I routinely have several thousands of tabs opened on my devices, and I never considered myself a hoarder.
At some point you adopt a workflow where every browser activity starts with opening a new tab. Plus, so many websites have broken browser history management that it’s easier to open all links in new tabs, too.
I do close tabs on occasion, usually when I see that the device starts to struggle. Closing all tabs helps make things fast again.
Browsers tend to take open tabs into account when I search for stuff, and it’s nice to be able to enter a few keywords and get redirected to an existing tab. Saves me time for page reloads.
Sometimes entering the same keywords into a search engine does not land you on that article, though, so closing tabs as rarely as possible pays out for me a few times a year. But it’s ultimately not that important and I don’t keep tabs around for the sake of it.
> I routinely have several thousands of tabs opened on my devices, and I never considered myself a hoarder.
You seem serious, but it sounds a bit funny!
I also often open links in new tabs. It's also a bit faster than e.g. going back in history. But I do close tabs after I'm done browsing that site or otherwise don't need it. I'd start to feel lost with a lot of tabs open (say, hundreds), not knowing what is actually relevant, what kind of research is "in progress", how to keep track of them well etc.. I do use multiple browser windows and vertical tabs in Firefox.
> Browsers tend to take open tabs into account when I search for stuff, and it’s nice to be able to enter a few keywords and get redirected to an existing tab.
Similarly, I mostly receive suggestions from my browsing history and use that a lot. I've disabled any suggestions from search engines, since they are usually useless.
Aligning with the linked post, I've found that tab hoarding is directly connected to exceedingly poor bookmark UX/UI in browsers. Despite being a core browser feature, it's barely improved in decades, with the most radical change having been Arc's decision to cut out bookmarks altogether (which I don't think is right either). Bookmark management sucks and is too high friction for my brain to willingly engage in it.
Third party managers don't hit the spot either. They all spread out over too large of a surface area, trying to do read it later or moodboards or canvases and whatever else, without offering much in the way of material improvements over built in bookmarks (aside from being cross-browser).
I've been happy with Pinboard for many years now, which does just the bare essentials. There are integrations for most browsers, though I prefer using it externally via a small CLI client. This allows me to keep a local backup of my bookmarks in JSON, to filter them with fzf/rofi, and to use it with any browser. After all, I just need to quickly find a URL, and copy/paste it in the browser.
The service has had some issues over the years, leading to growing concerns over its stability and longevity. It hasn't affected me much personally, but I've wanted to replace it with a fully self-hosted solution for a long time now. With projects like ArchiveBox, linkding, etc., this is quite feasible, though I've been lazy with making the jump. My Pinboard renewal is coming up, and I think it might be time.
Absolutely don't agree. I'm a tab hoarder (currently have 2084 tabs). I don't use builtin browser facilities, but instead use sideberry. I've tried a lot of other tab mgmt approaches too. Some were excellent, some were far from it.
The one thing they all have in common: they cannot stop me from being tab hoarder. That behavior (in my case, and I suspect I am not alone) is not impacted by tab/bookmark mgmt approaches, at least not by anything I've seen.
Self hosted karakeep has been the only thing that got me out of tab hoarding.
Bookmarks, locally archives the page, OCRs text off images, auto tags using and summarizes it using whatever AI model I want, in my case one off a local ollama instance. ios? just a share away to have any link processed.
Now I just stash and move on, when I need to find things again it's never been easier.
I wouldn't say directly, but it is certainly part of it.
The problem is context. I think Tab Groups partly helped. But the implementation of tab group is still not good enough as it is. A lot of tabs aren't bookmark but unfinished work or research. I currently have Groups for Housing Market because of Rent increase, Jobs Search, Product Research, Marketing Courses, Surgery Research for Lasik, Youtube and a few others personal stuff. I wouldn't be surprised if it add up to 500 tabs.
Again, I will take this opportunity to say again, Multi / Lots of Tabs on Safari sucks.
Some content just can't be bookmarked. The only way to keep the state is to keep the tab open and the browser running. If you reload the same URL, you get something else.
