HN Explorer

Ask HN: What do you do about too many open browser tabs?

15 points by linsomniac ↗ HN
I have an illness... I come across interesting things and open them in a new tab, and about half of them (maybe 2/3) I read and close. The remainder I leave open to revisit (either to read later or to do something more with them). I seem to have around 30 tabs open on my chromebook right now, and my work computer probably has north of 100. I've used OneTab, where I can park open tabs, but I've found that I almost never go back and do anything with them. While it's effectively closing the tab, it is somewhat easier, emotionally than just closing it, so I guess that's a win. But honestly I might as well just close them. Any silver bullets for this situation?

29 comments

[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 63.5 ms ] thread
vxxzy
I end up in your situation often, 100s of tabs, 10s of windows. I do feel that "pull" to not close them, for fear of lost information, but, I quickly realize that I have browser history. If ever I really needed to go back, I can always search there. Once I reach that realization, I close them all out and start over!
iagovar
Just close them. I feel the pain, but you have to, it's like drug.
gjvc
Reboot occasionally. Clear the decks. What is there to make a fuss about?
linsomniac
Thing is... The browsers will restart, opening the same tabs. ;-/
iron0012
I am the same as you. Way worse, actually. When things get really bad (e.g. 500+ open tabs in Firefox), I spend ~20 minutes closing as many obviously "left-over" and otherwise uninteresting tabs, and then I save all of the remaining tabs to a new folder of bookmarks, then close the window. It's not ideal, but it does make sure that "potentially interesting" things I've seen don't get lost forever in the internet ether.
miklose
Check out Toby, it works for me :) You can use it to organize your tabs into different buckets: https://www.gettoby.com/
linsomniac
Thanks for the pointer. It seems oriented towards a team or company, but I think it could easily serve as a "better OneTab". And at that, it's better at pretty much everything except that you have to sign up for it as a service rather than storing it locally.
is_true
Use the bookmark function. And for performance reasons you have plugins like tab suspender.
linsomniac
I wasn't familiar with Tab Suspender. I ended up installing The Great Suspender to see if that will help with some of the performance problems I was having when I had a lot of tabs open. That's part of the pain is having all those tabs open can lead to my browser crawling sometimes, particularly when this particularly heavyweight backup job runs (restic).
erric
Slightly off the main topic, however I’ve been super happy with Restic!
linsomniac
I wanted to use it to back up 100 servers to a single, deduplicated repository. That didn't work, once I got a couple backups done, the amount of CPU and memory restic consumed was shocking. I still run it on my desktop, and for around an hour it brings it to it's knees. I prefer borg, except for never being able to figure out how to get past that Unicode filename that I couldn't get it to recover. :-( But no deduplication across backups. So my main backups are still in rsync/zfs.
eip
Get a better computer. Why limit yourself?

> I seem to have around 30 tabs open on my chromebook

Those are rookie numbers.

linsomniac
What do you suggest? I have a i7-7700 with 64GB RAM and a Samsung 860-PRO SSD. Is there any suggestion that doesn't involve a couple grand investment? :-)
eip
That should be sufficient for hundreds if not thousands of tabs. Maybe get a better OS.
cimmanom
If performance is a problem, maybe switch to Firefox. They've done some work that's been demonstrated to specifically to handle the hundreds of tabs edge case smoothly.

https://metafluff.com/2017/07/21/i-am-a-tab-hoarder/

linsomniac
I've been tempted to go back to Firefox, but it's kind of hard. I put up with Firefox for a very long time before moving to Chrome, and it's hard for me to go back. Part of it is that I suffered with really pretty crappy performance for so long, that when I changed, Chrome was so clearly better that I felt like my trust in Firefox had been broken. Part of it is that I feel like I have a lot of things in Chrome (saved passwords, extensions, configurations). I've been running one Firefox browser for running another session, just to get back to getting familiar with it and see how it does.

Firefox performance does seem dramatically better in the last year since I tried it seriously. Maybe 18 months. I think the multiple processes rollout really helped.

So, it's an option in my pocket. But I'm hoping to find a workflow that changes my habits, rather than just enabling my old ones. :-)

drstewart
I can't empathize with anyone in this thread. When I get to about 8-10 tabs, I start feeling antsy and start closing them down.
louiswilbrink
Same. Especially when coding, it’s one tab only and my focus is through the roof.
seanwilson
Same. Once I have too many I drag a couple of them to the left, then do a right-click followed by "close all tabs to the right". I'm not saying I'm doing things the best way but I don't understand how having 100s of tabs open is productive. Seems like an indication you're trying to do too much at the same time to me.
rahimnathwani
When you feel like you need to eat a muffin, instead hold ctrl and press w a bunch of times.

Two birds with one stone.

erric
I’m on a Mac. I have tried this but nothing happens, and I still want a moofin
oceanghost
On firefox-- I use the tab suspension plugin. After 15 mins it unloads the tab.

I read anything that catches my eye immediately.

I "pocket" articles which are things I might want to have access to later but am not interested in now.

I add the things I should read but maybe don't want to now-- to a reading list plugin.

Anything I can't make a decision about-- I wait a day and 90% of the time I lose interest in it.

akulbe
OneTab extension is your friend. :)
MilnerRoute
Here's an idea. All the tabs you've opened are in your browser history.

So in theory you could go back and re-read all those tabs later just by accessing them there....

pasbesoin
I used to use the Firefox extension Scrapbook. Damned shame that the switch to web extensions broke it.

I also think -- and have observed -- that continuing access is only ensured when you have a local copy. Scrapbook was very useful for this.

Just the other day, I wanted to refer someone to a very pertinent resource. To find that that page is gone. In this case, I was able to cite an archive.org link. However, those are currently susceptible to robots.txt retroactive removal.

grizzles
Same problem. I had a chrome extension that was supposed to close inactive tabs after n mins but it doesn't seem to work right. I periodically go on cleaning runs but it doesn't help much.

Even though I use them extensively, I'm very suspicious that Chrome somehow loses my bookmarks. I'm often in the situation where I want to find something I am 100% sure I read+bookmarked recently and can't find the article on my laptop or my desktop.

So I don't know what the answer is but one possible route would be a better bookmark+sync system, fully under my control that stores DOM snapshots too for full text search.

jxub
Firefox. So much better than Chrome at keeping many tabs open at once.
guilhas
For me the correct is do not "remember tabs from last time", and bookmak all before closing browser. Folder like "home20180626".

If I need them they are there, and they don't cause me anxiety, spend ram, or cause visual overhead.