on reloads.

I am a data point. I frequently have up to 100 tabs open, which are often interesting articles, music or gadgets i stumbled across and want to keep for reference. I use a tiling WM so i only ever have 1 browser window. But with the extremely efficient Pentadactyl buffer (== tab) search i could type something like "hack chrome" and this comment thread would be one RET, or a TAB (== next completion) RET away.

Part of the problem is that once you reach a certain level (20-25 tabs) mental state breaks down with flat horizontal tabs. The management's so bad you end up with a mess and can't spare the cycles to clean it up.

With tree-style tabs (Fireox), it's possible to see the relationships between tabs, with parents and stuff, so you can close an entire subtree trivially. For Chrome, that's not possible.

Even with Tab Outliner (which I've got), the disconnect between the T.O. window and the current window is utterly lost.

Also, for memory management, I cannot simply "unload" the current tab from within Chrome (though apparently with extensions that's possible). I do browse with the Task Manager open and routinely kill off windows to free memory. But that's also less than optimal.

Lots of make-work for shit my computer should be able to keep track of and handle for me.

I've had projects get so "packed" with tabs that i have about 50 in there, but it's generally just used as a stack at that point.

Every "tangent" i need to explore, or every other level i need to dive into opens another tab, and by hitting CTRL+W i can pop them off when i'm done and go back to where i split.

So i have had times where there are 50+ tabs in a window, but generally that's the exception not the rule for me, but i can easily understand how people get there normally.

One of my friends uses "google searches" as a form of note taking. It's "backed up" to his history, 90% of them end up as a search at one point anyway, and it's easy to open one and type it in without any extra steps or much thought at all.

My browser (Firefox + Pentadactyl) allows me to press b (for buffers) and then a snippet of the tab title or URI, then RET, which will take me there. It's actually quite efficient, even if you're not 100% sure what you're looking for.

Chrome + cVim -- B (b is used for bookmarks).

State management.

There's a huge gaping hole between tabs and bookmarks which needs filling. Essentially a "stuff to be read" queue, though with relations back to the parent document / page.

That backlink is where tree-style tab managers win. Firefox also delays page load to when you actually navigate to the fucking page, which Chrome utterly fucks up.

Tabaholics should really take a look at the onetab chrome extension to temporarily bookmark/store pages.

The cynical interpretation is that discouraging people from opening many tabs means having less tabs open which means the browser performs better. This is particularly true in Chrome, which tries to use a process-per-tab, something you can't really do with 200 tabs.

The conclusion they've drawn is rather naive because this is definitely a chicken-egg problem.

They've completely disregarded the possibility that the lack of effective tab management is limiting most users to use only a tiny number of tabs.

Tree Style Tabs for Firefox has been an integral part of my browsing experience ever since I discovered it: http://i.imgur.com/PnpZwos.png

I just wish some browser vendor would release an official vertical tabs solution that had a more seamless implementation of autohide/autoexpand (for non-maximized windows where horizontal space is at a premium).

Opera 12.16 (the last Opera version) had both native support for vertical tab bar and toolbars (it already had it a decade ago) and a kind-of-okay "tab group" feature (groups of tabs could be collapsed so that they wouldn't take much space visually).

Unfortunately, they started from stratch with Chromium-Opera, and even after more than 10 versions it still lacks most of the great features of Opera.

Day to day, I use both Firefox with Tree Style Tab, and Chromium with Tabs Outliner. This isn't perfect: Firefox still takes a minute to load the session with 700+ tabs, and Tabs Outliner feels kind of a hack and isn't really integrated.

I wish I knew of another way to enable this - but if you use the FireGestures addon there is a special menu for tab switching you can access no matter where in the window your mouse is.

Hold right click and scroll your mouse wheel down (you have to tweak a setting to have scrolling up also bring up the menu). Your tabs will appear where your cursor is as a drop down list, sort of like a context menu.

Combined with tab groups (ctrl+shift+e, or make another mouse gesture) and I can sort my tabs into categories and quickly switch between my tabs by either switching tab groups or using my mouse wheel, no matter where my cursor is.

So much time saved from not having to go to the top/side of my browser to switch tabs. :)

E:

The setting is under "Advanced" -> "Wheel Gestures" and the action is "[Popup] List all tabs"

I'm replying to your comment because it is on the top... But there is almost a majority of users in this thread using their browsers similarly - maybe we should get together and solve this. Maybe it will be a redesign of the difference between bookmarks and tabs as sort of "temporary bookmarks." I could see unused tabs getting popped off the stack into a bookmarks category which should automatically be selected by use of some simple search-engine based heuristic. One should be able to run their bookmarks through this categorizer to build consistent and limited categories.

I for one don't use a huge number of tabs because of the poor browser support for it...

I suspect a lot more users would use a lot more tabs if it were actually convenient to do so.