So the web is too broken for bookmarks to replace all uses of tabs.
> ...tab hoarding is directly connected to exceedingly poor bookmark UX/UI in browsers. Despite being a core browser feature, it's barely improved in decades...
I'm often a visual person, similar to what the twitter longpost also describes---I miss Apple's spatial file manager and made heavy use of the drag-and-drop grid on the Windows 10 Start menu to pin apps in logical groups---but I don't really have any problems with bookmarks as they exist now in Firefox. I have as many bookmarks as some tab hoarders have tabs (last count around 2,000), and I drag them into a well-ordered hierarchy with the Firefox Bookmarks Sidebar (Ctrl+B to toggle show/hide).
A hierarchy in a vertical sidebar has always seemed... Plenty visual, I guess? Do folks who have hundreds or thousands of tabs open also have as many files in their Desktop and Download folders and just search there too? What upgrades to bookmarks would make them significantly better than they are now?
Hierarchy-as-directory is a good conceptual abstraction, and it has useful, well-established visual representations. I get ornery when software tries to conceal a useful hierarchy from the end-user (most often... the file system itself, as in the iPhone).
I'll note that Firefox's "keyword" option for bookmarks is a killer feature for me: assign a keyword to a bookmark (e.g. "hn" for news.ycombinator.com or "yt" for www.youtube.com) and you can type those letters into the URL bar and instantly load the bookmark. It's kept me on Firefox for years, even though I'd prefer some of the security features and better process isolation of Chromium/Blink. I have a row common bookmarks in the Bookmarks Toolbar with favicons and names matched to their keywords and I've never needed or wanted a landing page with favorite sites.
Bookmarks do seem worse to me in other browsers without keywords. Oddly, if I import my Firefox bookmarks into other browsers the keywords I made in Firefox still work, but I can't edit them or add new keywords in those other browsers. Maddening.
Part of the reason why I kept tabs open in the tens of thousands (mainly images that were sourced from single tabs) was because bookmarks absolutely suck at actually organizing based on priority of access. In Firefox for example there's no way to create new bookmark containers, there's just folders and then there's the "Other Bookmarks" container. Since Other Bookmarks has a different structure than a folder, you're likely to just start throwing things into Other Bookmarks, which clutters it. Being able to sort by type, root URL, alphabetical order, and date saved would be so great.
The other issue is cache. If my internet goes out, for a lot of things I can just still re-open Firefox and there's a cached version of whatever tabs I had open that weren't put to sleep that I can look through. It's great when there's spotty cell coverage when using a hotspot, or when using a laptop in something like a highway or train tunnel. Bookmarks don't store a cached version of the page, it's just a link. This means if I close Firefox to clear up some RAM or save some battery life and then open it back up, if I didn't have those tabs open I'd have to have an active internet connection to view the page contents again.
I kind of disagree (personally, not out of principle).
The first time I've written my own bookmark manager was like 25y ago, before del.icio.us - which I used, then I got on pinboard, lately I've been self-hosting linkding.
I totally use those solutions daily, and I still have a couple bookmarks in some browsers (but mostly on the bars for frequent access).
The thing is, that 90% of my open tabs are either "I kinda want to consume this soon" or more often it's a working copy of research etc.
ANY form of bookmarking (and thus closing the tab) would destroy part of it's usefulness of being just one click away (also visible and on my mind). Of course that's not true for all of them.
So maybe I kinda agree with one of your possible observations, just not with your conclusion. Maybe if I could instantly find what I wanted in my bookmarking service, then I wouldn't need to look for it (just minutes or hours later) in my tab bar. On the other hand I'd need several hard-separated categories there, or a different bookmarking tool for work.
The middle ground is missing (on several axis):
- daily & semi-important -> bookmarks bar
- long-term & maybe important & !daily -> bookmark manager
- "need to read this" -> tab
I was very happy with Pocket. After Mozilla discontinued it, I switched to Instapaper, which I barely use, for reasons I don't fully understand. All I know is that the Instapaper home screen feels unhelpful and off-putting to me.
