Pruning. When I feel that I have too many, I go through them (or maybe just a subgroup of them) and close the ones that no longer are relevant or interesting.
This requires a threshold of feeling that they're "too many" while they're still a manageable number...
I think everyone is different, but for me bookmarks don't work (I just don't do it) and history rarely works (too much noise there).
Really, most of the time I can just close the tabs, and I will "re-discover" them when needed. But I don't do that: there is a fair amount of tabs that I don't dare closing because I feel like they contain something useful or I may need them.
I found an extension that I use as a "tab cemetery": a place where I can just store all the open tabs once in a while and start from fresh. And the two times a year I actually need to find one of them, I can open the cemetery and search there (it's organised by "dump date").
This extension is called "OneTab" (I have no interest in promoting it, that's just what I use). Works well for me.
I usually make tab groups to sort the frequently visited tabs properly but still most of the times, I am opening a lot of tabs outside the groups then I keep closing all the tabs outside the groups.
RAM/OOM does this for me very effectively. For example, I have opened several dozens of books right now, because when it happens to be a reading time I hate to look for any books in Downloads I am interested to read. I feel better to have opened all the books I am interested in right now. Maybe my reading session will be 5 minutes only, or maybe I want to see what I have read before leaving the reading with as little of digging in interfaces as possible.
I remember the times when 3GB computer could have 300 tabs hanging per months of everyday heavy using of the machine, but now a regular 1000$ computer can not open 300 tabs of modern webpages, so there is none of that problem any more.
I close my browsers with prejudice. If it mattered I would have put it into an issue or committed it to SCM before I wandered away from the tab. Also, history exists. If the reason we are keeping our tabs open is because we've disabled browsing history, then I have a simple suggestion to make.
Walking up to my workstation in the morning and seeing all the trash from yesterday's efforts causes me meaningful loss in motivation. I get down to a blank desktop at the end of each day now.
once a month sort them into groups and then journal about them is how I do it. for instance if I have 5 tabs on braid groups or learning chaldean for my wife mary then it goes into my journal where I paste the 5 links together and share what I learned.
I don't have more than 15 at once. Only when selecting hn posts to read at once. If they linger much (or anything at all) I will put the "important" ones at my raindrop with the false intent to read some day
I save them to https://histre.com/ [1] using the browser extension. This can save all tabs in a browser window into a collection, or even multiple windows each into their own collection. This also makes everything searchable.
I use the Tab Wrangler extension and have it nuke everything after like 8 hours or so. If I need it again, I can search for it in that extension. I've probably gone back to search for a tab two or three times in the last five years. That 8 hour window is almost always plenty for anything I actually care about.
My usual response once I'm doing looking things up to write/build something, and look up to see more than 5 tabs, is to go "ARRRGGGHHHH" and declare tab bankruptcy, just closing the browser completely.
There's always history, and bookmarks if you need to really keep something.
Currently I have 3 tabs open, Braid Solitare, HN Active threads, this edit window. I'll probably put on an HFY story from youtube for background noise in a minute, after I post this edit.
3 is a good number of tabs. Sproutlet, the kid, usually has many dozens, and if there's going to likely be a power interruption, I warn them to save their work, just in case.
3 monitors: 2K laptop on a stand, 4K rotated, 2K rotated & sometimes scaled to 4K. Lots of screen space.
Windows in strategic positions, sized small to fit the content. I removed maximize. I never maximize. I full screen a single game or video to one of the monitors when desirable. I rarely minimize. A dock on the bottom of the laptop with windows grouped by program -- very manageable. Placement and size of windows. Being able to see everything at a glance. I wish XFCE could save window positions and sizes.
No tabs. My default is new window. When desirable, I only create new tabs in a web browser window. Programs get separate windows, no tabs. I have custom CSS to hide the tab bar when there is only one tab. No tab bar is my default. I manually save URLs if important and close web browser tabs if I've gone down a rabbit hole. Destroy all tabs. My browser clears all history. Starting the browser opens a single custom web page window, no tabs, with recent URLs that I saved.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 55.7 ms ] threadThis requires a threshold of feeling that they're "too many" while they're still a manageable number...
Really, most of the time I can just close the tabs, and I will "re-discover" them when needed. But I don't do that: there is a fair amount of tabs that I don't dare closing because I feel like they contain something useful or I may need them.
I found an extension that I use as a "tab cemetery": a place where I can just store all the open tabs once in a while and start from fresh. And the two times a year I actually need to find one of them, I can open the cemetery and search there (it's organised by "dump date").
This extension is called "OneTab" (I have no interest in promoting it, that's just what I use). Works well for me.
I remember the times when 3GB computer could have 300 tabs hanging per months of everyday heavy using of the machine, but now a regular 1000$ computer can not open 300 tabs of modern webpages, so there is none of that problem any more.
Walking up to my workstation in the morning and seeing all the trash from yesterday's efforts causes me meaningful loss in motivation. I get down to a blank desktop at the end of each day now.
My IDE, previously VsCode and now Zen, has a max tabs option to close the oldest ones too.
[1] I created it fwiw
There's always history, and bookmarks if you need to really keep something.
Currently I have 3 tabs open, Braid Solitare, HN Active threads, this edit window. I'll probably put on an HFY story from youtube for background noise in a minute, after I post this edit.
3 is a good number of tabs. Sproutlet, the kid, usually has many dozens, and if there's going to likely be a power interruption, I warn them to save their work, just in case.
Windows in strategic positions, sized small to fit the content. I removed maximize. I never maximize. I full screen a single game or video to one of the monitors when desirable. I rarely minimize. A dock on the bottom of the laptop with windows grouped by program -- very manageable. Placement and size of windows. Being able to see everything at a glance. I wish XFCE could save window positions and sizes.
No tabs. My default is new window. When desirable, I only create new tabs in a web browser window. Programs get separate windows, no tabs. I have custom CSS to hide the tab bar when there is only one tab. No tab bar is my default. I manually save URLs if important and close web browser tabs if I've gone down a rabbit hole. Destroy all tabs. My browser clears all history. Starting the browser opens a single custom web page window, no tabs, with recent URLs that I saved.
No tabs.