This one stood out to me even more:
> I'm used to have 495 tabs open on my iPhone
iOS Safari lets you have 500 tabs max in a "tab group", including the default tab group which is the one that shows "N Tabs" when you open the browser.
I tend to hit this limit every few months and end up saving everything that's currently open into a new tab group with a name like "Old Tabs January 2026".
This used to be an issue for me, but it seems that in Brave it unloads tabs efficiently enough that I can have many hundreds open (on an MBA) without adverse effect. The only time I go in and clear things out, it's when I need to reboot and have to categorize/save all my incognito tabs, which are wiped out on quit.
Bah! Tab “hoarding” is part of my workflow and it works great with the right tooling in place: FF with sidebury, containers, and suspender extensions. Panels for 8 high level topics with a set of 10-20 pinned tabs for each and I can see ~60 tabs per panel at once. I work in three phases: tab accumulation (browsing), tab elimination (reading), tab reorg to move tabs to specific panels. Of course vertical tabs make this all possible and it is frustrating that there isn’t a browser with all of my extension functionality and ux baked in.
It boggles my mind that, not only do people do this, but it's common. I've seen managers at work with hundreds of tabs open, with an uncanny ability to know exactly where the thing they need is.
I've been using tabbed browsers for 20-something years and I never really have more than 1, 2 at a time. If I need to call something back, I either bookmark it or I open up the history and search for it.
Different strokes for different strokes. There is nothing wrong with how you use tabs, and nothing wrong with how others do. It is just different. The important part is that whoever can find things later that the saved for later, if the system works for you it is good. You don't even need to understand, since it is your/their personal system.
Now sometimes a different system is better. So there is nothing wrong with understanding - you might learn something that helps you. However it is optional if you are not aware of defects in what you are doing (but if you are aware of them...). Also technology marches on and so something better might come out in the future: keep an option mind.
The important part is to be slow to criticizing people who are different.
Same, if I have half a dozen tabs open that's a lot and I start to lose track of which one is which. Cannot imagine how I'd manage hundreds or thousands of tabs.
My tab hoarding has evolved a bit. I use separate windows that are mostly subject-based now. I might have an Amazon window that sticks around for several days that will explode with tabs before I decide to put in an order. If I get on a Factorio kick I end up with a window with dozens of blueprints and forum posts that will stay for a few months (until I get bored/overwhelmed with the game again...it's a cycle, that one...). I usually have a "main window" with stuff like email and nextdns allow list (stuff that I tend to fiddle with often) and a discord/reddit window. The wikipedia window comes and goes but sometimes gets several dozen tabs and might last a few days.
Always vertical tabs since forever. I feel like if I bookmark something I probably just missclicked at some point, it's just never been in my flow, even before tabs restoring on launch and automatic tab unloading.
It sounds like when you, say, compare a bunch of different products, you have an uncanny ability to know exactly where in your tab history those products are? I really have to open them in a bunch of tabs as I go, and then I can quickly switch between them when I'm at the point of making a choice.
I recently discovered that Chrome "More Tools" lets you "Name Window", so you can find the tab you want with alt-tab even if you opened some other tabs in front of it. Like I have one for "Gemini Enterprise", "AWS Console", etc. I might have some other tabs open with AWS Console but I can use this to find my main one.
"Tab hoarding" has been dead and buried for years. It's just "using tabs" now. Many people realized that what they used bookmarks for could be done with the same semantics using only tabs, and they started doing that to reduce the number of browser systems they needed to keep in their head. There was a brief gap between that, and browser vendors optimizing their tab systems to efficiently support those use cases. The tab hoarding dilemma arose during this period, and should have died with it. I currently have more tabs open than the author did, on a 15 year old laptop running an out-of-date version of Chromium, and it's using less than a gig of ram. >99% of the tabs are evicted, which is done automatically by the browser based on the presence of ephemeral data in the tab (partially filled out forms) and my typical frequency of accessing that tab. It works great. Every major browser has some form of this, as well as tab searching and tab grouping. If you want to use tabs as if they're bookmarks, like I do, you've been able to do so without problems for many years. It's time to retire the rhetoric of the scandalous tab hoarder.
The problem is hardly a resource one (unless you restart the browser) - you can’t see/scroll/wrangle 2000 tabs with the current tab display UI paradigm— you can’t even see their titles. Not to speak that Chrome state management is crap and you’ll end up losing them
I currently have 20,097 tabs open in one browser profile. The oldest tab appears to be an HN post from 2.5 years ago, which must be the last time I swept tabs into bookmarks.
I used to sweep them more regularly, but Firefox + Sidebery don't even break a sweat with 20K tabs, apparently, so why bother?
The only downside is that it takes about 15 seconds for the browser to launch. I restart the browser whenever Firefox or macOS is updated, so every week or two.
I've recently migrated to Zen [0] and its a breath of fresh air.
I agree with comments arguing bad bookmark UX is part of the problem. Zen's approach is a vertical tab sidebar with workspaces and folders. Crucially, it distinguishes pinned and ephemeral tabs.
The approach is much more natural to me than either bookmarks and tradition tabs.
I cured my tab hoarding by transforming myself into a bookmark hoarder instead. I bookmark pretty much every tab I open if it seems even remotely interesting. And in return I don’t keep open tabs. The handful of bookmarks that I actually use I keep on the bookmarks bar (and on the favourites view in iOS Safari). All of the random crap goes in the general bookmarks. I don’t try to organize the bookmarks in any way other than keeping those I actually use on the bookmarks bar.
Occasionally I type a keyword for something I previously bookmarked and the browser finds it in the bookmarks. Other times I don’t have the right word so I have to google it instead. But that’s ok. I know that the bookmarks aren’t hugely useful, but at least they helped me stop hoarding tabs :)
I wrote a (not published to the store, it's kind of just for me) Chrome extension (together with Gemini, pretty early in the days of it) that attaches an expiration date to tabs. Works reasonably well to cure it (except I keep setting many to 31 days… but eventually a month passes)
I never close tabs or re-use old open tabs on mobile, since the UI just buries them and I just open a new tab if i want to check something, so I will just accumulate useless tabs.
On my Laptop i try to only hoard a handful of tabs.
I just noticed I have some open since months, but never gotten to reading them.
The thing is i want to read the content, but never find time, so they just stay there.
Protip for a brain reset - right click on current tab - click close other tabs
The beauty here is that if you are at risk of losing anything, in a form that is not yet submitted, then the browser will pop up a prompt saying are you sure you want to close, you will lose data. So there is no risk of losing something you can't get back.
Then, after they are all closed, as needed, I just type in the browser bar the names of the tabs and it searches history and suggests previously closed tabs, then up/down arrow, then enter.
I do this frequently and it really helps my brain.
Good article. I nodded along and wish OP had written more about their solutions!
The problem for folks like me/us is fear of "losing" something, and like the OP. knowing that something can be saved and found again (or stumbled across) later solves the problem, whether it's ever searched for again. The act of "hoarding" actually scratches the itch for me. I'm fine to close a tab if it doesn't feel like I'm "throwing it away forever." And bookmarking a site is just a slower way to lose something forever. It's not easily findable, and I won't take the time to organize my bookmarks into a nice hierarchy. That reminds me of those old "internet yellow pages" that were sold at Microcenter back in the early days. That's a silly, slow way to organize information for retrieval.
I wish that 99% of my browser history was automatically indexed/recorded for later searching. I could imagine "boosting" particular links' importance with a bookmark concept, but I think you could also choose to elevate any site I spent a little bit longer on to actually read, or that I came back to later. If you added semantic search into that, and offline plain-text greppability, we'd really be in business. A lot of my searches boil down to "Didn't I see a tool or HN post that solved this problem 6 to 12 months ago?" Sometimes I find it again. Often I don't.
I keep hoping that someone like Kagi (which I already happily pay for) will let me build my own personalized internet index consisting "only" of the tens of thousands of URLs I've seen...They've built some stuff that is kinda close, and they already have a good crawler/indexer.
I have been using OneTab to quickly consolidate a lot of tabs to a single list of URLs, which actually does help me "feel" a bit better, but doesn't solve the semantic search issue. It sounds like Karakeep (mentioned by @miladyincontrol) does some of what I want already, and that they're working on semantic search too, but it doesn't offer it yet.
If anyone (including the OP) has something to help me auto-hoard, I'd love to hear it.
77 comments
[ 0.64 ms ] story [ 78.4 ms ] threadAt some point you adopt a workflow where every browser activity starts with opening a new tab. Plus, so many websites have broken browser history management that it’s easier to open all links in new tabs, too.
I do close tabs on occasion, usually when I see that the device starts to struggle. Closing all tabs helps make things fast again.
Browsers tend to take open tabs into account when I search for stuff, and it’s nice to be able to enter a few keywords and get redirected to an existing tab. Saves me time for page reloads.
Sometimes entering the same keywords into a search engine does not land you on that article, though, so closing tabs as rarely as possible pays out for me a few times a year. But it’s ultimately not that important and I don’t keep tabs around for the sake of it.
You seem serious, but it sounds a bit funny!
I also often open links in new tabs. It's also a bit faster than e.g. going back in history. But I do close tabs after I'm done browsing that site or otherwise don't need it. I'd start to feel lost with a lot of tabs open (say, hundreds), not knowing what is actually relevant, what kind of research is "in progress", how to keep track of them well etc.. I do use multiple browser windows and vertical tabs in Firefox.
> Browsers tend to take open tabs into account when I search for stuff, and it’s nice to be able to enter a few keywords and get redirected to an existing tab.
Similarly, I mostly receive suggestions from my browsing history and use that a lot. I've disabled any suggestions from search engines, since they are usually useless.
Third party managers don't hit the spot either. They all spread out over too large of a surface area, trying to do read it later or moodboards or canvases and whatever else, without offering much in the way of material improvements over built in bookmarks (aside from being cross-browser).
I've been happy with Pinboard for many years now, which does just the bare essentials. There are integrations for most browsers, though I prefer using it externally via a small CLI client. This allows me to keep a local backup of my bookmarks in JSON, to filter them with fzf/rofi, and to use it with any browser. After all, I just need to quickly find a URL, and copy/paste it in the browser.
The service has had some issues over the years, leading to growing concerns over its stability and longevity. It hasn't affected me much personally, but I've wanted to replace it with a fully self-hosted solution for a long time now. With projects like ArchiveBox, linkding, etc., this is quite feasible, though I've been lazy with making the jump. My Pinboard renewal is coming up, and I think it might be time.
The one thing they all have in common: they cannot stop me from being tab hoarder. That behavior (in my case, and I suspect I am not alone) is not impacted by tab/bookmark mgmt approaches, at least not by anything I've seen.
Bookmarks, locally archives the page, OCRs text off images, auto tags using and summarizes it using whatever AI model I want, in my case one off a local ollama instance. ios? just a share away to have any link processed.
Now I just stash and move on, when I need to find things again it's never been easier.
Onetab add-on in FF works fine. After every work you just “onetab” all tabs. It is flat structure, so I usually store similar tabs into one box.
There are 2 features: restore all tabs into browser. And fulltext search is easier.
I was a tab hoarder too. I am cured now as Onetab helped me a lot. (No affil. here.)
The problem is context. I think Tab Groups partly helped. But the implementation of tab group is still not good enough as it is. A lot of tabs aren't bookmark but unfinished work or research. I currently have Groups for Housing Market because of Rent increase, Jobs Search, Product Research, Marketing Courses, Surgery Research for Lasik, Youtube and a few others personal stuff. I wouldn't be surprised if it add up to 500 tabs.
Again, I will take this opportunity to say again, Multi / Lots of Tabs on Safari sucks.
So the web is too broken for bookmarks to replace all uses of tabs.
Browser devs do not seem interested in improving the state of bookmarks.
I'm often a visual person, similar to what the twitter longpost also describes---I miss Apple's spatial file manager and made heavy use of the drag-and-drop grid on the Windows 10 Start menu to pin apps in logical groups---but I don't really have any problems with bookmarks as they exist now in Firefox. I have as many bookmarks as some tab hoarders have tabs (last count around 2,000), and I drag them into a well-ordered hierarchy with the Firefox Bookmarks Sidebar (Ctrl+B to toggle show/hide).
A hierarchy in a vertical sidebar has always seemed... Plenty visual, I guess? Do folks who have hundreds or thousands of tabs open also have as many files in their Desktop and Download folders and just search there too? What upgrades to bookmarks would make them significantly better than they are now?
Hierarchy-as-directory is a good conceptual abstraction, and it has useful, well-established visual representations. I get ornery when software tries to conceal a useful hierarchy from the end-user (most often... the file system itself, as in the iPhone).
I'll note that Firefox's "keyword" option for bookmarks is a killer feature for me: assign a keyword to a bookmark (e.g. "hn" for news.ycombinator.com or "yt" for www.youtube.com) and you can type those letters into the URL bar and instantly load the bookmark. It's kept me on Firefox for years, even though I'd prefer some of the security features and better process isolation of Chromium/Blink. I have a row common bookmarks in the Bookmarks Toolbar with favicons and names matched to their keywords and I've never needed or wanted a landing page with favorite sites.
Bookmarks do seem worse to me in other browsers without keywords. Oddly, if I import my Firefox bookmarks into other browsers the keywords I made in Firefox still work, but I can't edit them or add new keywords in those other browsers. Maddening.
The other issue is cache. If my internet goes out, for a lot of things I can just still re-open Firefox and there's a cached version of whatever tabs I had open that weren't put to sleep that I can look through. It's great when there's spotty cell coverage when using a hotspot, or when using a laptop in something like a highway or train tunnel. Bookmarks don't store a cached version of the page, it's just a link. This means if I close Firefox to clear up some RAM or save some battery life and then open it back up, if I didn't have those tabs open I'd have to have an active internet connection to view the page contents again.
The first time I've written my own bookmark manager was like 25y ago, before del.icio.us - which I used, then I got on pinboard, lately I've been self-hosting linkding.
I totally use those solutions daily, and I still have a couple bookmarks in some browsers (but mostly on the bars for frequent access).
The thing is, that 90% of my open tabs are either "I kinda want to consume this soon" or more often it's a working copy of research etc.
ANY form of bookmarking (and thus closing the tab) would destroy part of it's usefulness of being just one click away (also visible and on my mind). Of course that's not true for all of them.
So maybe I kinda agree with one of your possible observations, just not with your conclusion. Maybe if I could instantly find what I wanted in my bookmarking service, then I wouldn't need to look for it (just minutes or hours later) in my tab bar. On the other hand I'd need several hard-separated categories there, or a different bookmarking tool for work.
The middle ground is missing (on several axis):
iOS Safari lets you have 500 tabs max in a "tab group", including the default tab group which is the one that shows "N Tabs" when you open the browser.
I tend to hit this limit every few months and end up saving everything that's currently open into a new tab group with a name like "Old Tabs January 2026".
I've been using tabbed browsers for 20-something years and I never really have more than 1, 2 at a time. If I need to call something back, I either bookmark it or I open up the history and search for it.
Now sometimes a different system is better. So there is nothing wrong with understanding - you might learn something that helps you. However it is optional if you are not aware of defects in what you are doing (but if you are aware of them...). Also technology marches on and so something better might come out in the future: keep an option mind.
The important part is to be slow to criticizing people who are different.
Always vertical tabs since forever. I feel like if I bookmark something I probably just missclicked at some point, it's just never been in my flow, even before tabs restoring on launch and automatic tab unloading.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12476605
"Tab hoarding" has been dead and buried for years. It's just "using tabs" now. Many people realized that what they used bookmarks for could be done with the same semantics using only tabs, and they started doing that to reduce the number of browser systems they needed to keep in their head. There was a brief gap between that, and browser vendors optimizing their tab systems to efficiently support those use cases. The tab hoarding dilemma arose during this period, and should have died with it. I currently have more tabs open than the author did, on a 15 year old laptop running an out-of-date version of Chromium, and it's using less than a gig of ram. >99% of the tabs are evicted, which is done automatically by the browser based on the presence of ephemeral data in the tab (partially filled out forms) and my typical frequency of accessing that tab. It works great. Every major browser has some form of this, as well as tab searching and tab grouping. If you want to use tabs as if they're bookmarks, like I do, you've been able to do so without problems for many years. It's time to retire the rhetoric of the scandalous tab hoarder.
"Firefox power user kept 7,500 tabs open for two years" (04.08.2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41156568
I used to sweep them more regularly, but Firefox + Sidebery don't even break a sweat with 20K tabs, apparently, so why bother?
The only downside is that it takes about 15 seconds for the browser to launch. I restart the browser whenever Firefox or macOS is updated, so every week or two.
I agree with comments arguing bad bookmark UX is part of the problem. Zen's approach is a vertical tab sidebar with workspaces and folders. Crucially, it distinguishes pinned and ephemeral tabs.
The approach is much more natural to me than either bookmarks and tradition tabs.
[0] https://zen-browser.app/
I am not sure it fixed my tab problem, but it improved tab management and overall efficiency.
Omnivore helped a bunch before they shut down. I need to see if any good apps exist that are similar.
Occasionally I type a keyword for something I previously bookmarked and the browser finds it in the bookmarks. Other times I don’t have the right word so I have to google it instead. But that’s ok. I know that the bookmarks aren’t hugely useful, but at least they helped me stop hoarding tabs :)
I never close tabs or re-use old open tabs on mobile, since the UI just buries them and I just open a new tab if i want to check something, so I will just accumulate useless tabs.
On my Laptop i try to only hoard a handful of tabs. I just noticed I have some open since months, but never gotten to reading them.
The thing is i want to read the content, but never find time, so they just stay there.
The beauty here is that if you are at risk of losing anything, in a form that is not yet submitted, then the browser will pop up a prompt saying are you sure you want to close, you will lose data. So there is no risk of losing something you can't get back.
Then, after they are all closed, as needed, I just type in the browser bar the names of the tabs and it searches history and suggests previously closed tabs, then up/down arrow, then enter.
I do this frequently and it really helps my brain.
If its important, I just remember it.
The problem for folks like me/us is fear of "losing" something, and like the OP. knowing that something can be saved and found again (or stumbled across) later solves the problem, whether it's ever searched for again. The act of "hoarding" actually scratches the itch for me. I'm fine to close a tab if it doesn't feel like I'm "throwing it away forever." And bookmarking a site is just a slower way to lose something forever. It's not easily findable, and I won't take the time to organize my bookmarks into a nice hierarchy. That reminds me of those old "internet yellow pages" that were sold at Microcenter back in the early days. That's a silly, slow way to organize information for retrieval.
I wish that 99% of my browser history was automatically indexed/recorded for later searching. I could imagine "boosting" particular links' importance with a bookmark concept, but I think you could also choose to elevate any site I spent a little bit longer on to actually read, or that I came back to later. If you added semantic search into that, and offline plain-text greppability, we'd really be in business. A lot of my searches boil down to "Didn't I see a tool or HN post that solved this problem 6 to 12 months ago?" Sometimes I find it again. Often I don't.
I keep hoping that someone like Kagi (which I already happily pay for) will let me build my own personalized internet index consisting "only" of the tens of thousands of URLs I've seen...They've built some stuff that is kinda close, and they already have a good crawler/indexer.
I have been using OneTab to quickly consolidate a lot of tabs to a single list of URLs, which actually does help me "feel" a bit better, but doesn't solve the semantic search issue. It sounds like Karakeep (mentioned by @miladyincontrol) does some of what I want already, and that they're working on semantic search too, but it doesn't offer it yet.
If anyone (including the OP) has something to help me auto-hoard, I'd love to hear it.